As my great-uncle used to say, “To create art, you must sometimes destroy an old and unwanted upright piano.” He was a strange man.
On the latest Inside Infinite blog, 343 Industries shared a lot of details and information about how it’s creating sounds in the next Halo Infinite. There is a surprisingly large amount of technology conversations and diagrams to be found in the post, if that’s your kind of thing. But what I want to focus on is that, to help create powerful and loud sounds for the game, 343 fucked a piano.
Fortunately, they recorded and uploaded it to YouTube as well.
Oh yes, I really meant fucked.
Not just a few touches of a hammer or some sudden shake. They destroyed this thing by hitting bricks and bats and cutting their wires too. Eventually, they started pushing dry ice on it and the results are some genuinely scary and strange noises. At one point, someone put a block of dry ice on him and took a strong step, which made a strange noise, which was the intended effect. But it also looked like someone just wanted to torture a piano and was lucky that day.
According to the blog postt, this piano was donated by a friend of Sound Designer Kyle Fraser. The friend no longer wanted it and Fraser decided to use it to collect various noises and pieces of audio.
I also think that some people there just wanted to hit the fucking piano with baseball bats. And who can blame them? It looks like fun.
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