— I’m not sure. The airport is a complicated situation. Even if you understand something and know how to do it well, it can be difficult to be heard in such a sprawling system. Sometimes people think that if something already works, there’s no need to improve on it. It is, of course, hard to agree with that view. Ilya Birman has written a great post on the scripting of informational announcements at airports on his
blog. The information is important, but for some reason people tend to add extra words, which overload the phrase. Our audio stitching doesn’t suffer from this, because the whole idea is to make it easier to convey the information. Oftentimes, there’s only one word in a line.
Another burst of words sewn together into a soundwave rings out across the concourse. And it does sound quite bad. It’s hard to make sense of it right away. In contrast, good audio stitching isn’t even noticeable in a video game, and should only be known to the management and the recording studio. Perhaps one day these sprawling, complex systems will let in people eager to make their work easy to understand for others, from the get go. But for now, a huge line snakes its way over to passport control, with Levsha somewhere in it, on their way to Gamescom.