As my great uncle often said, “To create art, sometimes you must destroy an old, unwanted upright piano.” He was a strange man.
In the latest Inside Infinite blog, 343 Industries shared a bunch of details and information about how it’s creating the sounds in the upcoming Halo Infinite. There’s a surprisingly large amount of in-depth tech talk 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, loud sounds for the game, 343 fucked up a piano.
Thankfully, they recorded and uploaded it to YouTube too.
Oh yes, I really meant fucked up.
Not just a few taps from a hammer or some rough shaking. They destroyed this thing, slamming it with bricks, bats and chopping its wires too. Eventually, they started shoving dry ice on it and the results are some genuinely creepy and alien noises. At one point someone placed a block of dry ice on it and stepped hard, which made a strange noise, which was the intended effect. But it also felt like someone just wanted to torture a piano and got lucky that day.
According to the blog post, this piano was donated by a friend of Lead Sound Designer Kyle Fraser. The friend no longer wanted it and Fraser decided to use it to collect a bunch of various noises and bits of audio.
I also think some folks there just wanted to beat the shit of a piano with baseball bats. And who can blame them? Looks fun.
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