Dropping brick walls from a crane, smashing junk with a wrecking ball, and pulling trees apart with a winch. It may sound like a demolition job. In reality, it was a sound recording session for Battlefield 6 by Pole Position and DICE, part of Battlefield Studios.
What does it sound like when a 2-by-3-meter brick wall is dropped from 30 feet on another brick wall, by a crane truck on a Swedish farmyard approximately 30 miles away from Stockholm? Not as you’d expect, according to Max Lachmann, who, together with Mats Lundgren, also from Pole, teamed up with sound designers Adam Viger and Arvid Lundin from DICE to record brick wall and tree destruction sounds.
“We hadn’t done this type of recording before, so we didn’t know what to expect,” says Max. “Still, we anticipated a broader sonic spectrum than what we actually got. This was quite underwhelming. When it hit the other brick wall, it just went “crash,” and then everything turned quiet, which meant it didn’t have a story or any action.”
“Given that we only had 10 brick walls for the entire recording, it was a bit ineffective to use two of them in our first attempt,” says Adam. “So, going forward, we had to change philosophy.”
Arvid says, “And that, that we had to think differently, gave us super good material in the end. You don’t want the sounds to feel designed. There should be a natural story in the sound files, and that is what we want to capture when we record.”
Pole and DICE go way back, and this time the focus was on recording destruction sounds for game number six in the Battlefield franchise, where destruction plays a big role. At the same time, DICE wanted to invest in new content for Battlefield 6.
“We made a big push to record sounds we’ve always wanted in our libraries but haven’t really been able to find,” says Mari Saastamoinen Minto, Senior Audio Director at DICE. “We’ve had some files that worked well, but we’ve redesigned them to death. Destruction is such a big feature in our games, so we wanted to gather a lot of that material and really capture it properly and get as much variation out of it as we could.”
Mari had worked with Pole on car recordings before, but she also knew they’re pros when it comes to organizing and building complex recording environments designed specifically to capture all kinds of advanced sounds.
Arvid says, “And that was exactly what we needed for this game. The game should be immersive, and the player should feel like they’re right in the middle of the action.”
“Natural and realistic, that’s the direction we want,” says Mari. “The sounds have to feel grounded and believable in the environment where it happens. That’s why we want to record unique content, so we can replicate it and place it into the game. It has to feel convincing, so we can simulate reality in our games. But I also think it has to do with understanding how things actually sound. When we know what it sounds like for real, we learn a lot from that. Then we know how it should be used in the game when we’re designing. You learn from experiencing a recording like this.”
“By learning what something actually sounds like, you get a much broader frame of reference for how to build sound systems,” says Adam.
Plans to blow up a summer house
Mari reached out to Max to find a location where they could record brick wall and tree destruction, classic sounds in a modern FPS game, where buildings are blown apart by grenades and trees are run over by tanks or APCs.
Pole considered multiple options, even buying an old summer house in a remote part of Sweden. “You can find dilapidated places for almost nothing,” says Max. “But we realized we needed a more controlled environment. Somewhere, we wouldn’t only get one shot at each recording. I mean, if you tear down a house wall, it stays down.”
Instead, Pole returned to a farmstead they’ve recorded at several times before and which is owned by the father of Niklas and Robin Olsson, who both work at Pole. Stefan Olsson, owner of Åkergläntan, is an entrepreneur with extensive experience in machine engineering, construction, and ornamental ironwork, among other things. In the past, he’s helped out when Pole has recorded cars crashing from heights. This time Stefan, and fellow entrepreneur Martin Johansson helped Pole and DICE construct the brick walls that were going to play the lead during recording.
“The request was to build ten brick walls. So, we laid the bricks and set the walls on concrete beams. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have held together,” says Stefan.
It came down like a wrecking ball
As mentioned earlier, a crane truck was used to lift the brick wall 30 feet into the air before releasing it. But since dropping one brick wall onto another produced a sound without any story or action, the team started to experiment. A large concrete ball, similar to a wrecking ball, and built for a previous project, was introduced. The crane lifted it and released it from the hook onto the debris from several shattered brick walls. A manual “trigger” mechanism of the hook was also constructed.
Max says, “A lot of the sounds we wanted to capture sit very low in the frequency range, which means we can’t have distracting noise like the hum of a diesel crane engine.”
“We want the recordings to be as clean as possible, without any background noise,” says Adam. “And we need space around the sounds. When we’re designing, it’s essential to have isolated sound sequences that can fade out naturally and then start again.”
The 1500 lb. wrecking ball was a success. Being a farmstead with resources, the team had access to pieces of metal, wooden boards, old furniture, sheets of glass, all sorts of junk, and could place it onto the mound of broken bricks.
“Pole and DICE wanted to improvise quite a bit to get the sounds they were looking for. Since we have a lot of props around here, it was easy to just go grab something that solved the problem. Most of the time, all they have to do is ask, and we’ll figure something out. If they want to crash a car, we can sort that too,” says Stefan.
When the wrecking ball struck, all of these objects of different sizes exploded in every direction, creating a chaotic, layered soundscape, which could be repeated. As a sort of grand finale, everybody got to build their own junk sculpture, which was then shattered by the wrecking ball.
“By bringing all this junk together, that’s how we got longer sounds that tell a layered story instead of just a single hard bang. We’re extremely grateful to have access to a place like this and to benefit from the expertise of Stefan and Martin. During recordings like these, we really need flexibility and the ability to try different things. Without their help, that wouldn’t be possible,” says Max.
“It also gave us the chance to experiment with different material interactions. We started mixing wood and metal against brick, and then the other way around, simply because we had the time. One of the big advantages of working with Pole and Max is that he really understands game audio. From a recording perspective, he knows how to capture sounds in a way that actually works in a game later on. That’s not as obvious as it might sound,” says Adam.
“Capturing different audio perspectives is crucial”
Two of the microphones used during the recording were buried in the ground directly under the debris pile. When brought back to the studio, they presented a nice surprise. At one point, the recording team filled the bucket of a wheel loader with debris and slowly released it onto the pile.
Max says, “I didn’t expect the mics to pick up much of that at all, but it practically sounds like an earthquake. It was extremely cool and totally unexpected. Another recorder was placed inside the pile. Eventually, it got totally destroyed, but it recorded wonderful sounds until it got smashed.”
Several microphones were placed in six different perspectives during both the brick wall and tree destruction recordings.
“Having all these different perspectives is totally invaluable,” says Adam.
“In a non-linear game, capturing different perspectives is crucial. In film, the distance is fixed. But in Battlefield 6, you don’t know where the player will be. They could be 50 meters away from a falling tree or right beside it. So, we have to record from all those perspectives,” says Arvid.
The tree session lasted two days and included trees of different species and sizes. The team attached a winch hook to the trunk and slowly tightened the line. As the tension increased, the wood started to crack before the tree finally gave way and fell. The winch was also used to tear off branches and even to pull a stump straight out of the ground. Stefan and Martin also crawled through piles of branches to create sounds of foliage being crushed and moved.
Mari says, “We’ve worked on tree destruction in a bunch of games, but we’ve never fully nailed it. People have tried digging up references online, watching documentaries, doing research but it’s never felt quite right. This time, though, we spent two full days just recording trees. We said, ‘Okay, now we’re going to get this right.’ And I think we actually did.”
Battlefield 6 is available for all of Playstation, Xbox and PC
Pole Position’s Brick Wall Destruction and Tree Destruction Libraries are in the works and will be released hopefully later in 2026
