Monthly Archives: November 2015

First Look: Beep Documentary interview with game music composer Winifred Phillips

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Beep-Headshot_Winifred-Phillips

The Beep documentary is an awesome upcoming crowdfunded film consisting of interviews with top game composers and sound designers from around the world.  Leading up to the film’s world premiere in Spring 2016, the Beep Documentary team has been releasing webisodes of interview footage with selected composers and sound designers who will be featured in the documentary.  I’m pleased to share that a webisode of my interview has just been posted by the Beep documentary team!

Beep has been described as “the most comprehensive documentary of game music/audio history ever made,” and “a huge and culturally significant undertaking to document the history of video game sound and music through interviews with composers and other game audio professionals from around the globe.”  The Beep documentary is described best on the project’s website: “Relive the moments of your childhood, and hear the stories behind the songs and sounds of your favorite games from the people who created them. Help us to give the composers and sound designers throughout game history a chance to tell their own stories, to share the truly amazing things that they achieved.”

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Call of Champions

Posted by Winifred Phillips on
Winifred Phillips, composer of the music for the Call of Champions game

Winifred Phillips, composer for the Call of Champions game

I’m very proud and excited to announce that I composed the music for the Call of Champions video game, developed by Spacetime Studios!

Call of Champions is an awesome action game in the popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (or MOBA) genre. The game pits players against each other in exciting timed matches within a futuristic fantasy-inspired setting. The game was created by the team at Spacetime Studios, an accomplished group of top industry veterans (including developers responsible for the famous Wing Commander series and Star Wars Galaxies.)

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AES Convention: Interactive Music of the LittleBigPlanet Franchise

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Winifred Phillips - Audio Engineering Society ConventionI was very proud to speak at three events during the Audio Engineering Society convention last week!  My hour-long presentation last Sunday was entitled “Interactive Music of the LittleBigPlanet Franchise: Dissecting a Complex, Multi-Component System.”

In addition, I spoke as a panelist during a game audio panel presentation on Saturday, and I also participated on Saturday as a game audio mentor in the awesome AES Speed Mentoring session, sponsored by the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services.  Attendees got a chance to ask loads of terrific questions of the assembled professional mentors, and it was great fun to answer game audio questions during the mentoring session!

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AES Convention: What’s New on the Show Floor

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

This past weekend, the Audio Engineering Society held its annual North American convention in the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. I was participating as an AES speaker, but I also knew that AES includes an exhibit floor packed with the best professional audio equipment from all the top manufacturers, and I didn’t want to miss that! So, in between my game audio panel presentation on Saturday, and the Sunday tutorial talk I gave on the music system of the LittleBigPlanet franchise, I had the pleasure of searching the show floor for what’s new and interesting in audio tech. Here are some of the attractions that seemed most interesting for game audio folks:

Fraunhofer/Cingo - Winifred PhillipsOne of the most interesting technologies on display at AES this year was Fraunhofer Cingo – an audio encoding technology developed specifically to enable mobile devices to deliver immersive sound for movies, games and virtual reality. Cingo was developed by the institute responsible for the MP3 audio coding format.  According to Fraunhofer, the Cingo technology “supports rendering of 3D audio content with formats that add a height dimension to the sound image, such as 9.1, 11.1 or other channel combinations.”  This enables mobile devices to emulate “the enveloping sound of movies, games or any other virtual environment.”   While I was there, Fraunhofer rep Jennifer Utley gave me the chance to demo the Cingo technology using the Gear VR headset, which turns Samsung mobile phones into portable virtual reality systems.  The sound generated by Cingo did have an awesome sense of spatial depth that increased immersion, although I didn’t personally notice the height dimension in the spatial positioning. Nevertheless, it was pretty nifty!

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