GameSoundCon 2019

I had a blast at GameSoundCon 2019. Once again I was honored to serve on the advisory board and to co-chair the ludomusicology/sound studies track, this year with Dana Plank.  Dana did a great job live tweeting the academic conference, if you want to catch up on what we were doing.  GameSoundCon really is my favorite conference of the year for a number of reasons, and I wanted to share some of my highlights from this year as well as encourage anyone reading who has any interest in the conference to consider attending in the future.

While I was of course excited to hear the talks Dana and I selected for the academic track, hearing Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey speak about the music of Metal Gear Solid, watching Martin Leung transcribe from Super Mario Galaxy live, Ryan Thompson discussing about the sounds of the SNES, and many others.  But honestly, my favorite day is the other day of the conference, where I can dart from room to room and hear any variety of presentations on very different topics.

Below I list some of my favorite quotes from GSC 2019 with some of favorite people I met.

With Elizabeth Zharoff

Elizabeth Zharoff speaking about upcoming AI developments in voice commands and video games:  "What if you yell at someone when you should speak to them normally?  Imagine yelling a spell incantation when you should simply speak it normally and thus the enemy is able to block it."

Marc Strait speaking about audio accessibility in gaming: "Why can you adjust the brightness on your TV to optimize your gameplay and suit your eyes the best, but not alter the audio profile to suit your ears?"

With Vincent Diamante 

Hearing Tom Salta speak about his use of leitmotifs in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon

Gender and Safety panel: "How do we ourselves act once in positions of power if we never had good role models as we came up?"

Will Roget's inspiring keynote with a cameo by U-M alum Nico Millado as Scorpion 

Will Roget: "Long term commitment in people and projects is more important than short term networking and gain.  Invest in people and connections and you'll reap dividends over the long term."

At the speakers dinner with Marty O'Donnell and Video Game Pianist Martin Leung

And I loved what Marty O' Donnell said to me: "I'm a big fan of yours!  It's great to have you working in and around this field."  Excited to have some of his music recorded and coming out later this year.

All in all, GameSoundCon is such a great time.  I hope that I might see some of you at one in the future.  If you have any questions about it, be sure to ask away.

GameSoundCon 2019: a month away

I'm getting really excited to head to GameSoundCon 2019 in just about a month!  This will be my third GSC and second time working there as co-chair for the academic ludomusicology/ sound studies track.  I'm joined this year by Dana Plank as co-chair, who will be presenting along with a number of other long time colleagues and friends including Ryan Thompson (who presented with me last year "The State of Game Audio Studies in Academia"), Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey, Martin Leung, and other old friends as well as soon-to-be ones!  I'm looking forward to all of the presentations in the studies track at GameSoundCon, but one that I'm really excited about is Kris Maddigan's presentation on the music of Cuphead.  While it's a game I've only seen others play (it'd probably be too hard for me!), I do love the soundtrack and am so excited to hear more about how he made the music for it.  Cuphead recently became the first game soundtrack to reach number one on the Jazz Billboard charts!

If you're wanting to know more about the game audio industry, I have to say that GameSoundCon is an awesome place to start.  It was one of my first deep dives into the profession years ago and I continue to love being involved with it.  And note that above, I'm selfishly just mentioning others in my track - there are whole other tracks of activity with celebrity game audio creators, including a keynote by Will Roget II.  Brian Schmidt has really created something beautiful and special in this conference.  Join us in LA October 29-30 if you can; hope to see you there!

Guest post: Student Andrew Lipian attends GDC on a GANG scholarship

I'm delighted to have my first guest post on my blog!  The below is written by my first ever one-on-one game audio student, Andrew Lipian.  Andrew won a student scholarship from the Game Audio Network Guild to attend GDC in March and I ask him to document his experience.  I thought it'd be cool to hear about the conference from the viewpoint an attendee who is both very interested in the field, a young up-comer in the area, and who went to GDC on scholarship.  Also, a great chance for him to synthesize all the notes he took there and his overall experience.  Andrew will have a second post upcoming soon as well where he describes his recent experience at NYU Steinhardt's Video Game Scoring Workshop.  

Four months have passed since the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco, where droves of video game industry elites gather annually to discuss the mechanics and business of gaming. I recall a large, imposing map of the world in one of the conference halls with the words “where are you from,” scribed above it. The map was bathed in little red dots indicating where attendees hailed from; not even Siberia was without a few. As I squinted between the chicken pox markers to find my home in Ohio, I began to reflect on the awesome conditions that brought me to this remarkable conference; how, exactly, did I get here?

Why, studying video game music with Matthew Thompson, of course! His guidance helped make my secret passion for game audio a not-so-secret passion by having me apply for a longshot scholarship to the Game Audio Network Guild. This award included an All Access pass to GDC with a personal industry mentor in game audio. I submitted a 1-minute RPG-style battle track I wrote under Thompson's supervision, a narrative with some letters of recommendation, and I was elated to see I was selected for the award! The University of Michigan School of Music Theater and Dance (SMTD) even paid for my flight! 

What would follow? A whirlwind of corporate convention constructs the size of circus tents, endless panels and seminars on all aspects of game development; industry titans roaming about like average Joes, and a bevy of indie video game stations ready for play. 

The Moscone Center, host of GDC, was a veritable sea of people. The complex is broken into three massive buildings (North, East, and West), the former two with sprawling convention expos in each basement (if you can call something the size of a NASA Space Silo a basement). Throngs of video game journalists, voice actors, narrative writers, graphics artists, directors, CEOs, programmers, and game designers painted the halls and courtyards. While I enjoyed these diverse people and their ideas, what I was really there for was the Game Audio. 

I would soon be greeted by my assigned mentor, Adam Gubman. CEO and founder of Moonwalk Audio, who has written music for hundreds of clients such as Disney, Zynga, Storm8, Sony, PlayFirst, GSN, GameHouse, NBC Today, and Warner-Chappell – to name a few. We met at one of the many meet-and-greet tables on the third floor of Moscone West, where I would get acquainted with one of the most motivated people I have ever met. With a forward, engaged posture and a surveying glance, Gubman was a dodecahedra-tattooed, spikey haired mensch; intense and cool, with a quick wit and boundless passion for music. He also had a no-nonsense approach to success: if you want this, work hard every day, don't burn bridges, absorb all you can, and persist. I've seen men of his intensity in successful musicians like Tommy Tallarico and Tom Salta and have come to identify it as the flagship trait that makes these men so successful. Their time is precious, they waste precious little of it, and tackle every task with speed and abandon. 

Adam would prove an impactful mentor, spending a great deal of time with me despite a very busy schedule of his own. Explaining a personal story of how a demo song of his won a Golden Globe, Gubman said you never know what each opportunity could bring. Demonstrating loyalty and compassion, he tells me, creates a “halo effect,” building rapport and camaraderie with potential clients. Trust and Loyalty, Adam believes, set you apart from other composers and earn you respect. He advised I take on GDC as a sponge, absorbing all I could, and give my time to every opportunity, even if the upshot for involvement wasn’t clear yet; I decided to run with his advice.

There was no shortage of sessions to enjoy in game audio. From a seminar in VR audio, featuring Winnifred Phillips as lecturer, we analyzed how special positioning for music can be more immersive than stereo in this medium, using 3D elements to implement a 2D score into the VR world. Music could even transition from 2D to 3D for dramatic effect, citing how she used 3D sound effects in the game “fail factory,” to accent the 2D musical score, creating several sounds in the “VR space.” One example was the loud “clang,” of a factory mallet dropping as the downbeat to a soundtrack for a stage. Analyzing “Shadows of Mordor,” with Nathan Grigg and Garry Schyman, they discussed how the tribal identity of various tribes in the game informed the musical themes. Using a tribe’s unique armor types, appearance and function of forts, enabled them to use the music to accent these properties. For example, the “Machine Tribe Fort Theme,” is comprised of billowing smokestacks, so he created a “non-melodic, plodding rhythmic theme with odd sets of industrial sounds to blend together and bring the orchestra in, underneath. Also, in a post-mortem on the “Call of Duty WWII,” sound track, Will Roget –who took home almost every award at the 2018 G.A.N.G. awards – described his embrace of a “modern,” sound through expanding on tradition and not limiting oneself to “genre expectation.” For example, to create the “WW II vibe,” he decided upon string quartet and solo cello over big drums and high winds or overt brass. This enabled him to focus on a modern presentation, with an early focus on the “in-game mix,” such as using trumpets only for doubling horns (instrumental EQ), and expanded low winds and brass into a “synth tuba.” He peppered his music with signature sounds, like the “echo horns,” in the piece “Memory of War,” or air raid sounds in the piece, “Haze of War.” Roget even used extended playing techniques, such as aleatoric orchestral techniques and “overpressure” in the strings. 

There was so much to absorb, I haven’t space in this post to include it all! 

When not at the many seminars, I met developers seeking music for their games, attended a G.A.N.G town hall where I pitched an idea to head up a student committee, volunteered at an IASIG meetup to run their slack channel, and got to present an award at the 2018 G.A.N.G Audio Awards ceremony as one of the 4 scholars at GDC. To top it off, I even got to meet “The Fat Man.”

GDC was an unforgettable experience, where endless paths crisscross into an intricate network to produce the pixelated art and sonic beauty keeping our hands glued to a controller. Whether I was examining the music of “Middle Earth: Shadow of War,” having my music played and critiqued before a panel of game composers at the “Demo Derby,” (where it was well received), or making new friends and colleagues, GDC provided an invaluable foot in the door for what I love to do. 

As I left my friends, boarded my flight, and scribbled notes on contacts from the handfulls of cards I obtained, the words of Adam Gubman pushed me forward faster than the jet I sat on. “You gotta be fast, you gotta work hard to deliver for your client; you have to push and persist every day.”