GUY WHITMORE / Freelance Music Design and Beyond!

Abstract

Imagine being part of a freelance game music team that covers every inch of the production pipeline, from music direction, music design, composition and orchestration, to recording, editing, music integration, and scripting. A seamless coordinated effort with clear communication across disciplines and specialties. One that is prepared to adapt to tight schedules and the zigs and zags of the typical development process, yet one that doesn't shy away from rich adaptive music concepts and designs. In fact, the overarching goal of such a team would be to bring well designed, tightly integrated music scores to games in an efficient manner. This is the prescient dream of this lecture.

This lecture will take on 3 aspects of the pipeline that are not often outsourced; music design, music integration, and music scripting, describing how each can be successfully offered by freelance music teams. Wwise-Unreal adaptive music compositions will illustrate specific concepts and techniques.

Bio

Guy’s first game soundtrack, for Sierra On-line, was nominated for an AIAS/DICE award. At Monolith Productions he created innovative music scores for games such as Shogo, No One Lives Forever, and Tron 2.0.

As Director of Audio at Microsoft Game Studios he worked on major franchises including Fable, Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing, Crackdown, and Halo. At PopCap Games/EA he oversaw classic franchises Bejeweled, Peggle, and Plants vs. Zombies, earning 4 G.A.N.G. awards.

Recently, Guy launched Foxface Rabbitfish, LLC; an audio-music design company and has designed sound for Alien Descent VR, and the Xbox One UI.

ALISTAIR HIRST / Audio for The Grand Tour Game

Abstract

Amazon Games Audio Director Alistair Hirst and Technical Sound Designer Kevin Salchert will give a look behind the scenes into some of the challenges and creative solutions involved in making a game following a loosely-scripted TV show with weekly episodic releases. Topics covered will include adapting the pre-existing dialog from the show so it worked in context for the game, how they handled seamless transitions between gameplay and show footage, scripting audio for four player split-screen races, and working with a foreign TV production company on TV schedule deadlines.

Alistair Hirst & Kevin Salchert Bios

Alistair Hirst is a game industry veteran whose credits include Halo 2, Guild Wars, and more than 50 other games. During a 10 year career as Senior Audio Director at EA, he was on the launch team for the Need for Speed franchise. He co-founded independent game sound house OMNI Audio in 2002, whose clients included Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision, SOE, and many independent studios. He has been Audio Director at Amazon Games since 2013. He has credits as Audio Director, Composer, Sound Designer and Audio Programmer, and is uncredited as that dying guy screaming on many titles.

Kevin Salchert is a technical sound designer and composer specializing in adaptive/interactive audio systems. He holds advanced degrees in both music theory/composition and audio technology, with an emphasis in game audio. His credits span a wide variety of mediums, including video games, film, mobile apps, commercials, and slot machines. He also can provide a first-hand account of the results of not properly securing cables when recording military vehicles.

SALLY KELLAWAY / Hearing into the Future: Audio in XR

Abstract

Audio for XR (VR, AR and MR) presents a significant array of challenges and augmentations to the traditional requirements of sound designers working on linear and interactive media. The change in perspective and embodiment of the player, as well as the new technologies involved requires the employment of additional tools and consideration of object size, spacing, and spatial design as a more significant part of the sound design process. Focusing on the design considerations and processes required in these unique mediums, the content of this presentation is designed to give insight in to the complexity of designing for this new medium, and potential pipeline and work flow approaches for Designers to take action on.

Bio

Sally Kellaway is the Senior Audio Designer at Microsoft Mixed Reality at Work, where she is exploring the future of Spatial Audio in Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Enterprise applications. This intersection of technologies allows Sal to build new workflows and technology pipelines that leverage interactive and immersive audio technologies from audio post production, psycho-acoustics and game audio with the mission to discover how humans hear, experience and use audio as signals in Mixed Reality. Sal has a deep passion for communicating about the power of audio, and has spoken at conferences across the globe about her experience working across Game Audio, VR and Audio Hardware Development.

STAN LEPARD / Forays Into Non-Linear Music

Abstract

This talk will present three recent projects using non-linear music techniques. One was for live orchestra, one was built in Max (and adapted it to Max for Live for this presentation), and the third was a museum installation running on Ableton Live. Stan will discuss the goals and concepts as well as the nuts and bolts of each project.

Bio

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Stan LePard began studying piano and writing original music at the age of 15. Within three years, he was performing professionally on keyboards, saxophone, flute and occasionally vocals. During those early formative years, he performed many different styles of popular music, including funk, rock, pop, jazz, blues, salsa, reggae, country western and western swing.

He graduated in 1980 with a Bachelor of Music Composition degree from Eastern Washington University, and in 1984 with a Master of Music in Jazz Education degree from University of North Texas. After graduating, he continued to perform in and write songs for bands playing original music in the Dallas area while also becoming more active as a composer for broadcast media, film, corporate videos and museum installations. During this period, his interests began to focus more on technology-based music styles such as techno, industrial dance music and hip hop.

In 1994, he moved to Seattle and began creating music for interactive media. He has since ridden the waves of several digital delivery platforms including CD-ROMs, websites targeting 56k modems, DVD-ROMs, game consoles and now mobile devices and web based Flash games. As production values in each cycle rise, he has gained considerable experience working with orchestras, choirs and other musicians. Stan has currently contributed music to over 300 interactive media products.

Stan continues to specialize in linear and adaptive music for interactive media while occasionally producing music for linear media. His music has been heard by millions of people in such diverse formats as video games, “edutainment” interactive media, software applications, operating system software, web sites and broadcast media.

He also frequently collaborates with other composers as a co-writer, an orchestrator and a co-producer of orchestral recording sessions.

Video game orchestrator and/or composer credits include: Destiny, Guild Wars 2, BattleTech, Peggle 2, Plants Vs. Zombies 2, Halo Reach, Halo 3 ODST, Halo 3, Halo 2, Toy Soldiers, Age of Empires III, CityVille 2, The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age, Peggle Nights and many others.