Gyakuten Saiban 6 Blog Entry 15: It Happened After the Dance of Devotion~ (2016)

Title: It Happened After the Dance of Devotion~
Source: Gyakuten Saiban 6 offical site

Summary: Sound composer Horiyama Toshihiko, who also worked on Gyakuten Saiban 4 (Ace Attorney 4: Apollo Justice) and Gyakuten Saiban 5 (Ace Attorney 5 - Dual Destinies), wrote this blog entry originally posted in July 11, 2016. The topic is a certain testimony early in the game, where the text was synchronized with the background music. Horiyama explains how they managed to make this.

Images are taken from the original source article. Copyrights belong to their respective owners, you know the story.

It Happened After the Dance of Devotion~

Hello everyone.
I'm Horiyama and I'm reponsible for the sound in Gyakuten Saiban 6 (Ace Attorney 6 - Spirit of Justice.

Points of interest in terms of sound are of course the diverse and grand music made by Mr. Iwadare Noriyuki and the Capcom Sound Team, and the sound effects that clearly seperate the Japanese courtroom with that of the Kingdom of Kurain. But the point we had the most trouble with, the point which the most satisfying, the point we have fondest memories of in terms of sound production, that was how we worked like crazy to get the sound data to have the music sync up with the testimony of the defendant Potdīno (Translator's Note: He's not the defendant actually...)

A request came from the planning staff to have to have the text of a testimony sync up precisely, one character at a time, with the background music. So we started working on the gigantic amount of sound data. and made a song with a pattern with an A melody, a B melody and a refrain.

It happens often that for every testimony, there are five or six seperate text windows, so we tried dividing them across the pattern of the A melody, B melody and the refrain, and made a melody so the text would come out nicely as lyrics. Whenever the text sounded bad, we would change the text (lyrics), being careful not the change the meaning.

Next, we would add markers to the waveform data. We can read the markers with a program, and they work as a sign for what lyrics to show.

For example, for the testimony text "are wa gogo no hōnomai no ato~" ('It happened after the Dance of Devotion~"), we would add markers to correspond with the timing of the pronunciation of each single character

a....Marker 1
re...Marker 2
wa..Marker 3
go...Marker 4
go...Marker 5
no...Marker 6
Etcetera.

That is how we made the sound data.

With this sound data, we then have the person responsible for presentation make a script that would go like: "When Marker 1 appears, show the character a; if Marker 2 appears, show the character re". Ōnishi, who is responsible for this job, already wrote a little about this, right? We go through a process of trial and error, by making sound data, putting it in the game and checking whether it runs well or not. But once the base has been decided, we create a lot of data ahwere we try matching all of the lyrics.

These sound data files we made for Potdīno's testimony, if you try count all of them, you'll end up with 41 of them. That means we prepared 41 lyric texts, each of them with their own specific sound data (specific melody).

That was last summer~
Every day every day just writing Potdīno's song~

The next developer's blog entry will feature an appearance of art director Fuse. We'll have him talk all about the points of interests about the character designs.

Look forward to it!