Summary
In today’s episode Oliver was joined via Skype by Aaron McLeran, Lead Audio Programmer at Epic Games. Aaron’s first taste of audio programming was writing computer music in CSound while in graduate school at University of Notre Dame (when he was supposed to be doing astrophysics research). Realising his true calling, he left physics to study procedural and interactive computer music, audio synthesis, and audio analysis with Dr. Curtis Roads at the University of Santa Barbara. His first game audio experience was writing procedural music on Spore where he got to collaborate with Brian Eno and Maxis’ audio director Kent Jolly on writing much of the game’s truly procedural music. His next game audio gig was a sound designer on Dead Space 2 where he wrote much of the games interactive audio systems in Lua along with accomplished audio director Don Veca. He made the leap from technical sound designer to audio programmer at Sledgehammer Games where he worked on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. His next audio programming gig was at ArenaNet where he got to wrangle with the unpredictability and scale of game audio in the context of an MMO and developed some pretty cool tech around for player-created music and musical interaction. He’s currently working on a new multi-platform audio mixer backend for UE4 and developing new tech and approaches to game audio for VR.
Aaron speaks to Oliver about all things Game Audio and Procedural Audio and his unusual entry into the industry.
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Shownotes
Super Collider: https://supercollider.github.io/
UC Berkeley: Centre for New Music and Audio Technologies: http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/
Maxis: https://www.ea.com/studios/maxis
Spore: http://www.spore.com/
Brian Eno: http://www.brian-eno.net/
Andrew Lackey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlackey
Wabi Sabi Sound: http://www.wabisabisound.com/
Kent Jolly: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0427204/
EA Games: https://www.ea.com/en-gb
UC Santa Barbara: https://www.ucsb.edu/
Curtis Roads: http://www.music.ucsb.edu/people/curtis-roads
Sledgehammer Games: https://www.sledgehammergames.com/
Travis Naas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tnaas
Activision: https://www.activision.com/
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare: https://www.callofduty.com/uk/en/infinitewarfare
Dave Swenson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-swenson-3b5b376
Epic Games: https://www.epicgames.com/
Unreal Engine 4: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog
Ethan Geller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-geller-7684133a
Game Developers Conference: http://www.gdconf.com/
FMOD: https://www.fmod.com/
Dan Reynolds: http://www.musicianeer.com/
Steam Audio: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
Oculus: https://www.oculus.com
Valve: http://www.valvesoftware.com/
Fortnite: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite