Time to get yourself a new book, huh? Look at this:

“A fascinating behind the scenes look at the previously unexplored territory of horror film sound..
Through in-depth analysis of sound in the films of Dario Argento and discussions with leading practitioners, this book explores our inherent relationship with sound; examining how and why specific sounds are chosen and utilised to express and manipulate human perception and emotion.”

“Talent, initiative and attention to detail”

“Interesting and provocative”

SOUNDS TO DIE FOR – SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF HORROR FILM SOUND

Part 1 - Discussions & Interviews

• Walter Murch
• Antonella Fulci
• Michel Chion
• Claudio Simonetti
• Claude Letessier
• Gary Rydstrom
• James Bernard

Part 2 - The Sound World of Dario Argento

• Deep Red
• Water:Bringer of Death
• Beware the ‘Raptus’
• Watcher in the Wind
• Symbolic Roots

• Suspiria
• Voice Behind the Curtain
• Great Wall of Sound

• Conclusion
• Footnotes
• References
• Recommended Reading
• Filmography
• Index

Via U.S.O Project

Wow, this year is almost over! One year ago I started with the exclusive sound design specials. It’s amazing to see the incredible persons that have visited us each month. And November will not be an exception. It’s an honor to announce the visit of a very talented sound designer: Jamey Scott.

Bio

Jamey Scott is a multi-talented, creative sound engineer and post-production facility owner in Burbank, CA. He’s been working as a creative sound designer, re-recording mixer, foley artist, dialog editor, adr recordist, game engine designer and implementer, and composer for the last 17 years, contributing pivotal roles in excellent independent films, award-winning animated shorts, and some of the most successful and influential video games in the industry’s history.

Jamey began his career as a “creative engineer” when he was very young, beginning his musical training on the trumpet at 10 years old. In high school he began playing guitar and studied Jazz and improvisation; a passion that would carry him through his college education where he studied under Rick Helzer at San Diego State University as his primary coursework for a Bachelor of Music degree with emphasis in Jazz studies and composition. Jamey was a celebrated Jazz guitarist who played alongside many outstanding and famous Jazz musicians.

After recording a CD and discovering the world of recording studios, his attention shifted intensely into the production side of things. He started to purchase recording equipment and slowly evolve a production system which allowed him to start making demos and pitching his musical ideas to potential clients. It didn’t take long, as his very first demo submission was received with a job offer to work for Echo Images, a CD-ROM production company servicing significant San Diego clientele and starting Jamey on his path of creating content for interactive media. This was in 1994, when it was all very new and unevolved so the trials and tribulations of learning a craft before there was any practiced workflows set Jamey up for a mindset of problem solving and innovating new ideas which continue to set him apart in the marketplace even today.

Shortly after working for Echo Images, Jamey was invited to join the esteemed creative team at Presto Studios, a young startup game developer which was home to some of the most talented and innovative digital artists in San Diego at that time. Jamey worked as the sole sound designer and composer at Presto Studios for about 7 years and worked on a large handful of successful and innovative games including Myst 3: Exile, Whacked!, Star Trek: Hidden Evil, The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, Stephen King’s F13, and Gundam 0079: The War For Earth.

In 2001, Jamey left Presto Studios to become a freelancer and founded his company Dramatic Audio Post, Inc. After an immediate storm of successful projects such as Unreal Tournament 2003, Enter the Matrix, and Shadowbane, Jamey decided to move his operation from San Diego to the heart of the production world in Burbank, CA in 2003. Since landing in Los Angeles, Jamey’s demand has snowballed, bringing him into major feature film productions, celebrated animations and the very best productions in the game industry including Jak3, Daxter PSP, Unreal Tournament 3, Huxley and the massive XBox360 game, Gears of War. In addition, Jamey is ammassing an equally impressive list of credits in the feature film world with major creative contributions to films such as Automaton Transfusion, Van Wilder2: The Rise of Taj, Man From Earth, An American Carol, and Desert Son.

Jamey is currently working on Gears of War 3, Bulletstorm, SOCOM4, and is serving as Audio Director for Bethesda Software’s HUNTED, in addition to other various game, film, and animation projects.

Awards

Jamey has won a handful of prestigious awards including the 1998 New Media Invision Award for his work on The Journeyman Project 3, an EMMA award for his work on Myst3: Exile, 2 regional EMMY awards for various San Diego broadcast productions, over 30 festival awards for his work on Eternal Gaze including the coveted “Best of Show – Electronic Theater” from Siggraph and was also short-listed for a 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Short. He was also recently honored by the Game Audio Network Guild with 3 of the game audio industry’s highest awards for Gears of War, including Best Sound Design, Best Cinematic Audio, and the coveted “Audio of the Year” award. He has been involved with projects which have garnered multiple nominations and a win of Golden Reel Awards, and was most recently awarded an award for Best Score in a Feature Film by the Park City Music & Film Festival, for his musical score in “The Loneliest Road In America”.

Selected Work

• Desert Son (2010) – Sound designer, Sound re-recording mixer and Supervising sound editor
• Gears of War 2 (2008) – Lead sound designer
• Unreal Tournament III (2007) – Sound designer
• Gears of War (2006) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Jak3 (2004) – Sound designer
• Unreal Tournament 2003 (2003) – Sound designer
• Myst III: Exile (2001) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Star Trek: Hidden Evil (1999) – Sound designer
• The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time

Jamey Scott’s Website

Jamey Scott at IMDb

Today I’m happy to announce that Rob Bridgett, one of our best friends here at Designing Sound (and who started the monthly special series almost a year ago) is releasing “From the Shadows of Film Sound“, a new must-have book for anyone interested in sound for video games.

As a practitioner in video game development, Rob Bridgett has explored and written about the connective tissue between film sound production and a newly emerging video game audio production culture. This new volume brings together, for the first time, freshly edited writings with many previously unpublished articles, documenting his work and thinking over the past ten years. This book is equally suited to film sound designers intrigued by game sound production as much as those in game sound wishing to further explore the meaning of cinematic sound. A fresh, insightful, and long overdue volume offering nourishment for students of sound as well as ammunition for sound artists working on the front line of development.

“From the Shadows of Film Sound” is available now on blurb.com at US $21.85. Also, below you can find a Q&A session I had with Rob talking about the book.

DS: What made you decide to write this book?

RB: First of all, thanks for taking time to talk with me about the book, I’m really excited about the project and finally getting it out there. As you know, I’ve accumulated a lot of written material over the years – various articles, features and post-mortems – and it was while re-reading many of the older articles for my website that I began to see some common threads that tied the work together in an interesting way. A lot of the articles are hard to find and some only exist as scanned print pages, so it felt like I needed to re-visit them in an archival way too. The main thread, which I wasn’t conscious of at all at the time of writing, was of looking to cinema sound to shed light on production issues found in video game sound. This wasn’t anything I was conscious of doing when I began writing articles, just something that occurred to me a year or so ago, that all of these pieces could be tied together and read, not only as a collection of individual pieces, but also as a reasonably coherent whole.  Since then, it’s been a really exciting process putting the book together and realizing that there really isn’t anything out there already that addresses these topics from a practitioner’s viewpoint. It’s a book I’d have killed for when I was studying sound and trying to break into the industry!

DS: Could you give us a quick overview then of the topics and different ideas we could find in there?

RB: I’ve really tried to cover everything that I have come across, or been challenged with, as a video game audio director, and that’s a very wide scope. That goes from music implementation and communication with composers, to sfx & dialogue production and processes. I spend a significant part of the book discussing post-production techniques, including sound effects replacement and interactive mixing techniques that occur very late in the production cycle of a game, but also practical ideas about sound personnel embedding themselves in the earliest production opportunities on any project in order to leverage as much artistic and technical collaborative influence as possible on the project. So, lots of detail yet also plenty of broad, higher level examples.

DS: As you mentioned, the book contains some articles already found on the internet, yet in a re-edited form, could you talk a little about these?

RB: Previously published articles form the heart of this book for sure. Every single article though has been re-edited and updated significantly in order to give it more relevance. I’ve also given new contextual introductions and summaries, which help these articles actually feel more like a book with a single central themes.

DS: ‘From the Shadows of Film Sound’ is an interesting title for a book about video game sound. Is there a particular reason behind this title?

RB: Yeah, I guess it’s a very different title for a game audio book! The main idea behind the title is that, for me, video game sound is bound up in the history and culture of cinema sound, whether consciously trying to emulate it, or to reject it. I see game audio as being something that is emerging from this culture and history and, that over the next few decades, will very much evolve a distinctive style of its own. Video games really used to sound like video games twenty years ago, but now it’s getting very difficult to differentiate games from films.

DS: In the book you often refer back to a relationship between film and game audio production. Do you consider this book also important for someone working on sound for film?

RB: Definitely. All of the film sound people I’ve met and worked with are incredibly curious about how sound is implemented in video games. If you work in another medium, you often perceive a ‘grass is greener’ situation, and, from a film sound perspective, us game audio folks have a lot of things easy, such as being on a project from day one during the pre-production and concept phase. I believe there is a great deal that both film and game sound can learn from one another about production and creative process – it is definitely a two way street.

DS: You have chosen to go for a self-published book, rather than through an established publisher, could you talk a little about the reasons behind this?

RB: Several practical reasons really. I didn’t want to work with any time constraints or deadlines, this book has taken a long time to write and edit and I definitely didn’t want to feel rushed or pressured into getting something out that was unfinished, or wasn’t 100% something I was happy with. This is an important factor for me while working in game development, as I don’t have the time to spend dedicated full-time on a book project. Control over the whole process has also been really important, in terms of how the text looks on the page right down to the cover design and detail, this may sound like a fickle point, but the cover art for almost all game audio books so far published kinda sucks! Finally, I always wanted to put out a book that would be priced reasonably and therefore accessible, as a lot of the books on audio for games that I’ve purchased over the years have been in the $40 – $50 range, and some even higher, which, for me anyways, feels like a lot.

DS: What’s next for you Rob? Can we expect new publications soon?

RB: At the moment I’m gearing up into full production on an awesome unannounced project with Radical, which is really exciting, so there is little time to delve too deeply into new articles. I’m also more fully involved with the GANG IESD group as a co-chair, along with Kenny Young and Scott Selfon, so this may focus a lot of my writing efforts in that direction in the future.

More information can be found at Arkhive Sound.

I’m happy to announce Aaron Marks as our October’s guest on Designing Sound. A multi-disciplinary audio professional with background in music composition, sound design, field recording, and more. Author of “The Complete guide to Game Audio” and teacher at The Art Institute of California. A very kind person ready to share lots of cool things with us this month.

Bio

Best known for his book, The Complete Guide to Game Audio, Aaron Marks is not only an outspoken advocate of great audio in games, he is an accomplished composer, sound designer, field recordist, voice over artist and owner of On Your Mark Music Productions based near San Diego, California. As if that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, he is also the lead author of the book, Game Audio Development, and is part of the audio production faculty at The Art Institute of California – San Diego teaching the art of field recording and sound for interactive media.

Music has always been a part of Aaron Marks’ life – but it wasn’t until 1995, when his overgrown hobby became On Your Mark Music Productions, that he began selling it to the world. Aaron started with the Southern California radio and television scene composing jingles and scoring public service announcements. Although he set his sights on Hollywood, he fell headfirst into the game industry instead where his sound design and voiceover talents also exploded – leading him to music, sound design, field recording and voiceover credits on over 120 game titles for the Xbox and Xbox 360, PlayStation 2 and 3, Wii, Dreamcast, CD/DVD-ROM, touch screen arcade games, iPhone/iPad, Class II video slot machines, Class III mechanical and video slot machines, coin op/arcade, online and terminal based video casino games and numerous multimedia projects.

Through the years, Aaron has written for Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra.com, Music4Games.net and the Society of Composers and Lyrists. He wrote an accredited college course on game audio for the Art Institute Online, is a member of the AES Technical Committee for Games, was an AES Game Audio Workshop chairman, was on the launch committee for the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.) and is a popular guest speaker and lecturer at game related conferences and academic functions.

Aaron currently divides his time between his love for all things audio, his family and their eclectic menagerie of farm animals.

About OYM

On Your Mark Music Productions is a provider of music, sound effects, field recording and voice overs for the video game, television and film industries with clients such as Codemasters, UbiSoft, Konami, Universal/Vivendi, Activision, Microsoft and Electronic Arts. In operation since 1995, Aaron Marks and his cast of creative characters, have provided audio for over 300 combined projects and proudly continue the pursuit of the ultimate soundscape. With the recent addition of composer, arranger and orchestrator Mark Scholl, OYM rounds out their sonic arsenal and offered services with 2 Emmy Awards, 15 years of live touring and performing experience and a premier drummer/percussionist.

Awards

• GANG Award, Best Game Audio Article, Publication or Broadcast – The Complete Guide to Game Audio
• GANG Award, Best Game Audio Article, Publication or Broadcast – The Use and Effectiveness of Audio in HALO: Game Music Evolved

Selected Works

• The Complete Guide to Game Audio, 2nd Edition – author
• Game Audio Development – lead author
• bittosHD, bittos+, bittos-e, bittos – composer, sound designer
• Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising – field recordist
• large variety of video casino gaming devices – audio director/composer/sound designer
• Sprint Mobile network daily audio news segments – voice overs
• Colin McRae’s DIRT – voice over direction and recording
• Tom Clancy’s ENDWAR (PSP/DS) – composer
• The Settler’s – Traditions Edition – composer
• The Settler’s II – 10th Anniversary – composer

On Your Mark Music