Surf Berlin: Patience, Dedication, Obsession

Surf Berlin: 30 Seconds from Ira Mowen on Vimeo.

With only one chance per day to catch this wave, every missed opportunity is agonizing. Surf Berlin is a film about patience, dedication, and a bit of obsession in the quest to catch the last German wave....

Sifteo Cubes: Radically Simple

I wrote music for an advertisement for the new Sifteo Cubes – a new tactile gaming platform.

IndieCade 2012: Indie Game Developers

Ashton Kutcher and ThrashLab produced a short video featuring Sifteo's Chroma Shuffle – a 2012 IndieCade finalist.

Keep an ear out at 3:20 for a familiar tune:

The next step is terrible...

If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined."

-J.D. Salinger
Seymour, an Introduction

Chroma Shuffle at IndieCade

Very excited that Sifteo's Chroma Shuffle is a 2012 IndieCade Nominee! (Music and sound by yours truly)

Updated Music Reel!

On Landing the Dream Job

Applying for work in a creative field is a stressful, intimidating process. There is an insane amount of competition for the relatively minuscule amount of work (which is a good thing for you content producers!); some applicants are highly-skilled and talented, while others will be weeded out early but still add dead weight and noise to the already-bloated pool.

Ariel Gross, Studio Audio Director at Volition, Inc., a sonic branding company, sheds some light on his hiring process and has some great advice in bettering one's chances at landing the dream job:

First of all, I want to see that you have a purpose for wanting this job. Not what you’re doing (e.g. your resume and demo). Not how you’re doing it (e.g. your web site or blogs that show how you do what you do). But why you’re doing it...

Secondly, I want to see the potential for growth. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been around the block, either. There are as many titans of the game audio industry as there are newbies who realize that this field changes so quickly that you still need to be able to grow and change...

And thirdly, I want to see that there’s more to you than audio...There’s so much more to being part of [a] game development team than being a good audio designer or than knowing how to make things sound right in Wwise. Maybe you have some game design sensibilities. Maybe you’re able to make people laugh. Maybe you play an instrument... I’m not just trying to look at you as an audio designer, I’m trying to look at you as a complete human being. The bigger picture I can see, the most interested I may become [emphasis my own].

In audio (and elsewhere), we often talk about the 'signal to noise ratio', or the amount of desired audio signal compared to the level of background noise. I like to use the same analogy when I'm critiquing my own reel and cover letter. "Will this stick out above the noise of the other applicants? How can I ensure that it does?"

While Gross writes from the perspective of in-house audio (the rarest of birds), his advice holds true for music contractors and everyone looking for work in a creative field. He confirms what we hear so many times: make sure your work is the best it can possibly be, approach it with openness and curiosity, and treat your personality and interests as your greatest assets.

Read Gross's full post here

The Grimm World of Limbo

I just finished playing through the indie hit Limbo for the first time (yes, I'm a few years late to this party). I loved the grainy black and white, multiplane camera aesthetic, as if a 1940s-era Disney brought to life the creepy violence of the original European fairy tales they recreated. Characters in the game react to you with unwavering hostility, seeming to stem from their own fear of the world they inhabit, in which everything is a threat.

The game's sound world is just as bleak. Beds of ambient gloom form a murky sonic backdrop, while the foreground sound is marked by its whip's-crack precision, punctuating your repeated death with a rusty exclamation point.

Dampness and decay dominate the first half of the game – decades of dirt fall like rain from rotten logs, and gooey liquid pours from limbs cracked off of giant insects. Abandoned industrial machinery provides the violence in the second half.

The game is DARK.

But also, like a fairy tale, enchanting. The puzzles are stimulating and rewarding, the physics feel great, and even the multiple attempts necessary to get through the more difficult sections feel less frustrating because of the fast pace of gameplay. And best of all, the sound and music make the hairs on the back of your neck tingle like crazy.

Limbo Composer and Sound Designer Martin Stig Andersen reflects on his approach:

I’ve never been fond of the traditional Hollywood soundtrack having a clear divide between music and sound design, as purely non-diegetic music tends to take me out of the experience." (source)

And to me, he succeeds. The world of Limbo feels rich and cohesive – the mood is consistently gauzy and dim throughout the visuals, score, sound design. It seems that all you want is to go home, but it's clear from the start that you have a long and dangerous journey ahead.

Comedy in Music

I believe that 'play' is the most important value in creativity and composition. I don't mean 'playing an instrument' – what I'm talking about is imagining, combining, highlighting and contrasting relationships between people and objects and the occasionally absurd things that bring us contemplation, entertainment, and joy. As children we create games based on made-up rules, then temporarily live in the worlds that those rules govern. Often, the rules we're bound to have funny consequences. I like to imagine my music in these terms and find the most interesting musical outcomes of my made-up rules.

Here's a classic example of Haydn distorting rules of musical form and expectation as he overshoots the expected resolution of the piece and ends partway into the next statement of the theme (skip to 2:44 for the "joke"):

On the other hand, I'm usually not a huge fan of funny music. It's a blurry line between "playful music" and "funny music" (i.e. music in which the goal is comedy). The two contain each other so often it's not worth trying to define boundaries, but I'd argue that most parodies fall under the "funny music" category – their main source of humor is in contrasting new lyrical content to an already-known song, with as many jokes crammed in as possible. Don't get me wrong, parodies can be FUN, but they tend to be disposable, often empty containers. Which is OK! Just not where I want to dedicate my time.

Which brings me to a man who I don't know how to categorize – Reggie Watts. His music and stage performances are playful as well as funny (pretty hilarious actually), he's a great musician and vocalist who uses looping technology to improvise pieces with rich musical fluency and expressiveness. His humor (musical and otherwise) plays with both musical and societal expectations. He performs on late-night stages and TED conferences in thrift store outfits and has a huge fluffy afro that he bobs around as he performs. He'll begin a sentence speaking in a 'stuffy british gentleman' accent then morph halfway through into a 'stereotypical black guy' accent. In poking fun at pretentious intellectualism, he'll string together such poetic philosophical quasi-absurdisms that you wish he WASN'T "just being funny" in order to give you the go-ahead to actually embrace and dissect the concepts he's satirizing.

It's a masterful kind of play. I'll leave you with this video:

New Game Music: Peano's Vault

Take a look (and listen) at the latest Sifteo puzzle game, Peano's Vault, designed by master puzzle-maker Scott Kim! The challenge for this game was writing music that was sneaky and suspenseful, but also fun and light.

Surf Berlin

I've been working on my friend Ira's new feature documentary Surf Berlin. In the film, Ira chronicles what may be the world's most unlikely surf spot: a wave created once per day by a passing ferry boat on a lake near Berlin.

Sword & Sworcery: EP

I've been playing through Sword & Sworcery: EP and am really loving the music and sound.

Audience Calibration Procedure from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery on Vimeo.

I've read others describe the music as 'chiptune' but it really isn't at all. Lots of lush synths (my guess is that the difference between 'synth' and 'chiptune' is confusing for some), harps, voice, electric guitars, and a drum kit all add up to an otherworldly palette that can be either propulsive/badass or whimsical/reflective. Jim Guthrie wrote the music -- he's also written the score to the upcoming Indie Game: The Movie, which I'm also really excited about.