A God of War: Ragnarok developer has revealed that one of the game's subtlest sound effects is the sound of their baby's heartbeat from inside the womb.
In a recent tweet, PlayStation senior sound designer Alex Previty revealed what went into creating the sound effects heard during the Spark of the World section of God of War: Ragnarok. In a clip, you can see Kratos looking around the environment as a peculiar echoing sound rings out around him. Underneath that, a heartbeat sound rings out, adding a strangely visceral effect.
That's likely deliberate given the story implications of this part of the game, which I won't spoil here, but it turns out that that heartbeat effect is very real. Previty revealed that the sound "is actually my daughter's heartbeat while she was still in the womb," and that he recorded it using a Doppler - a fetal heartbeat monitoring device.
This is one of my favorite sounds I made for the game! The heartbeat sound is actually my daughter's heartbeat while she was still in the womb - I recorded it via the 3.5mm output of a baby doppler. The longer tonal elements are from a children's choir warming up in a gymnasium! https://t.co/9PV8iPpzhPDecember 27, 2023
The rest of the noise comes from a children's choir, who Previty recorded as they were warming up. Both sound effects are dramatically slowed down - in a follow-up tweet, Previty demonstrated the original sounds, outlining the work down to create the eventual effect.
Previty's tweet is a fascinating peek behind the curtain of two different aspects of game development. On the one hand, there's the astounding, existential foley work that they document, showing how sound design can take an original sample and tweak it to capture an entirely unique mood. There's also a sense of how PlayStation's central teams help its first-party studios create their games - Previty doesn't work for God of War developer Sony Santa Monica, but for Sony's Creative Arts team, meaning that he's contributed to multiple games, including Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and the Demon's Souls Remake, in these smaller, more subtle ways.
God of War: Ragnarok just dropped its Valhalla update, featuring a roguelike mode so tricky that no-one on the dev team was able to complete its hardest difficulty.
