Baba Yaga (2021 Emmy Award Winner)
For this Emmy award winning VR experience for Quest and PC VR by Baobab Studio, I worked with the Pollen Music Group to script and prototype the audio behavior of a swinging lantern using Unity internal audio, as well some consulting work for other sections of the experience. Although this was a brief contract, the team found my script useful and their final version was mostly based on my previous work.

This game continues the award winning tradition of Baobab, winning an Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Media for a DayTime Program as well as a Golden Reel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing and the Fan Award at the Venice Film Festival.

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Out There (MR experience – Magic Leap)

This groundbreaking onsite mixed reality (MR) musical experience produced by Wilkins Avenue and Pollen Music along with a star studded cast, including Grammy winner Vanessa Williams, was created for the Magic Leap AR headset, combined with a physical environment overlaid with virtual objects. For this contract, I worked with sound designer Richard Warp of Intonic Audio to assist in scripting audio interaction with two virtual musical objects for the area. This was a challenge, in that due to strict NDA clauses as a subcontractor, I was not permitted to see any artwork or to work inside the Unity project and had to go entirely by text and audio description of the desired behavior, while mocking it up in Unity myself to test the interaction and verify all was working. In the end, I did manage to overcome these limitations and delivered the desired behavior, which contributed to the excellent reception for the experience when it premiered at the 2019 Paris Comic-Con.

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Jeff Koonse – Garden Test
This was a really interesting job I did for a startup called AcuteArt subcontracting with Intonic Audio and composer Richard Warp, who I previously worked with on the Kizoom Brainventures game. The goal of the website is to serve as a hosting service for VR art experiences, and for their debut they contracted work by several well-known artists – Marina Abramovich, Olafur Eliasson, and Jeff Koonse.

I worked mostly on the project for Jeff Koonse. This was a virtual garden setting for Vive headset on PC, with butterflies that the user could touch and interact with. The butterflies would trigger a generative music system and play notes. This system was adapted from an earlier one devised by Charlie Hugenard and the output was spatialized using Steam Audio.

Unfortunately the garden idea ultimately did not get approved to go forward, so this video demo recorded from the Vive is the only evidence that exists for it. I did also consult on the other two projects in terms of audio mastering and last minute interaction tweaking. Overall a really fun job, just a bit disappointed it never saw the light of day.

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EagleDiveVR
This VR based game lesson from the Game Audio Institute in Unity with spatial audio handled by Steam Audio was adapted from a Oculus Rift based Unity Asset. Using VRTK for a Vive version and subsequently Unity’s XR Interaction Toolkit, I revised the game code to run on Oculus Link in Windows as well as Mac and Windows standalone. I was responsible for all code revision and adapting to these platforms and overhauled the entire music management system as well. I also wrote the documentation and produced video tutorials for the implementation.

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Constellation Prototype (Vive)

Constellation is a 3D music sequencer project i have been involved with for several years on and off in the Unity game engine. It is a unique music application/experience based upon the idea of being able to rotate a musical idea along a 3D while viewing it on 2D screen. The name of the app is based on the phenomenon that any given arrangement of stars in a constellation is not actually equidistant from the viewer. Instead stars are at different levels of distance from the viewer. Thus rotation of the constellation from a center point would result in vastly different patterns than what was originally perceived.

 
The basic idea revolves around a fairly common grid based sequencer approach that many application and hardware sequencers take, where pitch is controlled by the vertical (Y) axis and time the horizontal (X) axis. In this case, however i have a third axis, making the design a 8x8x8 cube. This last axis (Z) controls timbre with different instruments playing. Rotating the cube then not only changes what notes or pitches are playing at various times, it also changes the instrument used to play them. Because the sequencer rotations are somewhat constrained in terms of outcomes, the resulting transformations of the sequence can be heard as more or less distantly related to the original idea, but in a slightly different manner than typical motivic transformation via inversion, retrograde and so on.
This prototype uses Csound as the sound engine running within Unity as well as a rudimentary cross modulation between layers. Future expansions will revise the interaction to be more intuitive, and will have a 16 x 16 x 16 cube, as well as many more cross modulating and processing capabilities.

 

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Pearl (2017 Annie & Emmy Award Winner)
Did consulting work for this award-winning Google Spotlight short 360 video by Patrick Osborne with audio by Pollen Music Group. I analyzed the code in Unity to determine best approaches for integration of ambisonic audio with Easy Movie Texture’s FFMPEG based video playback on the Samsung GearVR platform.
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Death’s Feather
This project published on Itch.io is another collaboration with Grammy winning engineer and composer for the film ‘Super Size Me’ Steve Horowitz, and it’s an homage to a Randy Hostetler, a composer of promise who attended California Institute of the Arts but whose life was cut short only a few years after graduating with a Master’s degree. Steve had earlier written a piece dedicated to his memory called ‘Death’s Feather’ after a short poem by Dylan Thomas, but rather than a basic recording or recorded concert video he decided an interactive setting would be an interesting and engaging experience that would bring a different audience’s attention to Randy’s music and aesthetic.

We discussed various possibilities and settled on a FPS setting in a 3D maze environment. The piece would be the basic soundtrack, which would temporarily end musically by entering into special areas where players could experience a video of a performed piece by Randy or examine his influences. Once the player left the area the music would return. Eventually by visiting all four of these areas you were allowed to leave the maze by falling through it, which would trigger the ending and credits.

I handled all the level design and C# scripting for this in Unity which involved some usage of the Unity Timeline in the intro, as well as the ending and music management along with video clip playback playing on textures in special rooms. Also managed to find a text animation asset that created spooky floating text which was typed out for an introductory poem as well the basic directions. Overall a brief but fun project!

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SoundInMotion
This was a slightly unusual contract job for an Israeli startup that did NOT involve Unity but instead used the low level FMOD Studio API running in Xcode. The team wanted to create an application for iOS that would allow the user to perform different kinds of foley to existing videos by triggering and manipulating parameters of the sound using touch. A few different panels allowed control of car foley, or of weather or other sounds. This was my first experience dealing directly with Xcode and ObjectiveC and it was a challenge but ultimately resulted in a shipping product that’s still available.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sound-in-motion/id1167935147

https://www.soundinmotionapp.com/soundinmotion

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Essential Game Audio App
I designed all of the music and sound effects for this title to accompany our book The Essential Guide to Game Audio. Both the book and the app were published by Focal Press. I also programmed all of the interactive game examples in the app (The Holodeck section) in Unity which also featured videos and quizzes by the developer Zephyr Media and Teravision. Last, I ended up in charge of creating and testing the final build in Xcode and delivering it to Teravision.

Due to the application being 32 bit and there being no desire to update it by Focal, the app is unfortunately no longer available.

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Shadow Puppeteer

Metaphysical Media was privileged to work on this critically acclaimed co-op physics based puzzle platformer from developer Sarepta Studios. We provided audio implementation assistance to the main contractor, my good friend Jory Prum and his Studio Jory, in this Unity based PC and Wii U title using Fabric audio middleware. Duties Included light scripting, configuring of scripts, configuring trigger objects in the Unity scene, and communicating more complex needs to the programming lead.

Sadly, this was the only time I was able to work with Jory on a project, due to his untimely death in a motorcycle accident in 2016.

Awards & Recognition:

  • “Winner «Shadow Puppeteer – Indie Prize Europe: Director’s Choice Award»” – Amsterdam, February 2015
  • “Winner «Shadow Puppeteer – Game Connection Development Awards: Most Promising IP»” – San Francisco, March 2015

 

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