Interview with Dr. Hasan Baran Firat

June 2022 (2156 Words, 12 Minutes)

This is a summary of a questionnaire sent to Dr. Hasan Baran Firat, a practicing acoustic consultant based in Turkey with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, a Master’s degree in Building Physics, a Doctorate in Industrial Design and Cultural Heritage as well as a passion for the preservation of Turkish musical heritage.

Dr. Firat is currently working on leveraging virtual reality (VR) technology to create historically accurate soundscapes: auditory experiences that allow the user to experience the sounds of historical places in the past, such as the city of Istanbul.

Those interested in contacting Dr. Firat can do so via his website or e-mail: hbaranf@gmail.com .

I’ve had the pleasure to submit a written questionnaire to Dr. Firat in the context of my Bachelor’s thesis during my third year at the SAE Institute of Geneva as part of the school’s Games Programming curriculum. The answers he provided were of great use and the questions and answers that might be of use to anyone else are presented here, with the approval of Dr. Firat.

Oleg:

As I’ve understood it (using automatic translation), in one of your blogposts you’ve mentioned that companies don’t really view music as anything more than a passtime, have I understood that correctly? If so, do you think the same stigma applies to video-games or do you think it is correct to consider video-games as a passtime only?

Dr.Firat:

I’m not sure where I have mentioned that, that might have been a comment on how music and sound are being considered in the video-game industry: I feel that we are still far away from giving the attention it deserves. Coming back to your question, as far as I could follow, the importance of sound in the video-game industry may be made more credible by attracting more interest from academia and well as from professionals of the acoustics simulation sector, the marketing sector and the serious games sector. The expectations of the final user of the game is the main motivator for developers, including serious games. I also think that the moving force behind the latest boom of the entire video-game industry is the appreciation of serious games as those are used more and more for a mainstream audience.

Oleg:

In your experience, what are the main challenges associated with the preservation of Turkish musical heritage?

Dr.Firat:

The scarcity of credible historical sources is the main challenge that musicologists are facing. Although archives that include some of the significant musical corpuses have been brought to light and made available in last decades, the lack of performance guides and other reference materials from the specific eras hinder the discovery of stylistic period practices. This brings the reconstructive methods into prominence for recreating performances instead of referring to existing documents.

Oleg:

Do you think leveraging VR technology and video-games might be a useful tool for the goal of preservation of musical cultural heritage?

Dr.Firat:

No doubt! As it promises to all fields, VR will undoubtedly affect the musical cultural heritage positively. Virtual audio reality or spatial audio have already begun to change our understanding of the sounds of the past while transforming our daily listening practices. Transformation from stereo to binaural audio would have significant results both in contemporary and historical music studies.

Oleg:

Are there some projects you’re working on you’re willing to share something about? Any projects aspiring sound designers and audio programmers might be interested in following?

Dr.Firat:

I am working on the topic of historical soundscapes, this time with a focus on Istanbul. During my PhD, I have been mostly interested in the tools and techniques which can be used for historical soundscape reconstructions. Now, I feel like I should compose a more elaborate narrative and I take my time to make my stories more evidence based.

As for the second question, there are thousands of projects that can be mentioned in the general context but I’ll repeat the specific ones which I have mentioned several times and it should be noted that this is a look through the window of physically based sound design:

Besides these I would like to mention the entire Assassin’s Creed series with a special salute to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and its audio director Lydia Andrew (Andrew 2019). In addition, I would like to feature two apps built on spatial audio concept: “KBH1807”, a no longer available soundscape app that let the user experience the 1807 bombardment of Copenhagen, and “Odio” which has won the Apple Design Award 2022 for innovation. I think we will see more of them in the near future.

Oleg:

What prompted the idea for the subject of “3D sound spatialization with game engines: the virtual acoustics performance of a game engine and a middleware for interactive audio design”?

Dr.Firat:

As mentioned in the paper, it was a part of a wider project dwelling on digital methods of reconstructing historical soundscapes. Since traditional acoustic software simulates static scenes, we needed a software which could serve to calculate spatialized sound of an open area and present it in real-time. At the time, there were not many options and game engines had already been used with the same aim. That’s why we wanted to conduct a series of tests to understand their performance. Eventually we shared the result of these tests in the article.

Oleg:

What have you found the most interesting in the making of that work?

Dr.Firat:

Having a background in architectural acoustics, I was really surprised to see that almost none of the design parameters of game audio were matching with the ones in the acoustics studies. The parametric approach was prevailing in the game audio instead of non-parametric ones.

Oleg:

Has your opinion on Unreal’s capabilities for accurate sound simulation changed with the release of Unreal Engine 5?

Dr.Firat:

Yes and not just for Unreal Engine 5. Several new versions have been released since I began my study on Unreal Engine 4. It was even difficult to follow the changes coming up with each update. There is no doubt that Unreal Engine 5 now has more capabilities with the [“Project Acoustics” plug-in] and other new features. However, I would like to see a more physically based approach in the entire conceptualization of the audio features.

Oleg:

I understand that you have very good mechanical engineering, architectural and acoustics knowledge, but what about computer science and software engineering? Did you struggle to get familiar with the field of game-engines? How did you go about gathering technical information about both Unreal and the various plugins?

Dr.Firat:

This was one of the pitfalls, I really struggled on specific points but thanks to the large community of users and a culture of sharing I could find answers for the major part of my questions. Even if I still cannot write my own code, eventually I have learned how C++ code and the Unreal Engine works. By this way I could gather some specific technical information about Unreal Engine 4. And of course, Unreal Engine’s blueprint scripting feature was another advantage that I have really benefited from.

Oleg:

What do you think is still missing in existing video-game middleware that would make it useful for physically accurate sound simulation?

Dr.Firat:

Audio engine developers have certain restrictions both in middleware and in the game engine, which is the CPU resources reserved for audio, and it restrains them from implementing more sophisticated sound computation methods. That’s why they resort to sound effects, simplified versions of the acoustic phenomena to be able to decrease the computational costs of audio processing. This way of controlling sound design is called “parametric” design and it also helps to provide more effective control of audio features to a very large audience of users of the software. Ultimately, it is a performance-based approach and it has certain advantages in providing a better control of sound features but as visual realism improves, similar expectations are rising in the audio rendering domain as well. Therefore I believe that using acoustic parameters such as “reverberation time”, “clarity”, “transmission” or “diffraction” in the octave based frequency range should be the first target for audio engines whether these parameters are based on simplified or actual mathematical functions. This way, the entire industry can be better oriented in acoustics and this would help to improve the quality of physically based sound simulations especially with the help of increasing CPU resources reserved for audio processing.

Oleg:

What are the challenges when it comes to working with audio content that will be spatialized and binauralized? How much freedom do you have when processing a signal (with reverb, EQ, etc)? Do you have to try and work with the dryest signals possible?

Dr.Firat:

If we are talking about the promise of physically accurate spatialization, we have to get the driest signal we can get. It is almost impossible to get rid of undesired components of a sound once it has been processed. Of course, it is not always easy to have a recording session for a variety of sounds that sound designers can get a recording of in-situ. They have to use different mixing techniques or they can also use deconvolution methods to obtain very dry signals. However, as long as we are talking about sound design and not about physically accurate modeling, sound designers have much more freedom to get the final effect they want. In such a case, the designers can switch to a psychoacoustic approach and focus only to provide a level of detail in the limits of human’s just-noticeable difference (JND) by using masking effects, positioning the sound sources themselves or using the focus of the listener.

Oleg:

For you, what are the main differences between VR for historical experiences, VR for entertainment experiences and VR for video-games?

Dr.Firat:

I am not sure that we can talk about actual differences in the technical processes but we can talk about differences in conceptualization of the sound design. In the case of VR for historical experiences, the design should be based on the grounded historical narratives and the entire process should be justified.

Oleg:

What is your feeling about the current state of the virtual reality market?

Dr.Firat:

A short and ambitious answer: we are only at the beginning!

Oleg:

What do you think are the challenges still needed to be solved to allow more players to experience VR?

Dr.Firat:

We’ll see more VR users as long as we can get cheaper and more developed versions of VR hardware.

Oleg:

Are there news, academic or otherwise, that got you excited lately?

Dr.Firat:

Currently, I am looking forward to the conference in Verona. It is going to be great to meet and listen to the professionals working on acoustics of historical buildings and on historical soundscapes.

Oleg:

Do you think VR will gain popularity in the upcoming years?

Dr.Firat:

Another short and ambitious answer: winter is coming!

Oleg:

In your opinion, what domains of application would benefit from advances in real-time physically accurate sound simulation? Do you think the video-games industry would be one of them?

Dr.Firat:

For sure, the video-game industry is already taking the lead, and I think that mass media, social media and education as well as the military and security sectors will follow.

Oleg:

What domains of sound simulation would you advise to get familiar with as its importance might increase in the future? Diffraction simulation, transmission simulation, scattering simulation maybe?

Dr.Firat:

The simulation of accurate diffraction is the first phenomenon needed for the game industry, especially for the FPS genre. This is why a lot of middleware and plugins are dedicated to HRTF and panning processes to provide users with better performance at localization. Additionally, early reflections have a great impact on localization which is mostly neglected. Sound scattering can be another important phenomenon to get familiar with since, until recently, even in the acoustics simulation sector it has only been implemented using simplistic methods.

Oleg:

What software tools do you use the most as an acoustic engineer? Would you recommend aspiring sound designers and audio programmers to get familiar with Odeon or is that software not relevant in the context of making video-games?

Dr.Firat:

Odeon and other similar software such as CATT and EASE are the tools I use most as an acoustic engineer. I cannot say that they are directly relevant in the context of making video-games but for an audio programmer integrating these softwares into applications would be beneficial. However it is more important to have a good understanding of spatialization processes than understanding and using this kind of software.

Oleg:

And finally, would you have any parting advice to give to aspiring sound designers and audio programmers?

Dr.Firat:

I can only recommend not to dwell on traditional listening practices and to try to follow developments in the field of acoustics and to be eager to experience new ways of listening which are waiting at the door to revolutionize our conceptualization of sound and music.

This concludes the interview and I wish to once again thank Dr. Firat for the time and expertise he has provided.

I invite anyone interested in the use of VR technology for historical recreations and in the creation of historical soundscapes to visit his website and follow him on the various social media platforms he is on depending on your preferences. Those interested in historical Turkish music will also find his youtube channel to be very interesting.