On behalf of the Utrecht School of the Arts – School of Music & Technology I visited the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2012 audio tracks. For colleagues and peers, I’ve made an overview that can be found below.
book about music games
Today I learned about the existence of a book dedicated to music games – Music Games Rock – by Scott Steinberg. Read this teaser:
Chronicling the meteoric rise and fall (and rise again) of music video games, Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming’s Greatest Hits of All Time is the first book to explore the field’s history, origins and most spectacular hits and flops. Offering an inside look at rhythm gaming’s hottest headliners and oddest one-hit wonders – including exclusive tour stories from the creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band – it’s your backstage pass behind the scenes of the games industry’s hottest act.
It seems to be a great overview of the music games that have been published so far. And you know what? It can be downloaded for free here!
[thanks, Jaap! 
]
This is the game I’ve been working on after becoming a Doctor! It’s Gluddle by Creative Heroes (Richard van Tol and yours truly) and it’s absurdistic and we’ve done some things differently with audio.
More on Gluddle.com
(more…)
Guitar Heroes - by SNDR
In the design research investigation Listen! the multi-disciplinary collaboration between game design and audio design students is researched. The research focuses on gathering more insight in the creative design process of game audio and presents general recommendations and pitfalls for the development of game audio.
Screenshot of Biophilia
If you’re into adaptive/interactive music, you should definitely check out the Biophilia app by Björk. This ‘full-length app-album’ is an interesting application in which studio-produced music, music apps and visual art meet.
Today is the official release of the alpha version with all the music tracks that can be bought from the free main (mother) app. The beta was published earlier this year.
[Björk website]
[iTunes link]
Richard and I have added the IEZA framework for game audio on Wikipedia. This way everyone who uses IEZA can contribute to the further development of this framework and add his or her insights.
IEZA framework can be used to conceptualise the communication by means of game audio
The URL is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEZA_Framework
[not game audio, just plain audio]
Remember Colin Firth’s appearance in “The Kings Speech” (2010)? In this movie the king has severe problems with public speeches and I was really impressed hearing Colin Firth stammering in such a monotone manner. Some time ago I found an actual recording of King George VI opening an exhibition in Scotland and you can clearly see the reference to this original footage (please click the video if it doesn’t play). The speech starts after 2 minutes.
The Dutch Control Magazine has published 6 interesting items on game music. The articles have also been published on the Control Magazine website. The articles have been written in Dutch, but perhaps Google Translate can help you understand the articles. For your convenience, there’s a [T] after the links leading you to an English translation.
The game studio FluffyLogic invites you to create some original music for their new social game Ur Zoo.
The lucky winner’s music will feature in the game and their name will appear in the game credits!
See: http://www.fluffylogic.net/2011/07/ur-zoo-social-game-music-competition/
Pointer to a symposium in the Netherlands:
VIDEOGAME MUSIC: PLAY, FANS, SPACE
13 September 2011
Utrecht University, NL
(more…)
