The obligatory thesis word cloud about immersive audio

The word is out: I hereby present you my PhD thesis! After the final writeup in 2009, it took some time to get my viva arranged in August 2010. Sorry to keep you waiting…but now, it can be downloaded via this blog.

This thesis addresses the role of audio for immersion. Yep, the I-word…almost just as Impossible as it is Irresistible to designers. Yet, I’ve tried to come up with some useful theory for those who want to know more about the design of sound, music and speech in games and the conceptual decisions that are involved.

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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.

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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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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

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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

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