Just a quick pointer for those who are interested in a symposium about Music Design in the Netherlands. Mind that the symposium will be held in Dutch. I’ll be presenting my research concerning the cooperation between game designers and music designers (sound designers and composers). For more, click more below the flyer.
Now that we’re in the voting mood…have a look at an AnswerGarden that was added to the Pretty Ugly Gamesound Study. Do you agree with the votes in the garden or do you want to suggest some other games?
Julian Smith posted this video of a percussion performance with the help of the sounds coming from a Jeep. He claims that all the sounds in this video are the actual sounds from the Jeep and that it took 7 hours of filming to get a solid take. Pretty amazing!
You probably know the Wilhelm Scream. According to the Wilhelm Scream entry on Wikipedia, the sound effect that was recorded in 1951 has been used in about 149 films. A recent example is Inglourious Basterds…but we also find the sound effect cliche in games. The following video shows some of the most common examples of the Wilhelm Scream in movies:
Last week, Creative Heroes released the Helmut Scream, which can be used freely. You’re invited to download and use Wilhelm’s jealous brother in your projects.
Yesterdag Richard and I presented at the Music Summit of Festival of Games in Utrecht. After visiting many international conferences on audio for games, it’s great to meet all the local peers and professionals. At the bottom of this page, you can find a link to the slides and a special link page.
By the way, it was a splashing venue, featuring a truly wonderful performance installation by Matthias Oostrik. See the two pictures below I made before the summit started:
Saturday June 13. Richard van Tol and I will present developments in game music at the Music@Games Summit of the Utrecht Festival of Games. Attending this summit is free, but registration is required.
My colleage Kees Went and I attended the AES International Conference Audio for Games 2009. We presented a paper about the Game Audio Lab that was developed in 2008 at the Utrecht School of the Arts.
In 2007, I supervised an internship for the Adaptive Music Systems Research group under Jan IJzermans. The group [1] researched adaptive sound design and composition for games and developed the Adeptive toolkit, which helps composing in nonlinear settings.
To make things clear: we’re not talking about composing a song from the beginning to the end (linear music); the composer makes a large amount of musical ‘cells’ and the system selects new cells based on the rules of the composer (nonlinear music). Such an approach can be highly suitable for games, that mostly have a nonlinear character, as the music is able to correspond with the narrative or the presupposed experience of the player. And at least, we’re preventing the repetitive background track that drives players crazy.
My PhD thesis on game audio and immersion will be published on this site (expected fall 2009). Enter your email address and you'll be informed of future updates on captivatingsound.com.
