This is officially the first post on my blog. Never mind the fact that it’s still using a generic theme template. It will look cooler later–gotta focus on the content! Anyway, the purpose of this blog will be to write about music and sound design for games and projects I’m working on, as well as general pondering about music, sound, and game design. So to begin, I’d like to share with you what I’ve been working on in general.
Currently, I’m awaiting a response from a graphic designer for a logo for my portfolio site, which you’ll find at Bartnett.com in the near future. What you’ll find there now is a Mixpod playlist of some music I’ve written. Unfortunately there’s some songs on there that I feel could be improved, so to remedy that I’m working on a couple different portfolio tracks to add in. Tackling one or two of these at a time seems to be a good balance for me, provided I don’t have a midterm coming up or anything. Hopefully in a month I’ll have the two new tracks produced as well as a web site on which to showcase them.
Also, I went to the 127th Audio Engineering Society Convention and had a blast. Game Audio had its own track this year, and the tutorials and panels were incredibly helpful and informative. Scott Selfon from Microsoft made some compelling presentations about how to take the implementation of audio in games to the next level. He cited Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter’s wind system as an intriguing example of audio being a driving system in the game rather than say the visuals or physics engine. The wind effects were initially developed as audio-only–that is, based on environmental variables and a little random variation this wind system would generate wind sounds at an appropriate intensity and from an appropriate direction. Later when they wanted to have the wind blow things around on the ground like tumble weeds or tin cans, the system that rolled the cans around actually read the intensity and direction of the wind from the audio system, and used that to calculate how to blow things around in the game world.
Another great presentation was given by Richard Stevens, who has created this fantastic Game Audio Tutorial within the Unreal Tournament 3 engine. You can download it from his blog. Another panel I found invaluable was a demonstration of interactive music in action by Tom Salta,of Red Steel and Tom Clancy series fame, and Paul Lipson, the head of Pyramind Studios. Tom Salta showcased his work from Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., and Paul Lipson gave an amazing demonstration of constructing interactive music within FMOD. What was interesting is he started with a very dense string of material within FMOD’s interactive music designer, then radically scaled down the footprint using FMOD’s sound effects designer and an 8-channel WAV file, and then to keep the same reduced footprint, restructured the loops and arranged them into the interactive music designer again. I’m honestly tempted after college to just go to San Francisco and spend a few months at Pyramind’s training program absorbing as much information as I possibly can from this guy and his army of master engineers and musicians.
The last bit I’d like to talk about is what I’ve been doing at NYU. Basically, NYU has one of the best film scoring departments, but nothing for game scoring yet. Don’t take that as a knock against NYU, the only other major college that has a game scoring curriculum is Berklee College of Music, and that only happened after students started up a Video Game Music Club to raise awareness about how awesome game music is. I’ve been talking with Professor Sam Howard-Spink from the Music Business program in the music department at NYU, and he’s agreed to be the faculty sponsor for a game music club for NYU. So, I’ve been talking with our program directors in the composition program as well as music technology. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to find some time to talk to the film scoring directory, Dr. Ron Sadoff. I’d love to get a game music club going at NYU, not only would it be fun to do a game music orchestra, but I really see an opportunity for NYU to make a big leap forward in educating its music students for future careers. Interactivity is the way of the future, and it presents some fundamentally different problems in contrast to linear media. Also, I’m hoping to collaborate with students from the Computer Science department as well as the ITP program at Tisch. I’ve already met one motivated ITP student at a Tisch Game Center event last week. Exciting things are happening for games at NYU!
In the meantime I’m also exploring some tools to use for developing a game. Or, at the very least, a small section of a game with which I can demonstrate my music composition and integration, and sound design and implementation skills. After I’ve played around a little bit more I’ll post my findings.
Tags: aes convention, audio engineering society, education, game audio, interactive, Music, paul lipson, portfolio, scott selfon, tom salta