I was audio lead on the Sleepy Donut team for another Ludum Dare game jam. A 3rd place in audio out of almost 2,000 submissions? We’ll take it!
I have now contributed to a chart-topping album. (Cue my expression of dumbfounded shock.) I supervised the creation of the skits on R&B singer Brent Faiyaz’s album Wasteland.
As a matter of fact, you can play thousands of them. But I was hoping you’d play mine. Our little team of seven game developers made Asterisk for the 72-hour...
Twenty Thousand Hertz is a great, easy-to-listen-to podcast with stories and interviews about those hidden elements of sound and sound design throughout our world, the ones you might never have considered or even heard of before. The NBC chimes, the voice of Siri, the sounds of the cars we buy, the hum generated by a secret government project—lots of neat little explorations.
Now here’s a man living out his love of sounds. A great introduction to Diego Stocco via his Custom Built Orchestra:
Needs-no-introduction editor Walter Murch on six criteria by which to judge the worth, quality, and necessity of an edit.
Here’s an excellent article in The Guardian by Jordan Kisner about veteran sound designer Skip Lievsay, whose credits include No Country For Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Waiting for “Superman”, Men In Black, Fargo, Silence of the Lambs, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and Goodfellas.
Okay, well, electric vehicles aren’t silent. But having nearly gotten run over by them as they back out of driveways and parking spaces, I think it’s fair to say they’re a little too quiet for safety. Something that weighs over a thousand pounds shouldn’t be able to roll into you without some warning. So there is research and legislation in progress in various places to require that sound effects be used to warn pedestrians at low driving speeds.
Ignore the horrible grammar and writing and you can learn a few of the policy wonky elements on Bloomberg.
Or see the version on Wikipedia.
But the closest we get to hearing about the sound design itself is on Popular Science.
Gary Bourgeois, Jeff Wexler, Mark Mangini. If those names don’t mean anything to you, do nothing. If you’re experiencing a little bit of excitement just reading those names, you need to see these videos from LASG: Los Angeles Sound Group. They’re sort of a combination of interview and Q&A and they involve some of the biggest names in the business.
They’re at lasoundgroup.com. I was at the Mark Mangini event and found it downright inspiring. Huge thanks to my friend Steve Urban and the other fantastic people at LASG for sharing with the world. Keep up the great work!