“ENTER MY office,” says Joanna Fang. Okay, but to the untrained eye, it looks more like the lair of a kleptomaniac: rolls of artificial turf, mud and moss, wooden planks, violin bows, smashed keyboards, plastic boxes full of shoes, a whole arsenal of axes and swords, a sandbox, a bamboo fence, rocks, half a bicycle, smashed iPhones, an anchor chain boat, a dirty car door. “Never trust a clean Foley studio,” she says.
Improvisation as an Art Form
Fang is a lead Foley artist at Sony PlayStation. Her job is to give sounds to video games. So, of course, in her warehouse, there are many leather jackets because “everyone wears leather” in games. But other common video game clichés – like assault rifles and the like – aren’t readily available in her San Diego studio. Her work revolves around improvisation: Fang has training as a classical musician, and now everything is an instrument. “I always say, the best props are the ones you can play like a Stradivarius,” she says. “They just sing and sound great. And you can use them anywhere, anytime, and be very expressive with them, right?”
The Art of Sound Production
Shake a hunting knife and a torque wrench together for the sound of a reloaded rifle. Stick wooden sticks to gardening gloves to simulate a cat’s paw. Suction cups on concrete create the clattering of a horse, crushed charcoal becomes crackling snow. To break bones, Fang crushes a gun holster full of pasta shells; for smashed skulls, she has to hammer melons – for the squelch of the slime inside.
Emotions Through Sound
Just as booming strings can turn a boring street into a menacing alley, Fang uses her sound effects to appeal to our emotions. “It’s like weaponized ASMR,” she says. “We try to make the audience feel something.” But even with such a well-equipped room – she praises the virtues of her concrete water basin – Foley is an art of limits. The struggle to embody a simple sound effect (Whoopi Goldberg in flat shoes walking up to a bar) led to a personal revelation. “I had such a hard time with this cue because I didn’t feel right in my body,” says Fang. “I used Foley for so long as this perfect art form that helped me shed my gender dysphoria.”
The Sound Landscape of God of War Ragnarök
Fang’s recent projects include one of the most acclaimed games of 2022, God of War Ragnarök. In a scene set in a Nordic bar, a character named Atreus lays his bow and arrow on a table. For this sound, Fang rubs wood and leather on wooden boards together. Later, as Atreus slides down a collapsing balcony, Fang vigorously scratches the boards with leather and metal, and, incongruously, a boxing glove, to simulate armor. At the climax, as a bouncer chokes Atreus, melons and pasta shells come into play, along with a wet cloth and some broken celery sticks, as the mythical hammer Mjölnir flies through the air, smashing the attacker’s bones.
The Future of Foley Art
The sound design of a game takes months. So, as with any art form in this day and age, a question hangs in the air: Does Fang feel threatened by the increasing proliferation of creative AI? In a word, no. She welcomes the assistance, the chance to reduce the pure physical labor. “The cartilage in my knees has been deteriorating since I was 20,” she says, while tottering in high heels.
AI could generate the noise of cars and citizens in a dense cityscape, but the characters in a scene are her domain: “The game is about their mission, their goals, their beliefs, and their textures and performances. So I can imagine a future where machine learning is used in Foley, but I don’t think it will ever take away the simple and beautiful performative nature of it.”
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