Check our upcoming events for Spring Quarter 2019!
Welcome to Winter Quarter 2019!
The DH Working Group has an exciting quarter filled with everything from informal meet–and-greets, to workshops, to guided tours! Check our upcoming events for Winter Quarter 2019!
Welcome Madelynn and Dwayne as Co-Chairs
This fall, Madelynn Dickerson (UCI Libraries) and Dwayne Pack (Humanities Computing) will serve as the new co-chairs for the Digital Humanities Working Group. Dwayne and Madelynn are looking forward to engaging with the UCI community on DH discussion, learning, and project ideas. Learn more about Madelynn and Dwayne here, and be sure to attend the upcoming DH Live! event to meet them and others in the DH community at UCI.
Music and Sound Design in Games Panel, 5/14/2018
On Monday, May 14th UC Irvine welcomed a panel of composers and sound designers for videogames to talk about their professional experiences. Participants included:
Pedro Seminario (Blizzard)
Tim Labor (UC Riverside)
Josh Mancell (Composer – Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter)
Greg Edmonson (Composer – Uncharted)
Each offered an illuminating perspective to the topic of music and sound in games. Seminario brought gear for a live demonstration of striking an object with varying degrees of force and recording the results at different distances. He compared the work of a sound designer to Jurassic Park’s treatment of chaos theory: small variations in circumstances yield vastly different sonic results, which a good sound designer appreciates. He also displayed a pocket mic that he brings with him wherever he goes, just in case he encounters a unique sound or something that would work for one of his projects.
Labor discussed some of his history with late-90s games such as Everquest. As a player (and appreciator) of tabletop RPGs, a designer of digital games through pencil and paper, and as a composer for these games, Labor brought to light many quirks of developing games during that period. Labor concluded his presentation with lessons from the 1990s. These included: be flexible, be willing to revise, don’t forget implementation skills, don’t trust the stability of even big businesses in a volatile marketplace, and ergonomics matters. His final lesson was that the most valuable instrument a musician has is their car, because if one is willing to travel to places others won’t, that person will get more and better gigs.
Mancell positioned his presentation as the “adolescence” of music in games, the era of the late 90s into early 2000s that witnessed increasingly orchestral compositions and recordings, growing out of the memory limitations that had defined videogame sound from the medium’s inception. The short, staccato sounds of Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter matured into fuller sounds by Jak 3 as the platform Mancell worked on changed from the PlayStation to the PlayStation 2. He also discussed sound design choices such as starting a level off without a score, letting the music start a minute into the experience and build up as the level progressed.
Edmonson’s work, as Mancell pointed out, picked up from this point gaming’s adolescence – Edmonson composed for Uncharted, another series at the same studio Mancell had worked for (Naughty Dog). Edmonson’s talk began with an extended listen to the overture to Uncharted and a more free-form question and answer session. During this, he offered some important distinctions between film and game scoring. The composer enters into the picture relatively late in the film-making process, when the principal footage is already shot, whereas the game composer typically has little to go off of other than story synopsis and character designs. Games offer a tremendous opportunity forĀ long compositions, but one disadvantage of game scoring is that games, unlike films and television, don’t pay residuals.
The panel concluded with some gregarious Q and A as panelists fielded questions from the students in attendance. It was a highly generative experience for folks studying games, music, and new media to hear professionals’ experiences in the field.