By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hi! I’m videogame composer Winifred Phillips, and in February of this year I was thrilled to win the GRAMMY® Award for my musical score for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! My Wizardry score won in the category of Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. Every year, the Society of Composers & Lyricists (in collaboration with Electronic Arts and White Bear PR) organizes an online seminar entitled GAME CHANGERS. The seminar features all of the nominees in the video game category of the Grammys that year. Discussions during the seminar range from expert analysis of composition best-practices, to sources of inspiration that fuel the creation of the Grammy nominated scores. I remember participating in the GAME CHANGERS seminar as a nominee for Wizardry. It was one of the most awesome online seminars I’ve ever participated in, and I was really honored to be a part of it!
Now, I’m thrilled to share that as the current Grammy winner in the video game category, I have been invited this year to serve as the official moderator for the seminar! On December 16th, I’ll be interviewing all of the nominees for next year’s Grammy Awards, and I’m really looking forward to exploring their creative process in composing their Grammy-nominated video game scores. It should be tremendously inspiring! Only current members of the Society of Composers & Lyricists can attend this popular online seminar (more info here). However, everyone can enjoy the Grammy-nominated scores composed by these celebrated video game composers! With that in mind, I’m happy to share their work in this article. I hope our readers will be inspired by the creativity and skill on display in these nominated soundtrack albums!
If you are a current voting member of the Recording Academy, you’ll find the following details helpful as you decide how you’ll vote in the video game category. And if you’re not yet a member… why not consider joining the Recording Academy? Any Recording Academy member can submit their soundtrack releases for Grammy Awards consideration. Let’s get the video game composer community involved! After all, the Grammys are famous for being ‘Music’s Biggest Night,’ so the video game music community should be a big part of it! More information about joining the Recording Academy can be found here.
So now let’s explore these currently nominated soundtrack albums for the Grammy Awards! I’ve listed them alphabetically by game title. For each nominated score, I’ve provided a biography of the composer at the top, followed by a Spotify playlist of their nominated soundtrack, and a no-commentary gameplay video demonstrating the game for which the music was composed. Enjoy!!
and I was able to land the gig because an example of my work landed on the desk of a music supervisor for the project at exactly the right time. What are the chances of that? It’s akin to being struck by lightning, and I certainly can’t advise young composers to depend on that kind of lightning to strike. But I don’t want to leave hopeful young composers in the lurch either.
premiere event celebrating popular video game music. My lecture would be the very first video game music composition lecture ever given at the Library of Congress. I was both honored and humbled to accept the invitation and have my lecture included in the 
This week I thought we’d check in with some of the top orchestral video game music concert tours currently underway. We’ll take a look at some reviews of 2015 performances from the respective tours, and we’ll also take a look at video from some of the most recent concert performances.
Originating as a simple four-minute overture performed at a Nintendo press event in 2011, Symphony of the Goddesses kicked off as a full-fledged concert tour in January 2012 and 
In this blog, I thought we might take a quick look at the development of the three dimensional audio technologies that promise to be a vital part of music and sound for a virtual reality video game experience. Starting from its earliest incarnations, we’ll follow 3D audio through the fits and starts that it endured through its tumultuous history. We’ll trace its development to the current state of affairs, and we’ll even try to imagine what may be coming in the future! But first, let’s start at the beginning:
In the 1930s, English engineer and inventor Alan Blumlein invented a process of audio recording that involved a pair of microphones that were coincident (i.e. placed closely together to capture a sound source). Blumlein’s intent was to accurately reflect the directional position of the sounds being recorded, thus attaining a result that conveyed spatial relationships in a more faithful way. In reality, Blumlein had invented what we now call stereo, but the inventor himself referred to his technique as “binaural sound.” As we know, stereo has been an extremely successful format, but the fully realized concept of “binaural sound” would not come to fruition until much later.