Music and Sound Effects in Computer Games

Simon Amarasingham of dSonic will give a one-hour talk on music and sound effects in computer games. The talk will be given at 12:50 and then repeated at 2:00. The talk’s primary audience is grades 5–9 students, but adults are welcome as well. There is a fee for parking, but the talk is free.

Mr. Amarasingham will be demonstrating some of the things that go into making music and sound effects for a game, including some of the things that go on “under the hood” of game software. This includes Adaptive Music—music which changes in real time depending on events in the game, how animations are tied to sound effects, the use of randomization of sounds and the scripting (simple programming) that is used to make sounds happen when they should.

dSonic was formed in 2000 by brothers and game industry veterans, Kemal and Simon Amarasingham and now has teams of accomplished composers and sound designers in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. They have over sixty titles to their credit and have won numerous “best of” awards from the gaming press. Recent projects include major titles such as: Bethesda’s Oblivion, Namco Bandai’s Mage Knight: Apocalypse, Ubisoft’s Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Microsoft’s top selling Zoo Tycoon 2 and Mumbo Jumbo’s casual gaming hit Luxor. Currently they are working on Irrational Games’ anticipated title Bioshock.

The Forum auditorium is in the Library building, near Lot 3. You’ll need eight quarters for a day parking pass. See the campus map.

The talk is part of Dave Briccetti’s computer programming classes at DVC College for Kids.