By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Welcome! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips – my latest is the music for the bestselling remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (listen and download the award-winning soundtrack for free). Today I’m pleased to present the final installment of my three-part series based on my interview with Meena Shamaly, the host of the Game Show on ABC Classic (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Meena Shamaly brings all his knowledge as an accomplished composer, producer and performance artist into his role as interviewer and host, and I was honored to be an interviewee for his awesome show! An audio recording of the full uncut interview is hosted right now on the ABC Classic web site. I’m including the full written transcript of that interview here, along with some supporting links and media files to expand on the topics discussed. In part one of this series, Meena and I reflected on the journey a new composer takes to break into the video game industry, along with the “always say yes” philosophy that can help new composers as they pursue their first break. In part two, we discussed the unique role that music plays in video games. Now, in the third and final installment, we’ll be discussing the impact of music on a gamer’s experience, and how game music weaves itself into a gamer’s life.
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.
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.