By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hi! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and this past September I traveled to Washington D.C. I’d been asked, as the current winner of the Grammy Award for Best Video Game Soundtrack, to speak in the Congressional Auditorium of the Capitol Building, at an event advocating for the importance of video game music. It was an enormous honor! Alongside a panel of fellow Grammy Award winners and nominees, we discussed the process of composing for games, sharing stories and memories while doing our best to help lawmakers understand the inherent creativity and expertise involved in crafting a video game musical score.
Participating in panels and discussions like this one has always been very inspiring for me. I’m grateful to be a part of this amazing professional network of game audio wizards, as they continually innovate and share ideas with boundless enthusiasm and generosity. Through a lively exchange of ideas over time, the game audio profession has built a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience that enriches the entire community. With that in mind, I’d like to use this article to share a collection of resources that I’ve gathered from across the internet, providing both educational enrichment and inspiration for game audio folks. We’ll start with a collection of informative conferences that include rich game audio content. Then, we’ll move to an assortment of music festivals and symphony concerts dedicated to music from video games. We’ll include a couple of awesome organizations that are serving the needs of game audio scholars and researchers. And finally, we’ll lay out all the vibrant online discussion forums and helpful communities ready to assist game audio practitioners. So let’s get started!
VR games currently focus on binaural audio to immerse players in the awesome soundscapes of their virtual worlds. As we know, binaural recording techniques use two microphones, often embedded in the artificial ears of a dummy head (pictured right). By virtual of the popular binaural recording technique and/or binaural encoding technologies, game audio teams can plunge VR players into convincing aural worlds where sounds are spatially localized in a way that conforms with real world expectations. The technology of binaural sound continually improves, and recently the expert developers of the Oculus Rift VR headset have refined the quality of their VR sound with two significant upgrades.
