Sally Kellaway speaks on hearing for new environments at May 2019 DigiPen Symposium. Greg Dixon photo.
On Saturday, May 11, 2019, DigiPen Institute of Technology hosted its seventh annual Audio Symposium, a yearly event hosted by the DigiPen Music & Sound Design department at DigiPen's Redmond campus. The event was co-sponsored by the Game Audio Network Guild and the Audio Engineering Society - Pacific Northwest Section. In lieu of a traditional Section meeting, AES-PNW encouraged members to take advantage of the opportunity. About 10 AES members were among the attendees.
The day-long event, free and open to the public, featured presentations on a wide range of music and audio related topics. This year's presentations focused on music and sound for video games, audio for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, and algorithmic music composition. Talks were given by Guy Whitmore (Foxface Rabbitfish LLC), Alistair Hirst and Kevin Salchert (Amazon Game Studios), Sally Kellaway (Microsoft Mixed Reality at Work), and Stan LePard.
Guy Whitmore's talk "Freelance Music Design and Beyond!" focused on the current opportunities afforded to video game composers for not just music composition but also the implementation of music in a video game, which Whitmore calls "Music Design." Alistair Hirst and Kevin Salchert presented their talk entitled "Audio for The Grand Tour Game," discussing the unique challenges of making a racing game designed around an episodic, loosely-scripted, reality television series, The Grand Tour. Sally Kellaway's presentation "Hearing into the Future: Audio in XR" shed light on the unique design challenges of creating audio experiences for virtual, augmented, or mixed reality. Stan LePard's talk "Forays into Non-Linear Music" discussed three different works that the composer created which feature algorithmic and aleatoric or chance music techniques.
