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:

Festival of Games in Ottone

Festival of Games in Ottone

[Download the Slides as PDF]
More information and weblinks at FoG.AudioGames.net

See a slideshow below the break.

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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.

Game Audio Lab: an educational framework for research and design of realtime, nonlinear sound and music design. Photo © Sander Huiberts

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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.

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