I’ve been doing a lot of research these past few years into field recordings, those of both the natural environment and the built environment. Bridging, in a manner of speaking, the gap between the two respective realms are the environmental sounds that fill video games, virtual reality, and the like. They are artificially created yet intended to give the impact of something real, something heightened or extrapolated, something — to use the ubiquitous term — immersive. Many of these high-definition sonic studio concoctions are derived from actual field recordings, while others are produced more synthetically. Such recordings are, of course, intended to be experienced in a given context.
However, as with the one heard (and seen) below, in which a driver navigates the nighttime streets of the 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V, there is a large and growing audience for prerecorded video game experiences, and though they are, inherently, audio-visual, many of these fan recordings are couched in sonic terms, like “ASMR” and as “sleep aids.” There is something lulling, indeed, to this city drive, which the title informs us has “NO LOOPS” — which is to say, it is a constant, non-repeating stream of different journeys around the open world of the video game, courtesy of the channel named Video Game Weather ASMR. It is also, per the functional title, eight hours long. The primary things I found myself listening to are the car engines and the rain, and I found myself listening for variations therein. Your mileage may vary. I recommend starting at the beginning and then checking out the different scenarios, each from the point of view of a different driver/character in the game. There is a clickable table of contents to the video, helping situate you should you want to know where you are — or more to the point, who you are — at a given moment.
This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.