Actor Jeremy Renner weathers Esquire's augmented reality app, featuring sound design by Q Department's Drazen Bosnjak.

Please turn up your speakers. If there’s anything that emphasizes the growing importance of sound within interactive experiences, it’s the short instructions that accompany many of the more adventurous websites being created. As interactive experiences have become more filmic, narrative-based and immersive, so too has the role of a site’s acoustic accompaniment become increasingly crucial in creating atmosphere and mood.

But while web sound design fills the same role as that in film, its execution differs radically – from thinking in a non-linear fashion, to the technological challenges of working within the parameters of home computers, to the psychological differences of creating interactive, rather than passive experiences.

With websites expecting more engagement from viewers, the quid pro quo has become creating experiences that are more engaging, for which the video game industry is an important prototype. Stephen Hodde is a veteran sound designer, who has worked at top interactive companies including Big Spaceship, Your Majesty and Atmosphere BBDO among others, before moving recently into the video game industry as associate sound designer at Champaign, IL-based Volition. His last project was an online multiplayer game to help launch Terminator Salvation, with Big Spaceship

"You are creating a world for [users] to inhabit," he says of the thinking behind gaming as a whole, and increasingly, interactive experiences. "Instead of having the player or audience view a film for 90 minutes, some video games you’re spending 40 to 60 hours with the same set of sounds. And for games like World of Warcraft, where people give their life to that game, repetition kills the ear. It takes the player out of the narrative and it destroys [that] world."

Avoiding that repetition requires imagination and time. "Let’s take a look at footsteps used in film versus footsteps used in a game," says Hodde. "With footsteps that occur on screen, the foley artist is performing them on a soundstage, the performance is edited down and lives in one place in one time forever. For a video game, you’re trying to mimic what happens in real life. You’re taking into consideration the implementation of that sound. So, you’re not just laying it out so it occurs once, the same way every time; you essentially create a system of feet. When a player walks around it’s not just the same footsteps they’re hearing over and over again."

"Two of the biggest challenges come when fitting [sound] together," says North Kingdom’s creative director Daniel Ilic of the most basic challenges that interactive production companies face. The Stockholm-based interactive production company has worked on some of the most compelling recent online experiences, including a recruitment site for Swedish Armed Forces, and Teamgeist, a graphic novel-styled website for adidas. "In Flash some sounds are triggered by the users, and you’re not really sure of when that will happen because so much is based on the interaction of the user. Then you have the performance issue, where you always need to make sure it’s a fluid experience for the user, that they don’t have to wait for a certain sound to trigger."

Doritos' horror site Asylum 626, featuring sound design by Headroom Digital, New York.

Creating that bank of varied sounds and executing it in Flash is something that takes time, and underestimating that is a common mistake for agencies. New York-based Headroom Digital worked on the acclaimed Doritos site Asylum 626 for Goodby Silverstein & Partners and B-Reel. A digitally souped-up version of a haunted house, it’s a genuinely chilling experience that dares users to wander around a creepy asylum, interacting with its unsavory inhabitants. Like any good horror film, the sound design is absolutely integral to the mood of the piece, and creating a bank of sounds took three designers working solidly over three weeks.

"One thing we had to be particularly careful of was that since there were three of us working on it, if one of us was working on one scene and one on another, and those two scenes had to go together, we had to make sure there wasn’t a big change in the style and ambiance," says sound designer Evan Spear. To keep that uniformity of tone, they discussed everything, creating a basic framework for, say, water sounds, that was shared amongst all.

The sound designers also had to supply bridging sounds to cover the transitions between Flash files that occurred from one scene to another and, in some cases multiple iterations of the same scene. In one scenario, the user is trapped in a closet with a murderer approaching with a chainsaw. "The interactive portion of that was such that the user could have his friend on Facebook come and save him, so essentially what I had to do was have two perspectives on the soundscape," explains fellow designer Scott McIntosh. "One from the closet being attacked, then almost if you can have a mirror image in sound, another from the perspective of the door."

The very interactivity that makes these experiences so compelling is also what makes them so problematic. Simply put: how do you design sound before you know how the narrative will play out, and with an almost infinite set of different parameters? Hodde says that interactive is still copying the idioms of film sound design as it experiments with creating something tailored to its own requirements. "With sound design for film, you’re often directing the ear of the audience to a specific place," says Hodde. "That’s a very difficult thing to achieve in the interactive world, because the player is directing the perspective, and not the director. So, in a way, you’re almost reverse engineering that effect."