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.
Mapping the Field Symposium Music Design
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.
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.
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.
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
PrettyUglyGameSoundStudy (or PUGS) is an experiment to gather as many examples of audio in games that people consider either to be ‘good’ (or ‘pretty’) and ‘bad’ (or ‘ugly’). On one hand we wish to get a better understanding of game audio that people consider to work well in games and on the other we would like to get an overview of (typical) game audio blunders, from which the field can benefit. We hope that eventually this archive can grow out to be an inspiration (as well as the occasional good laugh) for those working in the field of game audio.
The IEZA framework defines the communication by means of audio in games. Richard van Tol and I published the theory of IEZA in an article on Gamasutra.
Based on our review of literature and repertoire we have formulated a framework that uses an alternate approach to classify game audio: the IEZA framework. The primary purpose is to refine insight in the communication by means of game audio by providing a coherent organization of four domains belonging to two dimensions.
The authors would like to thank Jan IJzermans for his conceptual contribution to IEZA, as well as the feedback to the article.
[Read the article about the IEZA framework at Gamasutra]
[PDF]
In 2006, Richard van Tol and I visited the Game Developers Conference in behalf of the Utrecht School of the Arts. This is an (originally intended as internal) report which contains the developments in the field of game audio, after attending the audio sessions of the GDC ‘06.
Disclaimer: this is an document reporting the state of a rapidly developing field, many facts may be outdated. Mainly intended for “nostalgia” or reference! You can download the original report as PDF (Dutch) or read the article below this line, oftewel het artikel hieronder lezen: (Dutchy stuff has already started)
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.
