Uncorking this bottle sounded too good to not record. The sample's not as clean as I would have liked, but the sound itself is still really cool. And works well pitch shifted along Reason's NNXT Sampler. Results below.
Hi folks,
As you may know, I'm not the only one who received an IGDA scholarship to GDC 09, and the 25 of us have banded together to start a blog of our own. Game Developers Blog is basically just a sounding board for a variety of video game topics. As it stands, we scholars still have a lot to learn about games and the games industry... but I'm hoping in a few years it'll mature into something worthwhile. After all, these scholars are pretty talented in their respective areas of expertise.
My contributions to the blog will largely be related to audio, since I was the only music/audio scholar this year. Check it out if you're interested.
-Sarah
I just barely finished my remix in time to submit it to Twestival. You can see other user submissions on the website, and a lot of people simply put piano chords under Imogen's voice (which is legit; the vocals lend themselves well to that kind of treatment). Instead, I went for using only Imogen's voice, similar to Dialect. Toward the end I got a little lazy and didn't have time to turn her consonants into drum beats. I also added a sawtooth wave to the low drone for some extra heft, although the drone is in fact still Heap's voice.
While making the remix I realized that the vocal material was very rhythmic, and it was hard to edit that persistent 95bpm out of the samples. As a result, the piece is less ambient/cloud-like than I originally envisioned.
That's exactly what I did today in the studio. I found out that Ableton Live version 6 and higher has video capabilities. Since I only have Live 5 I had to do the assignment (which has been overdue for a while) in the studios at school. Sorry for the crappy video quality, I blame Live :)
As Steven Stucky has said in class, a composer is really only ever faced with 2 problems: coming up with musical material, and then finding a way to use that material for longer than 30 seconds. If you want to make a piece quickly, you're going to need to optimize both of these steps.
One way of generating material is algorithmically and that's exactly what I did for the opening. I chose one of Live's midi arpeggiator and a marimba because let's face it, when anyone thinks of mars there's marimba. Unless you're Gustav Holst, then you think of lots and lots of brass. Which is what I put in next. I also threw crazy space reverb on top since that (for once) seemed appropriate. This piece might be the most cliche thing I've ever written :)
There's no actual melody to this piece, so it might sound a little empty. But it's the background music to the action anyway, so I think it does just fine. Also I didn't plan this but the intensity of the piece comes once the rover has already deployed its chute. Gives the video sort of a different interpretation (since normally I'd associate entering the atmosphere as the height of intensity).
(The Moscone North Ballroom right before Iwata's keynote)
Here's a list of all the GDC lectures I went to, along with a 2 sentence commentary. What a great experience! More of my thoughts in later posts...
Discovering New Development Opportunities, Satoru Iwata
Tried to give 3rd party developers ideas and incentives to develop for Nintendo hardware. I wasn't aware that there are almost as many wii balance boards in homes as there are ps3's. I got a free DS game out of it, "Rhythm Heaven". Haven't played it yet.
From Bungie to Bootstrapping: Starting an Independent Developer Studio, Max Hoberman
Gave some tips on how to bootstrap using the work-for-hire model. Basically enumerated sound business practices... no surprises.
The Art of Braid, David Hellman
Put heavy emphasis on integrating the meaning of Braid into its art assets. Showed several iterations that the art went through to get to the final stage (apparently they worked on art for 2 whole years?!?). Artwork cut into various shapes and sizes was placed on top of collision tiles. They also made extensive use of particle effects.
Procedural Speech Generation, Paul Taylor
Excellent presentation on speech synthesis using voice morphing, text-to-speech, and everything inbetween. I really believe that procedurally generating speech allows for more dynamic and immersive gameplay.
Using Musical Styles to Enhance Storytelling, Lennie Moore and Garry Schyman
Advised that when asked to write music in a particular style, the best thing you can do is listen to as much of that style as possible.
Experiences and Rare Insights into the Video Game Music Industry, Hitoshi Sakimoto
Sakimoto reminises about what it was like to program game music back in the day, and encourages composers to write from the heart. Most people seemed to agree the talk was poorly translated.
10 Great Things Game Designers Exhibit, Gordon Walton
This week I'm attending the Game Developer's Conference. If you're going too, make sure to add me on myGDC. If you're not going, I'll be tweeting/blogging about it most of the week anyhow.
As part of my preparation for the conference, I started a tumblr which has my most recent projects on it. You can check it out at http://anaudioportfolio.tumblr.com
I was expecting to learn how to write fugues and sonatas in my composition class, which is not at all what we're doing. Instead we're learning about the more abstract processes that make up a composition. Also, I don't think I mentioned this last time, but our professor is Steven Stucky, who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
My last project, Oscilloscopes, was a foray into algorithmic composition. Essentially, the repeating statement is made of scale degrees taken from the Fibonacci sequence.
For the second part of class, we focused on the juxtposition between tonality and atonality. We looked at a lot of composers, specifically a lot of Stravinski, and found that they often employ bitonality. The second assignment follows suit (I apologize in advance for the poor recording quality of the tracks below):
