To generate the sounds, the director sampled existing casino soundscapes, fusing the whole to, as he put it, 'add a new and better track to the traditional sound, but not to clash with it'. In her book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling In Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes that in the late 1990s the 'prescient audio director' at Silicon Gaming decided that every one of the sounds made by its slot machines – a number that now exceeds some 400 discrete noises – would be issued in what she terms 'the universally pleasant tone of C'. It's as if Brian Eno had recorded Music For Casinos. It all percolates and pulsates in a gently propulsive fashion, as if to convey a sense of progress even as it relaxes. The first thing you notice on entering the vast hall of the casino is the sound: an ambient wash of well-modulated tones, a 4,000-strong machine symphony set not to any discernible pattern, but not without harmony syncopated by deeper subwoofer exhalations, an occasional chirp and the simulated clang of coins.
