Silent Hill 2 Redesign

I finished this up recently and wanted to share it and write some stuff about the process for fun and learning.

Philly Is a Hellhole

I couldn’t find any reverbs that felt right, so I ended up recording impulses from my own tiny Philadelphia row home (using iPhone voice memos!). It turns out that my shitty phone recordings of my hallway and bathroom sound more like Silent Hill than any pristinely recorded IR I could find. I’ve been leaning way into intentional character and imperfection lately, so I’ve been embracing using less-ideal recordings.

Lady in the Radiator

The radiator’s something I’m weirdly proud of. It’s filtered/band-passed pink noise with a really strong resonant peak to create that incessant hum. Then it goes through several convolution impulses of metal objects to make it feel like it’s actually resonating from the radiator. It’s unnaturally loud in the mix. I was going for an Eraserhead thing with those really loud, oppressive industrial sounds, where it’s always unnerving and surreal and otherworldly. It’s fun to tune into all the buzzing around my house and think about how, with a little massaging and context, you can turn a water cooler or a fridge humming into something disturbing. Everyday objects as scarifiers. I also hand-automated the tracking for it as James navigates the space, and left all my little mistakes in there. Grist for the spooky-scary mill!

Ambience Design & Room to Dream

You can see in the FX chain there’s a lot of stuff goin’ on here, but the two most important ingredients are filtering and reverb. I have a lot of lowpass and bandpass filters and convolution because I wanted it to be blurry, like you’re not exactly sure what you’re hearing. That’s scary to me. It gets your imagination going, and it’s a lot more effective than showing everything in extreme detail. I think that’s part of what makes the original Silent Hill trilogy so effective: the horror is in what you 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 see. I love a world where some questions are left unanswered. A disembodied sound where you never figure out what made it is way scarier than a billion-toothed creature screaming in your face. There’s room to dream.

Take FX

I’ve been playing with a new workflow where I add in a lot of my FX directly to a media item (compression, tape, etc.) and then largely shape it with item fades and very basic audio editing rather than complicated automation. I did the same thing with the footsteps, making the gentler ones quieter and just doing simple fades on the initial transient to make it feel softer rather than trying to get exactly the right material. What I like about it is that you can lift a lot of detail out of everything, but still give it a strong sense of dynamics because the fades come AFTER all the compression. The part where James stumbles through the dilapidated doorway is a good example: it’s compressed pretty aggressively, but it has a nice ramp leading into the major point of the wood collapsing. I think it gives a nice little arc of the wood stressing more and more before giving out.

That’s it! I hope this is interesting or useful or entertaining or something.