From Trumpets to Transients: A Composer's Guide to Sound Design

Good afternoon. Welcome. Um my name is Penka and um I'm a freelance composer for mobile and VR games and films. In the past I've also had um co-composing credits and additional composer for some of these nice games and um I wanted to share with you the findings of the annual game audio survey for 2017 sponsored by the Game Audio Network Guild and GameSoundCon. We're very grateful to Brian Schmidt for doing these amazing um surveys. Um 72% of the game composers also create sound effects. 50% of all game composers also provide audio integration. So, this is my message to all emerging composers in the audience and I mean this from my heart. Learn sound design to expand your job possibilities. Also, learn sound design to improve your own skills and craft as a composer for games.

Um having sound design skills makes you a more valuable collaborator to game developers. You could get in-house jobs and build a career more organically starting out as a sound designer for a game company and then gradually composing as well. Many sound designers have a full staff full-time staff positions. On another hand, most composers uh are freelancers unless they're also sound designers. So, um I I started out as a composer so I learned all of this. Each game has many people working on the sound. Some may work on weapons, vehicles, combat, or Foley. Others may work on ambiences, dialogue editing, implementation. It's common for a game company to have a few staff audio specialists and also farm out other audio tasks to freelancers. Most indie games use only one composer. The composer is brought in for a few months at the end or the last few months of the development cycle. Um I wanted to tell you a joke from the

old world. Um son uh father a son asks a father asks his son, "What are you going to become when you grow up?" And the the son answers, "I'm going to become a doctor." And the father says, "Become a dentist. People have 32 teeth and only one heart." So, um most opportunities for emerging composers are in a mobile and casual field where having all audio skills, music, sound design, voiceover, editing, audio middleware, and implementation could help you land a great job. This is why I encourage all of you to consider this path. Um another crucial reason to learn sound design is this. Learning sound design improves your own craft and skills as a composer. So, this is I'm speaking from my personal experience. As a composer working on fantasy content where music, sound design, and voiceover always dovetail and always mesh together, it makes you a better game composer to really know how to create diegetic and ambient sound design cuz it's all

frequencies and it all comes through the ears. By learning sound design, you learn how to compose around the frequencies of diegetic sound and tonal ambiences. You practice scoring hits and jump scares in horror or genre titles without the music smearing what the sound design is already doing. Um on another hand, the music is going to soar in a theme, the menu, um the boss battles obviously, and action cinematics without dialogue. Um it was a real epiphany for me. I learned this from my developer friends. Game developers approach the hierarchy of audio like this. The voicing voiceover is primary cuz it tells the story. Diegetic sound effects or sound effects directly related to what's visible on the screen are secondary. Emotional sound design, this is kind of a loose term, is the non-diegetic such as drones, ambiences, which is anything that makes you feel something, is also secondary. And music, the diegetic music the non-diegetic music is tertiary.

So, um in summary, I wanted you I wanted you'll get staff jobs in game audio in game studio as a sound designer and implementer first and later as a composer. Uh and also deep understanding of the sound in games makes you definitely a greater game composer. I wanted to briefly discuss one of my composing assignments. I scored this Mummy VR game that um is an arcade game and um it's a shooter with zombies. Uh genre projects always have a very elaborate By genre projects I mean horror, science fiction, fantasy, which I love and adore. So, these projects always have a very elaborate soundscape. You have monster roars, you have fantasy creatures voices, death, sound of imaginary lands, interiors, dungeons, and so on. So, when scoring horror, I learned the hard way to very carefully select the frequencies, timbres, instruments, and density of my music. The Mummy VR is an 8-minute um experience. It had helicopter diegetic

sound for the first 4 minutes throughout. Then a continued barrage of machine gun sound effects for the next 4 minutes. Uh the game had a continuous voiceover from for all the 8 minutes. And my job as a composer was to figure out a musical solution that would dovetail with all sound design and the voiceover. And I rescored the game twice because my first approach failed. It was too busy and too noisy and too orchestral. So, my second approach was iconic sound for the characters which was special forces and zombies and um iconic sound for the genre. And by iconic I mean a basic like a basic signifier that instantly will telegraph to you what the character who the character the characters are. So, the second big challenge in VR is that all the sound comes directly from headphones and usually they're crappy headphones in your brain. Um in our case, these are conventional headphones. So, the music needs to convey the emotions in a simple arrangement that's not too busy, not too complicated, and won't burn your ears. So, this is how I

approached um the special forces without melody and with minimal chord changes uh with electronic arrangement that we associate with like the special forces. So, I'm going to play um the first half Well, there's no video. You'll see the still image and you'll hear the music also dubbed with the sound design and voiceover. All strike team personnel report to me. Target has been spotted. Read done. Take a 170. This is 42. No, DG in command. Ready gunner. Okay, light them up. Hey, take a look down below. See if someone can launch us to keep you covered. Let me get that. Subject has been neutralized. Great shot.

Mounting the offensive. You stay put. And um the second half of the game was um shooting at zombies and a lot of creatures, a lot of noise. This is just a still image and I'll play you just a little bit of um the second half of the game with the zombie shoot shooting.

Um because of the machine gun, I took out all percussion and really only had the pads and the brass and uh because otherwise it will compete and won't be good. I wish you much success in your careers. Good luck and enjoy the rest of panel. Thanks. Hi folks. Uh so, I'm next, Bonnie Bogovich. Uh my talk I have titled I have a particular set of skills, also known as how to be yourself and embrace your background. Um and first off I wanted to say that I I was inspired to take this twist on my micro talk based on the results of being part of a panel that was in 2016 titled Everyone at this conference is a fraud. Uh it was me, Stefan Schutze, Laura Karpman, Varun Nair, Austin Wintory, and DB Cooper. And it It really inspiring to be on a panel of so many experts in the field who I personally admire and to hear that they also had um fears about

not being prepared for the industry that they're currently working in and the things that they encountered getting into the industry and how to conquer them. So, I wanted to put a particular twist on it and first off I kind of want to just quickly get a raise of hands uh who here in the audience came from a non-direct to game path or um had a completely different career before going into the industry, something not game-related. Awesome. That's what I was hoping for. So, either if you're coming from a different industry and hopping in or you're or you're completely uh new to games and you're trying to figure out how you can fit into this wacky world. Um you know, well under a normal scenario that many of us have gone to, you go to LinkedIn or you hear about a job posting from someone and they're they're told, "Oh yeah, you'd be perfect for this game opening. Please go to it, check it out." And you're like, "Sure, how bad could this be?" And you click on the apply now or the web link and you start to read all these

descriptions for crazy job titles and departmental needs and must have 14 AAA products and must know whys and all these other words are flashing at you and suddenly you're like, "Oh my god, I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't have 14 titles under my belt. I didn't go to a school for a degree in game audio. For most of us, like in my age group or or older, there weren't game audio degrees. Heck, there sometimes weren't even music tech degrees when we were to school. So, it's like what do you do when you're told like, "Yes, this is the field you want to go to, but you don't have a direct path." And I want to just assure a lot of you that especially those of you who have succeeded in hopping into the industry not straight from a game path in the beginning. Just first, keep calm, take a deep breath, know you're not alone and I I feel like many of us uh like to say that everything we learn especially bizarro quotes, we all learn from the movies of things to live by and I find Liam Neeson is a really good example because we've all heard this quote like,

"I have a very particular set of skills." Right? From Taken and that's my bad impression. Um and and I want to like remind all of us that we all have very unique sets of skills and we gather these skills through life and through all of the different experiences we have and often we forget that those skills can apply to dream jobs that we have or jobs that we don't even know exist yet. So, whenever you look at these giant lists of skills that are demanded for a job especially wacky new careers in the game industry, it's like how do I gather all of these techniques? How do I gather this experience? And you may be gathering it right now and you don't even know it. You just need to start to learn to rethink your brain process and know that you learn something every day if you pay attention. And you learn by doing and often I think we forget this especially when we're not kids anymore. We forget that we're all constantly learning. And we learn it from every aspect of of the day, every job we've ever had, every

mentor, every experience. Personally, before I worked in games, uh I had many different jobs. I came from I was a follow spot operator, boom operator for a while. I've I'm a course junkie. I know a lot of people uh around GDC actually are. Uh singer and musician, stage manager, teaching assistant, I've done multimedia, I do puppetry and I can assure you that I I use skills from every single one of these jobs every day in my current career in game audio. And you may think, "Oh god, that is crazy." Cuz how do any of these relate to games? Um those of you in the audience who may have come from stage, you're like, "Well, this is obvious." For those of you who are not, I'm going to analyze one of my biggest career patterns before I worked in games which was a 10-year sprint working as a touring stage manager in Pittsburgh for opera companies, ballet and a bunch of uh modern art installations. And while working as a stage manager, I acquired many different types of skills that I realized later when I eventually got in the game industry were actually

valid. So, I'm going to analyze two different sets of skills. Uh for those unfamiliar, there are hard skills and soft skills that you acquire. Hard skills are practical knowledge you learn hands-on, uh software, um handling rigging, things that actually were hard skills that I worked on in theater that I use in games where I learned a ton about software, spreadsheet management, organization. Uh whenever you're working as a touring stage manager, you have to manage uh actors' calendars and rehearsal calendars. Anyone who works in freelance as a game audio person, sometimes you have oh, what? 700 color-coded calendars going at the same time with different deadlines. Uh you learn about playtesting when you work in theater because you do uh rehearsals and you try out stuff in front of audiences and in games you do that a lot, too. Um I learned a lot about working in different departments and software because I worked with some theater companies that had multimedia projection systems. And my knowledge of things that I learned through them prepared me for working uh side by side as an audio person with

graphic people in the game industry. So, those are some examples of like actual software-based technical things. But one of the most important types of skills you can get that people often forget whenever they're trying to look at a career in games is soft skills. And whenever I say soft, I mean personal skills, ways to deal with people, emotions. Uh a big word that floats around this conference is stress, burning out. Um learning, you know, how to say no whenever a task is impossible or not being afraid to to admit whenever you need help. Theater can be really stressful for anyone who's been on the tech or acting side and sometimes when you're on a game project and there's crunch, uh one of your teammates might start exploding or maybe they're just low on sugar and you need to have that sense in your brain in a meeting to be be nice and offer them a cookie and suddenly that saves the game. But these are skills that you know, you can read about, you can see online, but the only way to really learn a soft skill is to work a job, work as a barista, work in

theater, work as an as an educator. Teachers deal with stress often. I mean, my god, they're saints. But uh again, stage management taught me all these things and I carried them through whenever I was in-house. Now, you may think to yourself, "Okay, so you get into this mindset, you analyze every type of job you've ever had." I had what? 14 jobs, right? Cuz freelance is insane. It's like, "Oh my god, so I have 7 million skills. I can do all the things. What can possibly go wrong if you say yes to every possible opportunity that comes up no matter how little it pays." And obviously burnout is a problem. So, you should learn that even though you have you are now able to analyze your life and that you have these skills and you can take on stuff like maybe you're really good at handling people and making them not fight with each other and stress and managing balancing calendars and schedules. And you become that person that everybody wants to balance their balance their calendars and schedules. It's good to not take on everything. And after you've analyzed all the skills you have, learn how to narrow it down and actually

admit what you don't want to do anymore. So, even though I praise in front of when I talk to kids or I I go and speak in front of crowds and I say stage management, I still feel gave me the most skills I use in games, I never want to be a stage manager again cuz it burned me out too many times. If you're lucky, especially on tour, you sleep. Some people are nodding. They've been in stage tech. You sleep 3 hours a night, you're the last person to leave the theater, you're the first person in, everything's always your fault. So, you know, that's life. And I know I'm really good at my job. I worked a long time because people knew I could handle it, but I knew that health-wise, it wasn't for me. But hey, it's okay to acknowledge that I don't like burning out and sleeping 3 hours a night isn't my thing. And maybe someone else is really good at not ever getting a good night's sleep. So, I'm happy now that I know how that job works to pass on stuff to other people, but keep the parts that I really, you know, learned from and apply them in other places. Again, please always remember especially in game jobs, if you're looking at

different companies you want to work at and you learned that through working these other experiences, you don't like working 80 hours a week or you do like having a family life, it's okay to say no to jobs where you know that that industry or that um lifestyle of the of the community that works there, they like to burn people out, just don't don't apply there. Look for companies that actually value taking care of their employees. And uh long story short, never forget where you came from. Every job is valid, every experience is valid. You never know what you're going to learn from something until you do it and you don't have to stick with it if you don't like it. But always cherish where you came from and find some way to use that towards a future job. Um never stop learning. Life never stops teaching you. And always remember Liam Neeson in your brain. Whenever you're looking at any job post and it lists all those crazy skills and a lot of them are really crazy words that you don't know what the heck's going on, remind yourself that you have your own unique very special set of skills and it's up to you how you apply them.

So, always be yourself, guys. Unless you can be Batman and then be Batman. Thank you. Uh hello. Uh my name is John Albert Matz and I'm going to talk about music and sound, a match made in Slack. Not endorsed by Slack. So, here's a thesis statement for you. Sound design and music are two parts of a whole and as such we need to approach them holistically. Now, for some projects, the audio team's eyes is one. Now, if that's you, congratulations, you control everything. Good luck with that. On the other hand, if you're working as part of an audio team, uh you can specialize, right? As a composer or sound designer, etc. You don't have to worry about what anyone else is doing. You only have your one little worry to worry world worry about and it's just great. Oh no, wait. No, heck, that's not how it works at all cuz everything you do has an effect on someone else's work. So how do we communicate?

If you're like me, you're winning right now, but that was the goal. Anyway, so how do we communicate, right? First a word about remote work versus in-house work. There's a bit of difference. If you're in-house, you're very lucky. You want to get to be in the same area as your team, but you need to make sure you do everything as Burr put it to be in the room where it happens. All right, so proximity and visibility are key. Put your workstation in the midst of the development team. Invest in good monitor headphones. Make sure you find opportunities to share your works in progress out loud when you reach milestones. You want to make audio feel like it's part of the larger picture rather than something that's siloed off in a backroom somewhere and isolated element. Go to the meetings even if they don't have specifically things to do with audio and even if they're outside your normal

area of expertise. Be part of the team. Now if you're not fortunate enough to be in the same building as the rest of your team, you need to find a way to communicate. Something a solution that works to clearly show where you are on a project, that show where everyone's working on and should easily share works in progress, questions, insights, etc. And allows for quick and clear feedback on those works in progress. And something ideally that fosters a sense of community within the within the team. Now I have used everything from Slack to Discord to Skype to Facebook Messenger to communicate with my teams and find that being able to pose a question and share something I'm working on and get feedback right away without having to worry about a broken email chain or something like that is super super valuable. It helps me to feel like you are in the same room with the people. No matter what your technical solution is for communication though, it needs to be able to accomplish those goals. So communication techniques aside, what do

you actually say? Every discipline in game development has unique language. Most of my experience comes from indie teams where you are one person or two people on an audio team working with like four or five other people. Now you don't need to know everything about a language to communicate with them. There are hundreds of terms unique to every language and discipline, but understanding the basics can help you and help form a effective bridge from one discipline to another. Knowing basic terminology or the structural logic behind a discipline will help make you more valuable to the team and help make your own ideas come across much more clearly. So couple examples. These are gross generalizations, but programmers tend to really like logical arguments and or randomization sequences. If this then that. If it's a complicated idea, but you can express it in a flowchart, they're going to love you. Maybe not this flowchart, but still.

Now artists on the other hand, again gross generalization, but they tend to understand color and emotion and intent. Same with writers. All right, a plethora of things that can be ample fodder for your creative mind either in music or sound effects fields. All right, these are things that can inspire you and give you an idea of where things are going to go even before there's something in the game. They're also the only people you can legitimately ask to make something more purple. Sound and music share common language. So if you're a sound designer or composer, that's great. You can pretty much talk with them naturally, but sometimes you have to decipher the accent. So things like frequencies, compression, EQ, audio mix, ducking, dissonance, etc. etc. etc. These are things that you're going to have in common with your sound designer or your composer. All right, and you can use them to describe things pretty effectively. If you don't understand a term or a term in this context, ask, learn. Remember that everyone on the team wants to produce the best possible work of art. So it's always better to clarify and add to your knowledge rather than assume and smile and nod your way

through a conversation. I know that may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised. So sound and music working in concert. Music and sound both come out of the same speakers and go into the same receiver. Human ear, right? So picture this. You need to make sure you communicate your intense clearly. Leave room for each other's work as appropriate. Here's an example. You're writing a vital cue for a key moment in a game. As the hero looks up at their goal so very far away, we hear this plaintive horn theme. It's quoting the theme of her her quest, the theme you painstakingly stitched into the prophecy cutscene at the start of the game. She's come so far and through so many trials to reach this point and she's never been more alone or more determined. Now your sound designer looks at this scene and says, "Oh, this is super lonely. You're on the top of this hill. There's a lot of wind. Want to just like feel make you feel isolated.

We'll do this. Now remember, everything you do has an effect on someone else's work. Both approaches are valid, but some communication would have saved us from this. I won't subject you to that anymore. There's only so much space in the audio spectrum at any given point as was mentioned earlier. Right? Sound effects and music need to be especially considerate of each other's requirements. Gameplay in the end is king and sound effects frequently provides vital player feedback. So you always want to take into consideration the likely sound design of a scene before you score it. Now Penka touched on this earlier with mummy. All right, but also last year Will Roget was talking about stripping out percussion elements for his Call of Duty World War score leaving it with just like brass and strings and woodwinds so that that left space for explosions and gunfire and other stuff. You want to make sure in addition that the sounds you're using don't clash with the music that'll be heard alongside. So just like you want to make sure the music isn't getting in the sounds, vice

versa. The sound you know so if say your sound has a pitched element to it, you want to make sure that it's in a compatible key with the music it's going to be heard alongside. You don't want to take up huge swaths of the audio spectrum with it unless the score is not doing anything so that it won't interfere. Complement, don't compete. That's a little cue from a game I worked on called Fossil Echo. In Fossil Echo we had two possible ways your character could die. You could be shot or you could fall to your death. When you fell and didn't die, we got a good body thump kind of impact, but he brushes it, gets up, brushes himself off and goes on. When you die in another way, you get this hit. Early on we had a body impact sound and this hit and that was a bad move, but the musical hit proves much more effective to tell you that like hey, that's the end for you. Sorry kid. Anyway, what about musical sound design? Good communication can help you find and capitalize capitalize on these opportunities. Even as a composer working with a sound designer,

sometimes musical sound design elements can be a vital aspect of a game's overall sound design and help tie the score and sound together in a holistic way. Here are a few examples here. So in For the King, when enemies pop up on the map, we get these little horn stings. Now our sound designer was struggling to find well he basically immediately realized that there really was no good sound effect for these things. It should be a musical element and so I used some of the instruments and tamers that I'd used in the score to kind of cue these things in. Same thing with rolling dice in this game. Rather than actual dice sounds, we used little drum and percussion sounds. All right, to further kind of cement the idea that this is a sort of a collaborative musical thing. In addition, we had a whole class of characters that were minstrels and bards and they played lutes and other things to cast magic spells. And so we wanted to make sure that when we were in a battle, you were using these instruments

and the sounds that we would have coming out of their various accoutrement would mesh with the key of the combat music. All right? Most of the time. Anyway, so in conclusion, ask questions. Stay in the room where it happens either physically or digitally. Find a way to do that. Stay connected to the rest of the team's development progress and process and let them know that you what you are doing as well. Hopefully, I've impressed upon you the importance of good communication with your audio team and within the larger development ecosystem. Asking questions, knowing what everyone else is creating and being able to get and give feedback are vital to a unified project. I hope you all have productive communicative teams going forward. Thank you very much. Hello everybody. Hope you guys are having a great GDC. I want to start this presentation by apologizing in advance cuz I am not the

best presenter. Emanuel, I don't know what you were thinking, but here I am. So never again. I'm kidding. So my name is Erica Escamez and I am from Monterrey, Mexico. I live here in the city though and I work I'm the audio director and lead sound designer for Echtra Games. We work on a project called Torchlight Frontiers. Like many of you here I'm I'm assuming how many of you are composers? Raise a hand. All right. All right. Cool. Cool. And how many of you have done sound design with your composing before? All right, pretty pretty much the same. Cool. Awesome. So like many of you, I have a music background. I went to Berklee College of Music, the the music whatnot, the impressive one from California. Um and uh when I graduated, I had no idea that sound design was even an option for me. I didn't even know what it meant. Uh but believe me when I say that being a

composer can only make you a better sound designer. Um almost everything will be covered by the amazing speakers and the amazing presentations they have. Um but uh I'm just going to jump in and go through this and uh and let you know what I think you need to do to think like a sound designer if this is your first time trying it out. Where's the mouse? Oh, there it is. Okay. Um first thing, the strategy for um it is not enough um to just be able to create something cool. How can you take it to the next level? To have like a dynamic mix um then showcase what's really important and what really means something to the player. And for that, we need to think outside of the box. Second, coming up with the questions and not the answers on how to make a simple composition that loops, for example, into something dynamic that conveys information to the player is

what will set you apart. Having the ability and thought process to use your composition to do this is what differentiates a composer from a sound designer. Also, I'm sorry for my accent. Um not just composing the cue is enough. But saying, "Hey, so you need a 2-minute piece of music for the gloomy dark pond. Well, how about I can give you a 6-minute piece without actually going through over 2 minutes of content and all the programmers will love you because you'll save a bunch of memory from streaming and all that." So, um that those are the kinds of things that you want to be or the kind of way that you want to be thinking about. Um in our game, specifically, everything is changing all the time and Matt Oman, our composer, basically delivered me a 4-minute song and after 20 minutes of playing, I've heard the same motif five times and I already know it by heart. So, I said, "How can we fix it so it's every time the the timeline is going through change changes a little bit. It changes it's different every time." How

how can we use this to our musical advantage to convey the information that we need and vice versa? How can we use the information that we want to convey in a musical way? And I have a note that says next slide. So, come up with the questions and not the answers. Here are some examples of questions uh you can ask yourself while you are composing. How many invi- How many enemies are on screen? How far are they from my player? How many other players are around? How difficult is the enemy? What's the environment like? Um Uh just is there more a monster skill happening? Am I using a special skill? Is there a UI hazard monster doing skill status and monster and you can go on and on and on, man, like with so many questions. Why did I put so many? Um So, yeah, final questions, questions, not answers. How does the music change based on all these factors in a non-linear environment? Next slide.

Using music as a sound of skill as a sound skill in your Music Using music as a sound design skill in your game thought process. I need to communicate all of the above questions, all of the above questions. And what what other way to do that than using music to communicate how much danger the player, you the player or me the player, are in. So, the first thing we did is I sat down with Matt Oman and I came up with a way to write up music in a Well, we came up with a way to write the music in a different way, not in a linear way. And with the instead of crazy creating music in one big loop, we decided that we were going to create the music in four bar variations. Imagine thousands upon thousands of four bar motifs and hits coming together in a puzzle-like way to make a song. And then once we put those songs to together, 2 minutes long or 4 minutes long, however the the piece is,

uh we wanted these instruments to change the intensity and drama of the game as the game of as the game drama increases or decreases. So, the result is the mix within our 2-minute piece would change dynamically and it will never be the same. I will show you how we did this in a second after I explain the next part. So, then I said that I couldn't do this by myself, obviously. We came up with the idea and we sat down with Guy, who's right here, who is an amazing our lead programmer, audio programmer, programmer extraordinaire. He says he does not restructure the universe when he codes, but I swear he does. And um we told him what we wanted to do with with this new music system. And the way we came up with this is How do we communicate how much drama is happening at once by assigning things within the world a drama value, which then drives the code to set the instance as low intensity, medium intensity, and high intensity. Next slide.

The result, flexible music. Uh flexible dynamic music. The music should change if the tension increases, if the drama increases. Uh for example, the drums should rise if the enemy is diff- is particularly difficult by assigning a higher drama value to that enemy. Um and if you're just cruising, then the intensity of the music should be low. It should be calm. It should just fill your space. And the most important thing, it should not interfere with the sound effects or skills of the player. Um which is something they they've already talked talked about. It should be cohesive. So, instead of having a sound effect that would say, "Hey, here comes a big enemy." the music is the one that triggers you. The music is the one that says, "Oh, I am in this amount of danger." Hit escape. And then tab. It's already up. Oh, there it is. Cool. So, this is one of our music sessions. We have a couple beds here

just to make it easier. But to give you an example of toms. Here we go. These toms, there is 1 2 3 4 variations. This is FMOD, by the way, for those of you who not know it's a great tool. Um each tom is different one from another. You get the idea, right? And if we solo this, every time the time that goes through here, it will pick a new one. Wow. Uh no, I'll show you in a second. Oh, yeah, yeah. Cool. I got to turn this up and this mouse not There we go. Hey, just picked on a different one. And so on. So, every time the timeline goes there, it randomly picks one. Or we can

choose if we want like a priority on on a certain one. Um so, that's the way the variations were working. And if you can see here, we have it with the toms, we have it with the hi-hat, we have it with fuzz 16th bass notes, the crash symbols, the high uh crash high only, a kit, etc. etc. Shakers, blah blah blah. Okay, cool. And so, then we had the the system where basically it grabs all the drama values. So, say 0 to 10. If the game says it's 0 to 10 intensity, then play low uh intensity. If it's 10 to 20, play medium. If it's 20 to 30, play high. So, I'm just going to show you a little bit how that would work. Um basically what the engine would be doing uh if that was the case.

We're on low intensity. This is for a creepy bug world, by the way. And here come a couple monsters. And then here comes a champion. And it just stays there until you're done killing it. We'll go back to medium. Cuz you still have a couple other enemies. You're done with them, you go back down. And that is it. Now, to congratulate myself for getting through this without having a heart attack, I'm going to have a milkshake.

Thank you. I'm good. All right. Hi. Uh I'm Matthew Martinson. I don't have a very great title. Um So, this is me. If you don't know, I'm Matthew Martinson, like I just said. I think I always repeat that twice. I don't know why. I'm a sound designer at Klei Entertainment. I've been doing game audio for 16 years. I also do the games uh Beards, Cats, and Indie Game Audio podcast that some of you might know of. I'm not sure. Uh I'm a sound designer, not a composer. So, I'm coming from that end of things. Um bear with me. Usually, I'm overly verbose about just about everything. So, 7 minutes is a challenge, but we're going to try and speed run this. So, you want to get into sound effects. Um right away, lots of people are going to tell you that you need to spend a lot of money. Um I've always had a problem with that and in the long run doing sound design is going to take a lot of investment on your part. But when you're

starting out, when you're just trying this to see if you even enjoy doing this part of it, now you don't need to do that. Um I'm going to make a few assumptions here that you're a composer, you have a computer, a DAW, an interface, some sort of monitoring, your usual suite of plugins that comes with that. Um and if that's what you've got, you don't need much more than that to start out. Um a thing to note that the fanciest tools that you see a lot of sound designers talk about and throw around that they use all the time are really about speeding up workflows. Uh when you're starting out, you don't know how you're going to work yet. Um so, don't worry about the special stuff until you actually know what your workflows might be like and then you know which ones you want to speed up. Um So, what do you need to make sound effects? You need a DAW. You already got that. You need some sounds to layer with and a way to record things. Don't feel that you need to change the DAW you're using to make music uh because you're now doing sound effects and it's different. Uh some might be better in certain ways once you know what you're

doing, but you're better off sticking with something you already know because you're not don't want to learn two skills at once. You can use Pro Tools, Reaper, Cubase, Logic, Live, Fruity Loops, whatever. Whatever you use now, keep doing that for sound effects. Um sounds can come from libraries and your own recordings. Um that as long as you do this, it's always comes from those. Uh lots of sound effects providers will give small free packages of sound effects that basically are the cost of an email, so you can start to build a library for free or next to nothing. Um there's also freesound.org uh but be careful, lots of sounds there need proper credit and then you need to keep track of that, which can add a workload that you might not want to do. I never want to do that. Um and you also have to sift through a lot of garbage to find the good stuff, so you can spend a lot of time trying to find something usable. Um and there's also always rumors of copyright infringing sounds have being uploaded there and you could get nailed for that infringement without even knowing it. Um a portable recorder

will be a really useful tool that you might not have that could be cool. Um even the really cheap ones from any of the reputable manufacturers will do just awesome, great job. Um don't worry about you got to spend thousands of dollars on that kind of stuff. Um and if you don't have that and don't want to spend that, your phone is a perfectly good recorder. Um there's YouTube channels devoted to making sound effects just from phone recordings. They will show you just you can do great results. Um it doesn't really matter. Uh if you wanted to record at home, you've already got a setup. You've got a DAW, that means you have an interface. All you Maybe all you need is a microphone then. Uh I found there's a $20 Chinese microphone that is like way better than it should be. Um buy that. Uh there's lots of slightly higher priced ones from reputable manufacturers that you can get into too. Anything on the low end really is quite good these days. Um but the and the great thing about cheap microphones is you can put them in really dangerous places. You get some really interesting sounds until you

get no sound at all. I totally haven't melted any microphones when recording things. Never happens. So, that said, always be recording. Um nothing is what it seems when you when you're when you're building sound effects. Uh so, it's all about reinterpreting sounds that you that from libraries and from recordings. Um this is great for starting out because you don't need to actually own any of the things you're making sounds for. You don't need to own a tank to make tank sounds. Um everything with arms within arms reach can become a source of new and interesting sounds to make things from. Uh think about bone breaking, it's always celery. We don't break bones for those sounds. Uh so, start taking things from around your house and putting them in front of a microphone. Shake the thing, hit the thing, rub it, hit it with something else. Do these things softly, do these things hard. Uh record them in all the different ways you possibly can. Listen how the sound changes when you do different actions. Listen for the elements of the sounds

that you can then use for something else. Uh recording sound effects is then like any other instrument. You need to practice at it. So, approach it with that mindset. It's a performance. You can get totally different things out of items when you use them in different ways. Um and just like any instrument with practice, you got to do a lot of it before you get good at it. So, you actually want to make some sounds. It's all about layers. You layer lots of different things together to make a new cohesive whole. This is the same way you would approach orchestrating a song. So, you've already got that skill set. Just think about making a sound effects like putting a band together. Um you layer all these different bits and you come up with something new. You build up the lows, the mids, and the highs, and you balance all these elements into this new thing. It's just the things are the body and the punch and the mechanics of the gunshot instead of the bass guitar drums of a rock band or the different sections of an orchestra. Um it's all the same

concept underlying it. So, your direct compositional orchestration skills will translate into making these sound effects. Middleware. That's the other big part of making sound effects. You might already do some of that as a composer. If you don't, um game info the implementation will definitely work into how your sound effects work into the game. You will need to skill up on this middleware and game engines at some point, but worry about that second. Don't take on too many things at once to to in embark on this new endeavor. Um you can do it one step at a time. So, learn to be an effective sound designer first, then become an implementer. Your implementation will become way better if you already have an understanding of sound design to go into it with. Um and once you have already to tackle that, just about all the major middleware programs are available out there for free. There's game engines that you can download for free as well. So, that's a like no cost thing to invest some time in and learn.

Uh so, there you go. You don't need to spend a lot of money if you want to get into this. Remember, you already know what you're doing. Your skills are transferable. Uh you want to record as much as you possibly can and don't worry about learning everything at once. Next. Hi. I'm Emmanuel Lagumbay, a freelance audio designer, and I'm here to tell you how you can has job. Is this you? I'm a composer. All I do is music. I love music. I love sound. It's great. And I'm like, "Hey, do you need a composer for your game?" I know, take my cards. I've got like plenty. I'm like a composer. I think it's actually like this this musical It's kind of like Star Wars, you know, it's awesome. It's a lot of fun.

Do you need a composer? Thank you. If it is you, can you not? So, anyway, who am I? I I'm a composer gone rogue. Sound effects are now my best friend. Uh I worked on VentureVerse uh or I I I worked on a game called VentureVerse. It's currently in early access. I've contracted for Torchlight Frontiers, though I think I might be fired after putting Erica through that. So, um I've also done uh sound effects for the VR experience Wonderfall: A Tale of Two Realms. And we're just going to get started with some basic numbers here before getting to the other details of how you can start getting your jobs as a your first gigs as a sound designer. So, according to that same survey that Pink referenced in the beginning of the chat, 50.8% of 464 audio professionals

said that they actually got work from referrals or networking. In other words, 50.8% of people are working because they showed up and said hi. So, congratulations, half of you will all have jobs somewhere down the road. Uh VentureVerse, Wonderfall, Miracle Mia, those are all games I actually got the sound design for uh because I actually knew the composers that were working on it or I was uh friends with a few people that didn't want to take on that work. Uh there's another one I I got to do where I had a friend who's actually sitting here, Andrew, uh who's out of the country and he called me. He said, "Hey, one of my deadlines got pushed back to like 2 days from now. Can you do the sound effects for me?" And I'm like, "Sure, man. Yeah, I got you. I'll get you covered." So, are you ready to be that person is part of the gig. Uh and I would much rather have six great relationships than $60,000 of sound libraries. While the libraries and friends can both comfort me as I cry myself to sleep, uh

the sound libraries won't directly buy me alcohol outside of the office. And yeah, sure, not everyone here gets jobs from other people. I get that. Some people have to talk to real people. Uh some tips regarding that, do not do what you saw in that video there. Leading with, "Do you need a composer?" makes us all look like really desperate and just kind of bad. Uh you will have plenty of time to talk about you and your craft in the future if the relationship is there to begin with. Also, please remember that people are hiring a person and not just a role. You can be an excellent designer, but you can be a complete ass and then no one wants to work with. So, people will remember that. Surprise. In the end, it's a numbers game. And like Pinca said, 72% of composers also do sound design. This means that everyone here is probably out to get you, which also probably means everyone out here is sometimes here to get you a job. We're all competing at different tiers at all times.

People may work on student projects when they're starting out, they may move to indie, then they move to mid-tier, and then eventually AAA. But, there's always backwards compatibility between the two. So, if you're a AAA composer, don't just consider yourself shoehorned into AAA. You could be doing other work for other things, too. Uh believe it or not, people in the industry often get too much work. So, if they don't want to take it, are you ready to be that person they can go to as a referral? But, how do you prepare for that moment? And I'm I'm assuming here that not everybody here has fully gotten into sound design. Can I see people that have never sound designed before? Yeah, there's a handful of people here. Wow, I'm actually kind of impressed that there's a handful of people that a lot of you are doing sound design already. Nice. But, if you aren't, you have to start by putting together a demo reel. Um what do you actually do? So, putting together a demo reel is kind of like picking clothes for GDC. Are you going to be wearing something fancy? Are you going to be wearing something nerdy? The point at the end is just really to be comfortable in your own skin. Wear what you want, show what it is that

you want yourself to show, and identify the niche you resonate with most. Uh for instance, if you want to work on shooters, you probably want to be showing gun sounds, explosions, vehicles, and not necessarily swords and shields. Um but, Iman, I have no credits. I can't make a demo reel. That's a lie. No credits, no problem. So, even like a lot of stuff uh comes from footage that you can actually just overlay sounds on. Like, when you're starting out, if you have a student project, you're often asked to do that kind of work. Uh find the footage which you can create opportunity with, and you feel that you can add to. Always try to be better than the original in your own way, because it's a lot easier to work on pieces that have room for growth, rather than those that have already a lot of established sound. For instance, I'm going to later show you a demo or of something I felt I could add to, rather than something I felt I couldn't elevate with my current skill and design. So, you may be wondering, though, why is there a a delicious pineapple pizza on the screen? Thank you. Thank you. Exactly this. This is exactly it.

You need to know your audience. If you buy a pizza for a group of friends, and you're the only person there that likes pineapple pizza, you've just disappointed a ton of people. But, you made yourself very very happy. You're going to be the happiest guest at that table. Uh my best friend, who actually isn't in audio, stated it best for me uh while I was mentally freaking out about a lot of stuff. He said, "It's a lot about It's like Cards Against Humanity. You have to know your audience. You have to appeal to the people that are voting for you. And if you think your work will benefit from something you add, then go for it. Get that pineapple on that pizza. If not, better to play it safe. Well, Iman, now I know what to do, but I don't know how to do it. That's okay. Ask for help. Contrary to popular belief, it's actually okay to ask other people their opinion before you submit their work or before you submit your work your work before you submit your work. I made this.

Um you don't know any sound designers? Well, there's plenty of composers out there that are actually pretty capable of providing some fantastic feedback. And look around you now and start making friends. Everyone here is able to help each other grow. Some of these friends may even see your work down the line and maybe the ones you work with in the future. Uh I'm going to go ahead and plug Real Talk by Power Up Audio. Uh that's a podcast/stream in which people can um submit their reels for review, and it's it's fantastic. A lot of people can get a lot of great feedback from that. So, I'm going to go ahead and share my first ever sound design attempt. In 2017, this is uh when I decided to just jump into sound design.

Pew pew. So, as you can imagine, guys, I immediately got hired after that. Uh I the truth, though, is after many iterations and sending it to colleagues for some feedback, and then presenting that version to a panel of people at the demo derby, uh and then getting more feedback from them, I was able to present and create this. Far from perfect, but after 2 weeks of work really on it and just jumping in and diving in and getting as much critique as I could, I was able to add an additional 30 or 40 seconds to it and secured the attention of some of my colleagues, which is really where it all began. After being super humbled and inspired to post it on Facebook and share my first sound design project, I actually turned the heads of my mostly audio uh

audio employees' friends list, which led to some of my first sound design gigs. So, I'd like to leave you with a few thoughts and things to remember. It takes time and effort to get better. It takes time and effort to build great relationships. It takes time and effort to be a good person. Don't just surrender your after your first KO. Press continue. Try again. See what happens, cuz everyone's path is different in the end. Uh you may have noticed that this presentation was in Comic Sans with some occasional inconsistencies in bullet points and, you know, spellings and dash marks here and there. But, the reality is that's kind of life. Not everyone likes Comic Sans, but someone out there may. Well, not Well, one person may hate and not like your reel, another might want to hire you for something that just might change your life because you picked Comic Sans.

So, if anyone out here is currently hiring and likes Comic Sans, I have a full stack of business cards for you. Thank you. Uh we've got a few minutes left. I'd like to go ahead and share with you everybody here thanks to the panelists that decided to jump in on this and dive in with me. Pinca, please stand up as well. If you haven't already, uh you'll probably be receiving a survey, so please like, comment, subscribe, smash that like button. Uh so, that way we can actually get some great feedback and just understand how to make this process better. Uh we have a couple minutes for questions, so I'll take like maybe one or two. Run. Run, don't walk. Fight. Fight. Fight. Hi, everyone. Thank you for your presentations. They were all great. Um one of the first slides that were shown had um percentages of and uh one of

those percentages were would said C# and scripting. I was wondering how much of that falls on your role, or do you typically just send your uh your content to a programmer, and then it's their responsibility to uh implement? Thank you. Erica, do you want to take that one, or So, my perspective is of a freelance composer who only writes the music. I talk very closely with all my bosses, my collaborative my collaborators. I don't write the first note of music until I understand fully how the music is going to be implemented in gameplay, the different levels. Um so, there are a lot of conversations and a lot of planning how to compose. I transitioned into game scoring from film, from linear media, and it was a learning curve, and this is what I would encourage you to do. Read the game audio survey from 2017, which is Just Google it, it's going to pop up. Um Brian Schmidt is providing this service to the community. It's an

incredible learning tool. Um I myself have made the choice to be only a composer. This means I'm always hustling to get work. Um this is why I'm encouraging um the young composers, the emerging composers, to also consider sound design, because it's a very viable career path. But, as far as programming, I put the slide there, and I'm not a programmer. Thank you. I I just like to I'll answer that question as well a bit. I'm from Klei Entertainment. We've got uh We're just about six sound designers now, and I don't touch a lot of code, but one of our sound designers is basically an audio programmer now. So, even within uh it's going to change studio to studio how much code you might touch. Uh even within my studio, sound designers touch different amounts of code. Uh it will never hurt you to learn some of that. Um even if you never touch it, you can communicate more effectively with your programmers. Um and being able to talk on their level will always be a plus. Uh Rachel, do we have time for one more? Go for it. All right, sounds good.

Thank you all for presenting. Um this is to you as well as to the room. It is Thursday night, maybe night four night five of GDC for some people. Audio people, where the party at? Where the party So, the the Game Audio Network Guild has their award show tonight. It's going to be a second floor Moscone uh 2016-2018. Uh it's an award ceremony, and there's also going to be uh an after-party for that, too. Killer, thank you. There's also another talk like about audio at the same time. Oh, it's about VR, actually. VR and audio at the same time. That's our show, so maybe that's why. That's seven? No, no, no. Five and four. Isn't what it says? you see he's saying "Where the party at?" Like where is the Oh, the party. Yeah. Where the party at? Well, there's a lot of places around here where you can party. Yeah. You don't need the audio people to party, man. Cool. We bring the party. Thanks, Brian. All right. Slam that next question in. I'm a huge fan of Comic Sans, so Hey! I'll talk TO YOU AFTER. WE'LL BE OUTSIDE. If you guys have any

more questions, feel free to approach us at any time.