Do The NPCs Hear The Simulated Wind
What happens when games become sites of archaeological listening? As preservation initiatives like Internet Archive1 work to save digital culture, this investigation addresses the acoustic worlds embedded in games—procedurally generated soundscapes, layered atmospheres, hidden environmental recordings—that risk being lost over time, harder to archive as new techniques like ray-tracing reshape how virtual worlds are rendered.
If we field record to capture the soundscapes of the real world, shouldn't we do the same for digital simulation sites?
This practice treats game worlds as sonic landscapes worth excavating. Not playing. Listening. Revealing the world-building beneath the surface.
Do The NPCs Hear the Simulated Wind: four stations, raw sound to composed music.
Conceptual Framework and Context
Contemporary immersive games have quietly become sophisticated acoustic environments. Beneath their surfaces, procedural systems compose the world in real time, weather that shifts pressure and wind, ecosystems that breathe and call, populations that murmur and move. Much of this sound originates in actual field recordings: captured material from the physical world, re-embedded into the virtual.
The systems that generate these sounds: weather, ecology, population, dialogue, material physics representing a form of invisible compositional architecture. They are designed to be felt but not examined.
This practice inverts the intended relationship with play. Rather than inhabiting these worlds as a participant, we enter them as listeners, moving through engineered environments with the attention of a field recordist, extracting, cataloguing, and re-contextualising the sounds that constitute a game's hidden atmosphere.
Virtual Field Recording
extends the tradition of acoustic ecology2 (Schafer's soundscape theory3) into virtual space. Where field recordists once captured vanishing soundscapes of the physical world, this practice turns to immersive game environments. The practice inverts the act of play into an act of listening. Game environments become field sites treating virtual worlds as archaeological sites.
1Internet Archive: a non-profit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, based in San Francisco. Alongside the Wayback Machine it keeps playable software collections such as the Internet Arcade (2014). See “Vanishing Culture: Preserving Gaming History”, Internet Archive Blogs (21 November 2024).
2Acoustic ecology studies the relationship between living beings and their environment through sound. It grew out of the World Soundscape Project, the research group Schafer started at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, in the late 1960s. See Barry Truax (ed.), Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (1978).
3R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1977), reissued as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994).
4P.S. I tried to play 4 games at the same time and also tried to control/manipulate the sounds and visuals.
5P.S. You can try virtual field recording by yourself by entering an open world game, then go to setting and mute the music sound leaving only ambient and game sound.
Project Consultant
Pasuth Sa-ingthong
Structure design
Putpipat Tamtantiwattana
Big thanks for folks that let me borrow their PCs
Pasuth Sa-ingthong
Yves Pokakunkanon
Roman Solodkov
Special Thank
Natwara K. (Toey)
Tentacles Gallery
Pathompong Manakitsomboon
Anon Chaisansook
Sahapon Chootinan
Sippapas Sthienwiwat
Photos by
Kornthanat P. (Ben)
Organised by STACK and Team Stimulant , in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Thailand , with support from Thai Film Archive , Office of the Prime Minister, Creative Economy Agency (CEA), Virtual Media Lab, immertech, and REAL Bangkok.
