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.  

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 1 at GameSoundCon

I'm just getting back to my hotel from the first day at GameSoundCon.  Great day!  Totally lifted my spirits from the fact that my flight in yesterday was delayed, the hotel oversold, and I was moved into a craphole where I feel like the sheets are going to give me Ebola.  As I walked into GameSoundCon this morning, George Sanger was lugging his suitcase up the steps in front of me and we started chatting.  When I got to the registration table, Alexander Brandon was passing out the registration information for the N-Z folks, which of course included me!  These are two great composers whose music I admire and whose books I love and have written about (George and Alex).  A great start to the day to help wash away the rough arrival yesterday.

After a mass meeting, I spent the morning in FMOD sessions with Stephan Schutze.  I felt a bit awkward initially when Stephan asked everyone how they identified as a sound designer or as a composer.  Then he asked who didn't raise a hand-- just me-- and I said I identified as a teacher of game music.  He went on a bit of a tirade about how there were a lot of "Bobs" who were teaching game audio and had no business or knowledge to be doing so and it was fraud.  Then quickly followed this with the caveat that he was glad I was seeking out the training that many didn't know they needed or care to get.  After that bump and a technical problem with the projector, the sessions progressed quickly as he showed many of the features of FMOD.  While the class wasn't the sort of FMOD 101 I was hoping for, it was interesting to watch what was possible in the software.  One of the main points he stressed was that folks used to linear media need to get out of the mindset of "get your sounds in ProTools, mix them, and export them off to the game."  Instead, technology today allows for the game engine to mix the sound interactively in the game.  Principles I understand already from readings, but cool to see how he applied them with the software.

After lunch at a gastro-pub, I headed to Alexander Brandon's session discussing his work on the Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity.  Most cool about this session was hearing how he worked in Unity 4 on this game and used various techniques and softwares to conquer audio problems.  Alex seemed to be a fan of Wwise, which was not used in these games, but he is hoping to use in future games.  He also discussed the differences in updates to Unity 5 that are improvements to how the audio works.  While I haven't used Unity much at all except for exploring just a bit of Steve Horowitz' book, it was cool to see that the interface wasn't so much different from the Unreal demos I've seen in The Game Audio Tutorial.  At the end of this session, I was sitting close enough to Winifred Phillips to get her to autograph my copy of her superb book, which I've been reading on this trip.

I was planning to head back to the FMOD session for some talk about generative audio, but instead I headed down to chat with some of the sponsors.  There were numerous tables set up by different groups and products: IAsig, Wwise, RealSpace VR Audio, and ProSoundEffects.  I'm planning to join IAsig next year as this year is my year of GANG.  Wwise and ProSoundEffects are both things that I think could enhance my teaching at UM, so I chatted with them about possibilities for students and educational packages.  The hardest of these for me to describe is RealSpace VR audio.  They had headphones where the audio changed in relation to the placement of a second device around you, changing the mixing as you were stationary in the headphones and the device was moved around you.  Next, they had me put on enormous goggles and a second set of headphones that looked into a beautiful 3D environment and it was possible to move through the environment by looking at various objects in it and hear the sound change in relation to your position in the virtual environment.  I'd never seen or heard anything like that.  Definitely something to keep an eye on in the future!

Marty O'Donnell gave the keynote address.  I forget that he wrote that memorable Flintstone Kids jingle from my childhood.  Never knew it was his daughter who sang the final "and growing!"  I never played Halo, but of course know the music anyway.  I played a bit of Riven, but was way more into Myst-- didn't realize he got into the later sequels in this series.  Anyway, fascinating to hear about his journey and some of his advice.  I may use some of his points and examples in my own teaching.  His three main points were: 1-practice, 2-take risks, and 3-have friends.  Good advice in any field, certainly any musical one!  The end of the talk was a bit of a downer as he talked about abuse in the game audio field and how to protect yourself and your creations.  Again, good advice, but too bad that folks get burned enough to make that a front and center issue in the field.

All in all, a wonderful, tiring, busy day.  Looking forward to tomorrow with some Wwise training and audio roundtables.

Video Game Music Class: Happenings last week and this week.

I'm writing this morning from the airport, where I'm about to fly to LA for the sold-out GameSoundCon 2014.  Super excited for the trip-- not only to meet the game audio experts, but also to learn a bit of FMOD and Wwise.  Pretty sure I'll be the only faculty member on the UM campus who has familiarity with these softwares.  I'll be able to demo them live in class later in the semester instead of my usual playing some of the video tutorials from Stevens/Raybould The Game Audio Tutorial.  Exciting times.

Last week in class, we talked briefly about MIDI and iMuse.  A number of the engineers in class have used MIDI in various ways before, as have the Peformance Art Technology students, of course.  Virtually no one knew about iMuse, though, except one student who had played a game that made use of its technology.  There are some great videos on youtube via Peter Silk's channel that demonstrate some different features of iMuse that I show in class when we discuss iMuse.  The great thing about these videos is that its much simpler and clearer to hear how they're working in some cases than it is to describe exactly what's happening in words.

We also had a superb Skype chat on Thursday with Aaron Marks.  When we have in-class Skype sessions, I pass out index cards to take attendance and ask the students to write a brief thought/reaction to the conversation also.  Often, I get creative doodles on the notecards as well and one student's drawing of the Skype session with Aaron was too amazing not to share with the world.  Talented artist!

Finally, I thought I'd share one other list.  Because we'd been speaking with Chance Thomas two weeks ago and Aaron Marks last week, the theme of this week's online discussion was to get familiar with a game audio composer of the students' choice.  I suggested that they research one of their favorite games and learn a bit about who created the music/sound for the game.  (As I think about it, I'm probably also a bit motivated for this line of thinking as I continue to watch the Diggin' in the Carts series about Japanese video game composers.)  I learned several things from their choices, some about composers I thought I knew well-- for instance, I didn't know that Nobuo Uematsu was an English major (What Do You Do with a BA in English?!)-- and I also learned about several composers and foreign games I'd never heard of.  Cool people and games to get more familiar with!

If you read much of my blog, you know I love lists, so I present below the list of "favorite game composers" from my Fall 2014 video game music students.  There was a fair amount of overlap, so there are fewer composers than I have students!

Austin Wintory
Ari Pulkkinen
Grant Kirkhope
Gustavo Santaolalla
Harry Gregson Williams
Masaya Matsuura
Masafumi Takada
Junichi Masuda
Motoi Sakuraba
Yuka Tsujiyoko
Simon Viklund
Jesper Kyd
Christopher Tin
Jun Maeda
Yoko Shimomura
Daisuke Ishiwatari
Koji Kondo
Brian Trifon
Darren Korb
Jun Senoue
Kevin Manthei
Kan Gao
Robyn Miller
Jeremy Soule
Garry Schyman
Joe Hisaishi
Greg Edmonson
Kazumi Totaka
Yoko Shimomura
Ben Prunty
Magnus Birgersson
Jack Wall
Ryo Nagamatsu
Nobuo Uematsu
Daniel Rosenfeld
Steve Jablonsky
HirokazuTanaka
Setsuo Yamamoto
Jim Guthrie
Michael Land
Kow Otani
Kenta Nagata
Ron Fish
Marty O’Donnell
Mitsuo Terada
Carlo Castellano
Keiichi Suzuki
Christopher Lennertz
Glenn Stafford

Stewart Copeland

Behind the scenes: GameSoundCon 2014

I just registered today for GameSoundCon 2014.  Really looking forward to it!  I've been checking the website every week or so to see when the registration begins because the price is better the earlier one registers.  Since I won grant funding to attend, I want to make certain I can make the most of the money!  I'm particularly interested in some of the Wwise training sessions so that I can get a better idea of what kind of work is possible with audio integration software.

After traveling to an academic game music conference in January, I'm excited to see what an industry conference looks like in comparison.  I also recently noticed that the UK has a game music conference as well called Game Music Connect.  It looks to be fairly similar with composer discussions, panel sessions, and hands-on activities/training.  Awesome that this kind of game audio conference is springing up and is separate from something like GDC, although I'd love to do GDC sometime, particularly if they still have an audio track.

Although GameSoundCon is still months away, I'll definitely plan to be blogging from LA about the event.  Can't wait to dork out with all the game audio nerds!  Any of my readers planning to attend?

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.