The annual GameSoundCon celebrated its 18th year in October, welcoming video game composers, sound designers, and other industry professionals to Los Angeles for two days of panels, workshops, and networking.
Major developers such as Valve and Insomniac Games conducted informative sessions, while lauded composers including Inon Zur (Fallout), Garry Schyman (BioShock), and Jesper Kyd (Assassin’s Creed) shared their experience creating iconic themes. There were also plenty of product updates and demonstrations from Unreal Engine, Wwise, and more.
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MusicTech attended the event to see how music and audio are growing alongside the video game market, which is now worth over $200 billion.
The concern: AI
AI was discussed in depth at GameSoundCon, and, like everyone else, the game audio industry is still finding its feet.
Roc Lee, senior sound designer at Clean Cuts Interactive, led a comprehensive session entitled ‘A Frank Discussion About AI for Sound Designers: Different Work, Not Less Work.’
In 30 minutes, he discussed similar points throughout history, detailing fears about new technology and how those fears played out. One example is Socrates’ fears that writing would disempower memory, but we know he said that because Plato wrote it down. Another example was when 22,000 theatre musicians lost their jobs after movies got their own soundtracks. But that created recording jobs for those same musicians, not to mention sound design work for films.
Lee also shared his own experiences, which were equally dichotomous. He admitted he was “afraid” of being left behind by AI, so he used it to build several tools himself. They included applications for running sound and music cues live, a REAPER similarity search, and some audio plugins. In that process, he found that AI made him feel more creative.
On the recorded music side, a primary concern at the moment is royalties. How are artists going to be paid for their work as major labels sign licensing deals with billion-dollar generative AI companies and use their catalogues to train generative AI? According to Lee, games didn’t have the same types of concerns just yet.
“Games have always been the Wild West,” he told me after his presentation was over. The key difference between recorded music and game composition is scale. One text-based prompt can make a pop song, but gaming soundtracks can require as much as five hours of music, with pieces that adhere to different scenarios. Some tracks loop in sections as players explore; others are triggered by certain actions. Even if someone wanted to use generative AI to create an entire game score, it would have to be fine-tuned and double-checked significantly, leading, once again, to different work — not less work.
“Game composers are some of the most vocal against generative AI, but the market is bifurcated,” Lee says. “You have AAA people who don’t want AI to make games at all. But there is a whole culture of people wanting to make indie games or hobbyists making AI games, and they don’t care.”
For a look inside how a AAA studio is thinking about AI, members of Valve’s audio team presented a similar thought process. They already had everything they needed to make what are widely considered some of the greatest games of all time. So, AI is not necessary, but they don’t want to hold anything back when it comes to innovation.
“We have never been the best because we get shit done fast,” says Mike Morasky, lead composer, musician, and technical director at Valve.
The trend: The flatter, the better
Two of Valve’s presentations were essentially open Q&As about what it’s like to work at the company. During both, Morasky emphasised the company’s flat structure, which is best explained by the headline of the “People” section on their website: “Boss-free since 1996.”
Technically, everyone has an equal say at Valve. The culture of seniority comes into play, but all ideas are welcome, and all teams overlap. Morasky mentioned that the audio team could also be part of the level design process, or some other aspect of the game’s creation.
Overall, this comes down to removing friction to get complete a given task in the creation of a video game. All throughout Game Sound Con, different presentations and products centred on this idea.
ZW Buckley, who has composed for Keyword 2: Nightfall and designed sounds for Minecraft, gave a presentation about composing adaptive music in DAWs rather than standard middleware. When he inquired, “How many composers would never touch middleware again if they didn’t have to?” numerous hands shot up.
Middleware is addressing this dynamic as well. Wwise had a very strong presence at Game Sound Con that included a dedicated conference room as well as a booth on the product floor where Mike Drummelsmith, head of licensing at Audiokinetic (Wwise’s parent company), talked about the new features they were advertising:
“The biggest ones are a reorientation of the differences between sound and music,” Drummelsmith says. “For years we’ve had a sound system and a music system, and they were separated for good reasons, but they also had unique feature sets for themselves. That led ot a lot of teams doing sound stuff in the music system because they could get timing and rhythm. Now we’re bringing music features to sound and sound features to music. It’ll make it so teams don’t have to do the workaround.”
The Unreal Engine team had a booth across the floor from Wwise, where they were promoting their product’s ability to create music without middleware. It wasn’t new, but it was gaining more attention.
“It has a lot of benefits to how you work on a larger team with a lot of different disciplines all together on the same project,” says Seth Weedin, director of technical audio at Epic Games (Epic Games is Unreal Engine’s parent company). “Boundaries between disciplines are getting blurrier and blurrier. Everybody’s encouraged to experiment. Having it all in one spot makes that easier.”
Interesting Insights:
Here are some tidbits of knowledge the speakers shared that current and prospective game sound workers can take into account.
Battlefield 6 still used 24 bit recording alongside 32-bit for all the practical recordings of weapons and vehicles. Jeff Wilson, studio audio director at EA Ripple Effect Studios, called 24-bit a “lost art form,” as he works with younger professionals. But there is an interesting perspective on this idea regarding genre. Recording quality has character to it. Perhaps a war game that takes place in WWII or a fantasy RPG would make more sense to use 24-bit to create a more historic feeling, while 32-bit is ideal for the next futuristic thriller.
Andrew Powell, a lecturer in music theory and skills at Auburn University, gave a fascinating presentation on how music is adapted for remakes, noting that when Ballistic Moon commissioned a completely new score for the 2024 remake of Until Dawn, the fans revolted and the game was a commercial failure. Powell compared this to the remake of Star Fox 64 that came out for Nintendo Switch 2 earlier this year. Polygon called the music the “best thing” about it, but the score was largely identical to the Nintendo 64 version except it was re-recorded with a full orchestra at Abbey Road.
The biggest change was during the game’s finale. Instead of using the action-packed music from the original, the remake swapped it for something more haunting and cinematic. The fans noticed, and debated the efficacy.
In short, fans are just as connected to the music as any other element in a game.
Video games are not immune to shifts in the broader audio and music markets. But as technology aims to simplify, there is still much room for people to exercise their creativity and expertise to the benefit of the player experience. Because players still notice and care.
Learn more at gamesoundcon.com
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Harry Levin is a freelance journalist with credits in SPIN, Billboard, MusicTech, Grammy.com, Los Angeles Magazine, and more. His musical journey began 20 years ago with a Led Zeppelin CD. He played jazz trombone through college, produced large-scale electronic music events, and now spends his professional time writing and editing.