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!

Game Music Online: Brian Schmidt details composing in the SNES and Genesis era

Want to get into blogging more regularly again. So, what pulled me out of my long hiatus?  In part, a wonderful post by Brian Schmidt about working as a game composer in the Genesis and SNES era. The fact that there are gems like this simply lying in Internet forums is pretty amazing. Brian is also remarkable for his work with reaching out from the game audio community to those who want to learn more about it. If you want to learn more about game audio, check out GameSoundCon, which he runs each year. It's a great place to learn more and this year there's an academic track as well.  More soon...

Current News: Day 2 at GameSoundCon

So I've just finished up my second day at GameSoundCon.  I'm a bit exhausted from the experience, but really glad to have been here.  It's really an amazing experience that I think anyone who's interested in thinking about and getting into game audio should attend.

I started the morning with a hands-on Wwise training class.  This was undoubtedly one of the coolest things that I did at the conference.  As a teacher of music technology, I know there's nothing like getting down and dirty with the software to understand how it works.  Led by Robert Brock, the session starts by getting the current version of Wwise and some sounds on a flash drive to install on your laptop.  Then, in an hour, you learn some of the very most basic of the features by giving sounds to a gunshot.  The demo is available on the Wwise site and is called Cube.  This training was great because it's something that I can show to my students.  I'm definitely planning to explore more of the Wwise demos in coming weeks.

After the hands-on training, I headed to a session entitled "Integrating Game Audio with Unity" led by Steve Horowitz and Scott Looney.  This session caught my eye because my engineering friends who teach game development at UM use Unity, so anything I can learn about how sounds work in that engine is of interest.  Several of the examples they discussed came from their book and the corresponding app that goes with it, so I was familiar with them already.  (I haven't reviewed the book yet because I want to play around more with the examples and training first.)  Their session opened my eyes to how much there is to learn in with regard to Unity and sound integration.  The session felt a bit rushed and I was glad to hear that they offer whole day long courses on the same material.  Hope I can either catch one of those in the future.

Before lunch, I caught a demo of Dolby Atmos which was superb.  When I bring my students to tour the sound facilities in the Duderstadt at UM, one of my recording engineer friends at UM, Dave Greenspan, has been talking to my students for years about the importance of height in sound and mixing.  Atmos is basically that to a huge degree.  Speakers above make an incredible difference in sound and I loved seeing it demoed both in games and movies.  Afterward, I snuck in a bit late to Penka Kouneva's session on budgeting and recording live instruments for games without large budgets.  It was definitely an interesting session with lots of good information-- particularly in her discussion as she surveyed friends/colleagues about how they made music work on tight budgets.

Not only does Brian Schmidt do an amazing job of coordinating this entire event, but he gives a great talk as well.  I'm so fortunate that he was one of the first people who I came in contact with when I started my game audio journey years ago.  Thanks Brian for finding me on my blog!  His talk on Casual/Mobile games was informative with lots of details I can share with my students.

Probably my favorite part of today (aside from the raffle where I won a GameSoundCon t-shirt) were the roundtable discussions at the end of the day.  The first roundtable discussion was with composers Garry Schyman, Austin Wintory, Adam Gubman, and Tom Salta.  The second was with audio directors Paul Lipson, Guy Whitmore, and Steve Horowitz.  I thought I'd just jot down a few of their quotes that I found most interesting in the chat.  I've got a ton more than it's useful to share here, so these are just a few highlights.

First, here's a picture I took from my seat during the composers' roundtable.

"If I get stuck, 9 times out of 10 it's because I'm not having fun anymore."  -- Tom Salta

"Don't let technology get in the way.  Don't let interactivity limit your creativity."  -- Garry Schyman

"Writing the first note is the biggest challenge."  -- Adam Gubman

"The industry is like this convention: everyone sharing a space together.  It's about relationships.  Contribute to the community.  The industry is accommodating to all different personalities and skill sets.  Find your place in it.  Be authentically yourself."  --Austin Wintory

"Audio programmers are instant hires right now.  They're unicorns."  -- Paul Lipson

"We need to break the freelance gap-- and by this I mean that freelance workers don't see the game.  I don't hire composers who don't deliver their material in Wwise or otherwise implemented."  -- Guy Whitmore

"If you're thinking of getting into the industry, do some research: what's a company where you'd like to work?  What kind of titles would you like to work on?  What languages and software do they use? What does their music sound like?"  -- Steve Horowitz


In this second picture, you can see George Sanger, Michael Csurics, and Marty O'Donnell just in front of me enjoying martinis as they take in the audio director roundtable discussion.  Wish I'd thought to get one during the break between the discussions!

All in all, I have to say GameSoundCon was incredible.  The networking is powerful-- meeting others who are thinking and learning and interested in what you are.  I definitely refined some of my thinking about game audio and got some awesome hands-on knowledge.  The knowledge wasn't earth shattering for me, probably because I've read and studied so much about game audio so far.  However, I'd definitely recommend GameSoundCon to anyone who is interested in game audio as an early step toward learning more and meeting folks working in the trenches.  I'll suggest to my students that they attend GSC for as long as I teach video game music!

Game Music Online: Introduction to Game Audio: How Games Are Different from Anything You've Worked on Before

Talking to a friend when I went in to UM today about my game music class and he pointed me to this video of Brian Schmidt delivering what appears to be the introductory talk at GameSoundCon in 2010. Wow!  I've got to get there!  If you haven't seen this before, give it a view.  It's amazing.  The best part of it is that Brian is a clear and effective communicator.  Seeing this makes me all the more excited to have him as a virtual speaker in my class.

SoundWorks Collection: GameSoundCon 2010: "Introduction to Game Audio"

from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Here are my notes and reactions to his talk:

First and foremost, it pleases me greatly to have read most of this before.  While the way he presents it is very unique, after a year of intense study, there were very few ideas I hadn't encountered before here.

I really like his closing the door analogy for game audio.  Basically, you could brush it closed, slam it, or never close it at all-- in a movie, a fixed medium, we know how it'll be, how hard the door's shut, when it's shut, etc.  In a video game, you don't know when or how...  you need to be able to encompass all of those scenarios and more.

A random thought as he's describing game audio: Musically, we need a new way to think about game music analysis, since it's interactive.  Traditional methods still apply in plenty of cases, key, meter, phrase shape, etc.  In other ways, they need to evolve-- the phrase can be broken many places and a new cue jumped to.  How can music analysis adjust for this?  Not really sure how or what exactly that means, but listening to this made me realize there's much work to be done in this area.  Interesting to think of it here because I've been realizing that I'm up for some hurdles in the "My Gaming Audio History" section of the blog as I move forward in time to modern games that have adaptive audio.

I knew the term "spotting session" from film audio, but good to hear "event planning" is the game music equivalent.

Spore-- real time compositional synthesis.  I know nothing about this game.  I want to check it out.

It's very good for me to hear about how game engines and audio engines interact.  I really didn't know anything about the process, and while his explanation is simple, the personification makes it easy to understand.

I love the turn of the century theater pianist analogy as being comparable to the audio engine and game sound.  What makes this analogy work is that the theater pianist was making music live, often playing from a collection of pieces with varying moods and styles that were easy to jump between as needed for the onscreen action.  In this analogy, the theater pianist represents the audio engine and the music he played off of the collection of game assets.

Brian sums up four unique audio challenges:
1- Lack of precognition for player action
2- Duration of experience is unknown
3- Sounds must vary with action
4- Unlike movies, games have resource constraints

Probably my favorite statement from the video was that "as a game composer you're working on a work in progress."  When you read game composer interviews, they discuss one of the best ways of getting inspiration for the game music is to play the game.  I'd never considered that they weren't looking at the finished version of the game, just a build.  I can identify with this as a musical director where I've worked on shows.  They often need to be adapted for the venue, pieces shortened, keys changed, parts re-written, music inserted or removed.  That flexibility, which at times can seem like chaos, is an extremely creative environment and necessitates a fine balance between being flexible in the moment and simultaneously keeping the big picture in sight.

Playing Games: Ear Monsters

A couple months ago, Brian Schmidt left a comment where me mentioned a new game he was about to release, Ear Monsters.  It's taken me a while to get to it, but I recently bought it and have been playing it a bit.  Very cool game, I've never seen, heard?, played! anything quite like it.  The premise is basically that you have to kill (by tapping) monsters you can't see, but you can hear them.  You need some good headphones for this game.  By changing the volume between your various ears, reverb, etc, the game gives a fairly easy to understand method of hearing where the monsters are.  The teaching/tutorial section at the very beginning of gameplay is simple and fast.  I hate games where you have to drag through long tutorials before being able to play.  This integrates the learning how to play right into the gameplay.  I also like the arcade like aspect of the game-- quick to dip in and out-- and trying to best your previous high score.  Old school, but awesome!  It may sound kind of simple as I describe it here, but add in aircraft sounds, the sounds of your shots being fired, bombs suddenly appearing, and a timer bleeping as your final (and most difficult) seconds count down-- and it's a lot to hear!

Aside from the unique audio aspect, I like that there's quite a bit of tapping around on the screen.  A lot of the games I play on my iPhone or iPad have a directional key and maybe just one button to push otherwise.    Here, I get to tap all over.  My favorite part of the game is easily just listening to the sounds that are unlocked in the sound gallery.  The planes flying from right to left are just incredible.  I find myself constantly checking to see if I've unlocked more sounds because I just want to hear them and play them over and over....

The game music is fairly simplistic, basically some percussion and a little bass.  If it were much more, it'd interfere with hearing the things you need to in the game.  I did try playing without the music to see if that helped my aural focus, but it didn't really and I quickly wanted the musical ambience back.  I will say that having a fairly good pair of headphones makes a difference.  I tried the game three ways: with my standard iPhone issue earbuds, with a pretty nice pair of Stretch headphones, and mirroring the game on my TV through my Apple TV so that I could play it via my surround system.  It's possible to hear the differences in the monster positions in each of these cases, but I definitely did the best with the headphones as I was able to get the most monster positions I've ever achieved and a score of 318.  I'm going to keep dipping in and out of the game in coming weeks and am definitely going to use it as one of the mobile games I feature in my game class in the fall.  

Cool game.  Different.  Haven't ever played anything quite like it.  If you want to try something outside the box, and the game sounds good to you, give it a whirl.  Let me know what you think.  Oh, and if you're interested in more info on Ear Monsters, Brian has an incredible blog post over at Gamasutra where he describes the process of creating the game.  It's well worth a read and definitely the kind of behind the scenes info that scholarship needs for historic accuracy in game audio.  

Video Game Music Class: Just won a grant for guest speakers!

I'm elated to say that I just got notice I won a grant for my game music class. It's a small award that UM's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching makes available for developing courses called the Instructional Development Fund. My proposal is to use the fund to moderate Q&A's between leading game music experts via Skype. A condition of the grant is that I have to record the conversations for reuse (if the class is offered again) and to enter them into the UM library collection. Through my work on this blog, I've made contact with Karen Collins and Brian Schmidt, both of whom I've asked to participate in these conversations. I also reached out to Tommy Tallarico and got him on board as a speaker as well. I'm still looking for a composer who works primarily in mobile audio as a final interview. This is superb news for the class, the library collection, and me!  This class is going to rock!