“Edanna Soundwalk” investigates the peculiarities of video game soundscapes and their relation to our perception of today’s real-world soundscapes. Game sound typically subserves gameplay mechanics and is therefore highly optimized for being an efficient hi-fi sound environment that conveys mood, game progress, function and dramaturgical gradation instantly and as pleasurable as possible. Still, most games hold on to basic real-life principles and premises in order to create a convincing, plausible world. Consequently game sound could not only serve as an indicator for good acoustic design, but tell us also what is perceived as a realistic, non-artificial soundscape. „Edanna Soundwalk“ seeks to observe a video game in observing, namely the game MYST 3: EXILE (Presto Studios 2001).
The piece realistically and impressionistically extends sound recordings from the game through extensive audio processing and with additional real-world recordings. The aim was to highlight characteristics of the game soundscape and its dramaturgy by altering or adding elements that are, compared to a real-world soundscape, missing or unrealistic in the game. Furthermore the piece deals with mediation by emphasizing audible loops, glitches, recording quality and audio format. Finally „Edanna Soundwalk“ illustrates the inner perspective of a traveller of MYST 3: EXILE and draws her / his sonic journey audible. In the composition, sounds are used and changed according to their role in the game soundscape and as part of the game world dramaturgy. The listener can oppose the piece to her / his experiences and thereby perform a second-order observation of the game’s soundscape.
"Edanna Soundwalk" was produced as part of the seminar "Soundscape Composition as Context-based Creation" (Barry Truax) at Technische Universtität Berlin. The piece was originally mixed in 8 audio channels and premiered on February 12th 2016.

MYST 3: EXILE is the third instalment in the Myst franchise, an adventure game series about a family drama within the fictitious lost D’ni culture. Having the ability to write books which link to various surreal worlds, called Ages, the D’ni culture provides an open-ended background story for the franchise. The gameplay of MYST 3: EXILE, like all Myst games, has a strong focus on place. Whereas the setting is often arbitrary in other video games, the Myst-franchise centres on discovering and understanding the underlying mechanisms of its numerous Ages. MYST 3: EXILE’s design aims for the total immersion of the player, hence putting emphasis on an immersive soundscape. One of Myst’s Ages is the basis for „Edanna Soundwalk“. Edanna, also refered to as „Nature Age“, is a skyscraper- like tree in an seemingly endless ocean. It appears that the tree stopped growing upwards at some point and instead grew into its own trunk. Edanna can be divided in four different floors: The upper deadwood ridge, the lower deadwood ridge, the forest and the swamp. The player starts at the top of the tree (upper deadwood ridge) and progresses to the bottom (the swamp). Each floor has its own wildlife and unique soundscape, only the lower deadwood ridge and the forest share similar keynote sounds and sound events.
MYST 3: EXILE basically consists of prerendered 360-degree panorama images, between which the player can navigate. By inserting prerendered video transitions between and videos sequences inside these images, a sense of real-time is invoked. Accordingly the soundscape can only be experienced from predetermined spots. The audio format of the game is stereo.

The structure of „Edanna Soundwalk“ correlates with the basic layout of the Age. Since the soundscapes of the lower deadwood ridge and the forest are similar and often interconnected, the composition has not four, but three major segments. When descending from the tree top to the swamp area, the soundscape changes from high-frequency noise to low-frequency tonal drones; the tree could be compared to a lowpass filter with a cutoff frequency that gets lower from floor to floor. The piece tries to reproduce and emphasis this as well.
Preceding the composition, Edanna’s soundscape was mapped and analysed in detail for all possible ways a player could experience the Age. This way, the importance, meaning and context of each sound could be revealed. In order to draw the listener’s attention to the discrepancy between the video game soundscape and real-world soundscapes, an eight channel diffusion format was chosen. Since the game only provides a stereo audio signal, a lot of the original sounds had to be extracted from the game’s mix, recreated and enriched.