Big Walk sound designer Em Halberstadt on capturing its wild Australian soundscape

Em Halberstadt hasn’t always been obsessed with sound. Or music. Or games. Before becoming creative director at A Shell in the Pit, the production company that’s made audio for games like Untitled Goose Game, Pacific Drive, and most recently Big Walk, Halberstadt dabbled in video editing as she made her way through her new media major at Ryerson University in Toronto. It wasn’t until she took a film school elective that a career in foley started to pique her interest.

“A friend showed me Limbo, and the sound in that is amazing,” Halberstadt told me during a recent video chat. “That was kind of when I was putting the pieces together. The idea of linear film wasn’t as exciting to me, but interactive storytelling was like, ‘Oh, this sounds so cool.’”

While many sound designers start off in music, Halberstadt says she found her way to sound as an observer, not a participant. “There was a time, a specific moment, where I was just kind of listening to music, and then I learned that you can listen to the different layers, like the drums versus the guitar, what they’re all doing separately. You can kind of tune into that, and it was the same with, you know, walking through the world and breaking apart the layers of the soundscape.”

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That sense of curiosity around observation is what leads Halberstadt’s career, which most recently took her to Australia with studio House House to record sound on location for Big Walk, a game in which sound is maybe the most important element. In the multiplayer online game, players enter a wilderness modeled after Wilson’s Promontory, a national park in Victoria. As you strain your ears to listen for your friends, whose voices you can only hear as they move closer to you in-game, you’ll also hear the sounds of birdlife, water rushing, sand squeaking, and wind rustling through treetops.

As sound designer for Big Walk, Halberstadt gathered all of those ambient sounds on location as part of a several-day trip with the House House team — an activity she’d be happy to do regardless of whether she was working on a project.