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!

Behind the scenes: NACVGM 6

I wanted to take a few moments to reflect about my experience at the 6th annual North American Conference on Video Game Music, which I’m flying back from right now.  NACVGM 6 was held at the University of Hartford, Hartt School, in their beautiful Millard Auditorium.  

One of my main takeaways after seeing four NACVGMs (1, 4, 5, and 6) now is how the quality of presentations has grown.  To me that showcases the importance of a conference like this: by seeing and hearing other scholars’ work, there is a general elevation of the research and knowledge.  The conference has also grown physically as well.  I’d guess that keynotes at the first NACVGM had about 70 in attendance and that keynotes in the last two broke 100 attendees.  

Some of my favorite papers included the very first one, by Elizabeth Medina-Gray, analyzing the talking sound from the first Dragon Warrior/Quest.  Really interesting to consider this short sound that I’d only thought of as noise in relation to the key of the game, and as a musical entity.  I’ve often asked my students what the sound in the first Legend of Zelda is meant to represent— typing? talking?— so this was right up my alley.  Elizabeth's presentation really set a standard for the conference.  Two other highlights for me were Steven Reale and Isaac Hraga’s joint presentation about their work over the last year having composition and implementation lessons at Youngstown State.  Very inspiring and I’m hoping to implement some aspects of that work at U-M in the coming year.  Also, William Ayers had a paper that I found very fascinating about echolocation in video games.  While he started talking about games where players play as dolphins, most interesting to me was when he turned to the matter of horror games where the player’s in-game sight is restricted.  I show Lurking often in Video Game Music class if the students want to do horror games and I love how this sort of game design ties in the importance of sound to the gameplay mechanics.  Really awesome. 

Steve Reale and Isaac Hraga presenting

Of course the Wilbert Roget II’s keynote address was really amazing.  He presented on a history of using middleware in his game experience.  I loved this because the technology is relatively new, has changed a lot through time, and also no one has really focused on that before in a talk that I’ve heard.  Instead, usually the compositional process is the focus or how that process has changed through time more than the implementation aspect.  

Will Roget's keynote

This NACVGM was definitely memorable in another way: a lockdown on campus during lunch on the second day, related with a stabbing incident in the dorms.  Sadly, many of us are familiar with lockdowns from instances at our own institutions, so we were able to handle it fairly gracefully.  The lockdown lasted a couple of hours, and after a bit of frantic texting and communication, Elizabeth Medina-Gray and I were still in the auditorium— we never left for lunch— and as members of the conference committee, were able to restart the conference a bit late and catch up by the end of the day, still ending on time.  Ryan Thompson was a huge help too, coordinating many matters and even allowing the other members of the NACVGM committee to watch over Skype.  One issue that presenters worried about was the topic of the afternoon presentations, which had to do with first person shooters and other violence and horror in games.  However, we persevered and gave appropriate content warnings ahead of these presentations.  The lockdown was soon lifted and folks were able to return to campus, get their luggage and belongings, and rejoin us in person.  While luckily none of the NACVGM participants or attendees were hurt, our thoughts went out to the students who were injured in this incident.  

When I return to GameSoundCon in the fall to co-chair their academic branch with colleague, Dr. Dana Plank, we hope to continue to spread the word about NACVGM there and drum up more interest.  It’s clear that the conference’s future is looking strong.  Next year, NACVGM 7 will be held at Ithaca, hosted by Elizabeth Medina-Gray.  Hope you might attend!  I find NACVGM to be inspiring and motivating, making me want to move toward some publication goals I have upcoming.  Beyond that, it’s simply fun to dork out with a community that loves video games and game audio.  

Let me know if you have any questions about NACVGM.  NACVGM 5 was live streamed and many portions of it are hosted on YouTube.  A few of the virtual talks from NACVGM 6 are available as well, and were excellent: both Kaitlin Saari’s video on Breath of the Wild (she really set a new standard for these!) and Ryan Thompson's video’s on Esports were stand outs that you might be interested in checking out.