Loved that sound when a monkey in your iPhone game gulped a banana down its throat and got all charged up? Did you try playing that game in silent mode? After all, it’s the insanely imaginative world of iPhone gaming. And you deserve the complete audio experience, especially as you touch along the sleekly geeky iPhone screen to (for instance) free some trapped souls in the intense world of touch-screen soul leveraging.

These sounds, plus the game, offer you an escape route out of the boring (sometimes irritating) world in the outside. As Sandy (a friend of mine from Cupertino), points out:

“Sound effects add to the atmosphere by making it funny or creepy depending on the game.”

We thought that we should ask the developers what prompted them to bring in audio, how they did it and so on. Let us see what the developers think.

From our observation and interaction with the developers we figured out that there are  basically two kinds of games available the App Store:

1.    Audio as the backdrop: Everest: Hidden Expedition, Trace, Jelly Car, ThumStruck and many more belong to this category. In fact most of the games belong to this category.

2.    Audio as the theme: There are not many in this category. But these are on the rise at the App Store. The audio adventure game Soul Trapper Episode 1 is an example of this. As is the hugely popular Tap Tap Revenge.

The developers we contacted agreed that for them sound effects are as much part of the game, as the actual gameplay and graphics. All the developers have unanimously agreed to one common factor- that the impact of audio has enhanced the overall impact of the game and that the users have come back with rave feedbacks, asking for more.

Here are some excerpts from our interaction with some developers:

For games that are based on music alone, there is an obvious need for getting the kind of music that strikes you. For instance, the developer of the audio adventure game, “Soul Trapper: Episode 1”, David Warhol (Realtime Adventure) told us that users are always asking for “more” of everything - Feel good and generally wanting more variations in both the audio content and the game levels.

Everyone seems to appreciate that we pulled out all the stops to make the audio as compelling as possible.

The music of soul trapper is thus suitably engaging.

Chris Przybyszewski of another highly successful music based game, ThumStruck told us this:

In our case, we live in Memphis, Tennessee, which is a hotspot for musicof all kinds, meaning bands, management companies, and recording studios.

For games like Trace or Jelly Car, the ones with simplistic graphics, but very imaginative set of worlds, the developers have used ambiance music or sound effects.

For the Sci-fi game Space Buster, we have the developer Sylvain Nowé saying this:

Most users had a good feeling about Space Buster audio’s atmosphere since the very beginning, and mentioned it in the first reviews. I would even say it was the best part of the game in the first releases.

If you are interested on the production side, most of these are original tracks. What kind of music will be used in a game entirely depends on the narrative of the game. For instance,  Space Buster has a Retro theme while Jelly Car depends on optimistic, bouncy, quirky sound bits. For Jelly car, its developer Walaber, chose to go to the musician and come up with the following:

The concept for the game was as if someone’s notebook had come to life, and the little doodles were alive…So… “extremely optimistic, bouncy, quirky” tracks.

The developers of  Thumstruck on the other hand have used the American Guitar Institute’s theme track.

The way sound is used rests with the developers. But generally there are two models – the console game model which uses unique tracks for each world and the random model where 3/4 tracks are played at random throughout the entire game.

For the console model, the music composer for Kevin Calderone’s extremely popular and likeable game Trace has told us that he treated each world in the game as separate universes.

I tried to treat it as if it were a  console game, 1 song per world and a title theme.

The sources can be anything – ranging from professional Musician/Composer, CDs, websites offering sounds and loops and even plain voice recording!

Tools that are generally used are digital synthesizers, Logic 8, Crystal AU, Madtracker2, Audacity freeware, VST 8 and many more.

Note: Most of the music gets copyrighted by the developer. S/he uses the popular tracks in the forthcoming apps as well.

The audio content in a game helps in both gaming experience and gaming performance. With the sound off, the virtual reality matrix experience is not complete. The audio provides a better experience overall and engages you more.

After all you are in the world of iPhone games. And here sound plays a major role in enhancing your overall experience -which is already changing with touch sensitivity and innovative visuals.

So forget that mundane busride by getting jacked in to the iPhone and enter the iPhone gaming world where Space Cowboys “whossh” their lassos around some unruly comet to capture and destroy it.

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