What kind of sound are you aiming for when it comes to "sound in space"?
The player’s ship is at this point both the main character and scenario in the game, so my goal is to have it generate a rich soundscape on its own: the hums and chatter from the electronic equipment (think Nostromo starting up), the whirl of the air conditioner, the resonances of the weapons in the cockpit... there’s a myriad of elements that we can work within this inner space, all of which can be reactive to meaningful parameters to the point that an experienced pilot should know the state of the spaceship just by listening to it.
When it comes to outer space, my approach is to gather meaningful information and bring it into the cockpit via sound, if the pilot cannot naturally hear it. We have a device in the spaceship that could potentially simulate an entire aerial battlefield (delivered via earplugs or bone conduction), but what it actually recreates, and how, is entirely up to us. The question is then really a matter of design: does the pilot-player need to hear explosions? Do we represent all the explosions or only those within a certain distance and radius from the player’s point of view? Should they sound airborne-like, etc.
In addition to the “sound HUD”, the spaceships will include a different device, a radio of sorts, rudimentary but dependable, that plays through a speaker in the cockpit and passively tunes to radio frequencies, say that of a “nearby” pulsar or the engine of a spaceship passing by; in case of general interface malfunction, the radio might very well be the only source of information on the outside world.
Finally, when an atmosphere is present, airborne sounds will come into the mix, and the pilot will for instance hear a nearby explosion, enhanced by a deep submarine-like HUD boom, and punctuated by a little crackle on the radio, each of those elements contributing to the feedback.
It is important to stress that both radio and HUD are real devices, so they can malfunction or be damaged, and replaced by better models with different capabilities (both) or sound sets (HUD). The pilot should have some degree of control over them, from within the ship’s interface –a volume slider, a sound HUD checklist to activate or deactivate types of data sonified. More so, since both HUD and radio can be muted, it is possible to just drift along listening to the sounds that truly belong to the inner space, and nothing else.
