Thanks to the Women’s Audio Mission, I was able to attend GameSoundCon for the first time this past October. GSC is focused solely on Sound Design and Music Composition for Video Games. Anyone interested in Game Audio was invited to attend, ranging from aspiring students to audio professionals. The two days were packed full of educational sessions and Audio Design Tool workshops.
The sold out conference was hosted in several rooms of the beautiful and historic Millennium Biltmore Hotel. Many sponsors were present, including Dolby, FMOD, and Audiokinetic. Dolby showed off their new Atmos Home Theater System, pushing for the release of more games mixed in Atmos. Sadly the gaming representatives for Dolby had very little audio knowledge, so many of my questions were left unanswered.
The keynote address was given by Marty O’Donnell, the audio director at Bungie for nearly 15 years and most recently, the producer of the soundtracks for HALO and Destiny. For many GSC attendees, the speech was a repeat of the address given in 2009. I’m not sure it was worth the second attempt. It was full of your stereotypical ‘what I did in my life to get to where I am’ stories, which I did not find very inspiring. Thankfully, many other great sessions made the trip down to GameSoundCon worth the drive! Perry Cook’s talk “From Interactive Foley to Laptop Orchestras: Real-Time Physics-Based Parametric Sound Synthesis for Art, Profit, and (most important) Fun!” was just that, a lot of FUN! He explained his techniques with entertaining physical examples of sound synthesis for games and animation.
As an experienced professional, I found GameSoundCon to be a bit too rudimentary, but it definitely is a great place for aspiring students and audio professionals with an interest in learning more about game sound or music composition.
