By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hello everyone! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m delighted to share that I’ll be delivering a lecture this March in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference — one of the top industry conferences of the year. My lecture is entitled “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” and I was honored that GDC included it as a featured audio selection in the GDC 2024 Session Guide, and highlighted my participation as a GDC speaker this year by including me in the GDC 2024 Speaker Spotlight. My lecture takes place on Thursday, March 21st in Room 3002 West Hall at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and I’m really looking forward to this one! We’ll be taking a detailed look at various ways that music and sound-design can cross fertilize each other. Specifically, my presentation will focus on how environmental and incidental sound effects can be directed towards musical applications. These audio assets, typically used by sound design experts, can serve to introduce quirky novelty into a game’s musical score. They can also deepen player immersion in the environment of the game.
While I don’t want to spoil the content of my presentation, I thought I’d take this opportunity to break down an example of this technique from one of my projects. This particular example was regrettably cut from my presentation due to time constraints, which affords me the opportunity to share it here instead! While my lecture will have a much wider scope on the topic of musical diegetics, this article will drill down on one specific case-study. So let’s start with some basic definitions.
