A scoring session for ‘The Princess and the Frog’ – Disney’s first hand-animated film for years – with composer Randy Newman:
A scoring session for ‘The Princess and the Frog’ – Disney’s first hand-animated film for years – with composer Randy Newman:
Tonight’s the night for the GAME British Academy Video Award show, and you can watch the event live online right here at 8:45 PM GMT.
Creative Assembly’s ‘Empire: Total War’ – with music by Epic Sound – is nominated in the Best Strategy Game-category, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed!
Joystiq takes a look at the work that went into creating the sound for thatgamecompany’s Flower – a great game with a unique vibe and a great soundscape.
Both of the developers gave some interesting insight into their respective designs. Diamante talked about how he’d assembled the music for the game, tying it to various flowers and hits in the landscape, layering it down so that as the player opened up new areas, new parts of the soundtrack would not just appear but actually take the lead. First the violin would lead the melody, and then the clarinet would take over, without the violin changing parts.
Johnson spoke at length about how he manufactured the game’s sound effects. At each menu screen, he talked about the ambient sound he’d placed in the game and where it came from. The game’s first menu screen has a heavy room tone, as it’s meant to show claustrophobia and a sense of being trapped, but as the levels progress, the room opens up. The next menu screen plays traffic from Chicago, and then later, a storm playing throughout a city. He talked about how he hid things in the background — in one menu screen, he’d placed some voicemail messages in very quietly at about eleven minutes in, but he thinks the developers later removed them.
Here’s some footage from the game:
Read the full post on the sound for Flower here.
We spend most of our days here in the studio listening to the sounds we create ourselves – but when I’m not doing audio, one of my personal favourite albums to listen to while working is Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Insen’.
Together, they paint some beautiful, atmospheric soundscapes in a great blend between Sakamoto’s organic piano sound and Noto’s glitchy and electronic-sounding edits.
You can hear an excerpt from ‘Logic Moon’ below, one of the tracks off their album – and you can find the full album on iTunes, emusic, and Amazon among others.
Hope you enjoy it 
Film Music Magazine looks at ten ways the iPad could enhance the film scoring process. Will indeed be interesting to see if any of this comes true once the device is out.
ScorePad – Imagine a world where recording musicians brought their iPads to the session and their parts were downloaded electronically to the iPads, or maybe even sent before the session if the musicians were asked to prepare beforehand. The addition of a stylus input, which is possible with the existing capacitive touchscreen technology Apple uses in both the iPhone and the iPad, makes it easy for musicians to make notes on the virtual score parts during a session, and updates to the score and parts made during a session could instantly be transmitted to the iPads of the players whose parts are changed, and scores could be displayed for the conductor in larger format on an external display. With bluetooth input, a score-reading application like Sibelius or Finale could be put into “sync mode” to automatically turn pages and keep the displayed parts and score in sync with timecode. Whether your orchestra is in the same room or across the world connected to you over the Internet, instant part changes become quick and easy to make.
Read the full post here.
Soundworks Collection recorded a panel discussion from the Game Developers Conference 2010 on how things were in the early days of game audio.
Not just a walk down memory lane, this panel will explore how the music of first generation 8-bit games was created and what makes it so well loved by gamers of all ages. What makes those old 8-bit tunes still so endearing, instantly recognizable and still fun to listen to? We will explore the glory days of game music, how it was created under unbelievable technical restrictions compared to today’s production standards. We’ll also explore how the modern day composer and audio director can use many of the same concepts and techniques used in first generation in today’s music.
Watch Soundworks Collection’s full feature on the GDC sound talks here.
Designing Sound has a special feature on the sound of ‘Transformers’ – and here are three videos that go behind the scenes on the audio for the franchise.
Check out Designing Sound’s full feature on the sound for “Transformers”, including an interview with film sound designer Erik Aadahl.
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