I teach audio design to game designers and interaction designers at the Utrecht of the Arts. Here are some valuable links for finding audio material and some tools. In case you have something valuable to add, you know where to find the comments section.
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?
What’s the next step in game audio? Now it’s your turn…Fill in your own answer or click on an existing one and hit ‘submit’!
Yesterdag Richard and I gave a keynote 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 great 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.
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.
Dit is een kort (aangepast) verslag van de AES 35th International conference 2009: Audio in Games.
Kees presenting at the AES. Photo: Sander Huiberts
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
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.
There are some websites that provide links to articles, papers and other valuable resources that are useful to start with. The list below isn’t meant to be complete and is aimed at helping you to start with finding references. Useful suggestions are welcome at all times, preferably in a comment below.
Guitar player photo by puja
This post is about an old thesis written in 2002 for the Utrecht School of the Arts, School of Music and Technology.[1] It contains guidelines for the usability of audio-only menus. It’s written in Dutch and I’d like to share some insights that might be useful for designing audio menus or audio games.
In the past years, I’ve designed quite some audio menus for audio games and supervised projects that used audio-only interaction for blind users. Below I share some of my experiences concerning these menus, and include the original recommendations of the thesis.
illustration by zkukkuiz
