Author Archives: Walkerwhite

With pre-enroll around the corner, I have now opened up applications for the game design courses next semester (CS/INFO 3152, CS/INFO 4152).  This post is not an attempt to promote more interest in these courses.  I will get twice as many applications as I can accept into the course; applications are extremely competitive.  But there are some new opportunities available for composers this year, and I wanted to bring them to your attention.

The courses are not designed to support composers that only work on music.  I do not have the training for this and large parts of the course would need to be rethought.  We only allow composers into the course when they can do one of the other three traditional tracks: programming, character art, UX design/testing.  We make the bar lower for good composers (so a programmer/composer is competitive with CS 2110 and does not need CS 3110), but we still require some expertise outside of music.

However, some groups in the past have asked if they can contract music out to their friends.  Not only have we allowed this, but these students were invited to our showcase.  In addition, if the game is accepted to a national game festival (like Boston FIG), I include these “contractors” when I offer to pay for the transportation costs.

This year, we have decided to make this a little more formal.  We have added an external member option to the application.  You can apply to join a team as a pure composer.  While we cannot enroll you in the full course, we can give you INFO 4900 (Independent Study) credit for joining the team.  The commitment is up to you.  We award 1 credit hour for each 2.5 hours of work a week.

If this interests you, I am accepting applications at the link above until December 15th.

Since winning an Emmy last year for their soundtrack to Stranger Things, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein having been giving interviews about their development process. As a synthwave fan myself, I was originally planning to post these when we talked about synthesizers. However, many of the ideas that we talked about in Tuesday’s class come out in these interviews.  In particular, they show how thinking about sounds this way is relevant to commercial music and is not just an experimental art form.

There are two interviews of note, both which took place this past June.  The first is the Vanity Fair interview where they specifically talk about Stranger Things.

Vanity Fair Interview

Here are two things to look for in this interview.  First, they point out how they use atonal and microtonal sounds to create feelings of horror or action.  One of the sounds used was recorded on a field recorder that they carried around with them.  Related to the larger question of “what is music?”, they also explain why they prefer analog synths over modern computers; they feel that the irreproducibility of the experience is important to music as an art form.

The Spitfire Audio interview is a slightly longer interview where they discuss their history with the band SURVIVE.

Spitfire Audio Interview

In this interview they talk about how they got into computer music.  In the beginning, they would capture sounds with a field recorder and learn how to compose with these sounds.  This experience taught them to use analog synthesizers not just as tools, but as musical instruments.