By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hi there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips – my most recent game release is the music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord: the smash-hit 3D remake of the classic 1981 dungeon-crawler (listen and download my award-winning soundtrack for free). Welcome to part three of my article series presenting the content of my talk from the Game Developers Conference 2024! My presentation, “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” discussed the ways in which game composers can repurpose the tools and assets normally within the province of sound design experts. In order to best make my GDC discussions as widely accessible as possible, I’m now sharing the content of my GDC lectures every year in an article series that includes the full lectures, supplemented by most of the videos and many illustrations from my GDC talks.
In case you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you can find them here:
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Sounds of Nature
In part two of my GDC 2024 article series, I discussed how using appropriate animal vocalizations can provide game composers with awesome sonic tools for adding evocative character to game music.
As an example, we discussed how adding seagulls to the music of an ocean-themed gameplay level can help the environment blend more seamlessly with the music supporting it. So let’s now check out another example of an animal sound that’s used less literally than seagulls at the ocean – and more in a figurative way.