Purveyor of Earworms for It Follows, FEZ, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Hyper Light Drifter, Mini Metro / Motorways, and many other things. 63 albums and a game called January.
Returning to "Horror" After #It Follows, I knew I wanted to wait for the right opportunity before jumping back in to score another horror film, if at all. And so I waited, and turned down quite a few opportunities until Bodies Bodies Bodies came along. It's not exactly horror, per se. It's a b...
Childhood Doodles I grew up in an artistic family. My mother was a graphic designer, and her father was an art director at Reader's Digest. So I was inspired from an early age to doodle, draw and come up with my own visual pastimes. Nu-Metal Beginnings As far as I can remember, this was the ve...
this is a working draft. Mini Motorways is a part zen, part hair-pulling urban planning game from the creators of #Mini Metro. It features a procedurally generated soundscape full ofrhythmic & harmonic trickery. It features something scarcely found in games—an entire soundscape created proce...
In which I talk about what went into the creation of the procedural audio for the 2019 follow up to Mini Metro, "Mini Motorways". Topics include procedurally generated harmony and rhythm, as well as DSP and working on sequels. Instead of a direct transcript, check out the →postmortem.
Written over New Year's 2014, originally intended to be a remix, but completely lacking any clear tie-in, "Naked" graduated to become its own track. Will be on a forthcoming album. Music Video by Don Tancredo
A talk covering many of the audio systems in the game, including the procedural exploration music, vertex spatialization system which handles environmental ambience, as well as case studies more specific to particular props and game mechanics.
I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the University of Utah on October 19th, 2024 about concept art, from the perspective of someone who creates music and sound. Transcript The Art of the Rolling StartA Talk About Concept Art Music September 19th, 2024 Introduction Concepting is a tech...
Don't ask me how, but Disasterpeace made it into a Star Wars game. A few years ago, not too far away... For the game Star Wars: Hunters, I was asked to write bounty hunter themes, but through the lens of things like wrestling entrance music. I loved wrestling growing up, and one of the k...
Here's a list of all the records we've done vinyl runs for. Availability may vary. Bodies Bodies Bodies Marcel the Shell With Shoes On Hyper Light Drifter (sold out) It Follows Under the Silver Lake Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar (sold out) FEZ (sold out)
'Jugglernaut', written for Everhood : Eternity Edition
100 bosses, 5 seconds at a time. A medley of three new tracks, written for Pwnisher's Boss Fight Challenge.
Draw the roadways that drive the city.
this is a working draft. Track Descriptions Ribbiting This is the music from the release trailer. I brought back the "turtle drum" from the original demo, "First Visit to the Marsh". Despite consisting of only four samples, this drum sounds good across a wide register. The four samples cov...
Over the years I've written a few tracks for Michael Molinari's Soundodger series of games. Backtrack : Ford the River Backtrack is a series devoted to backtracking to tell short stories about songs I've written. "Ford the River", written for Soundodger 2. I wrote this song back in 20...
An Hour of Crickets and Music. Play the game to hear it undulate forever. Apologies for leaving the cursor out to dry.
A talk about creative tools, for the 'High Score' Conference hosted by APRA/AMCOS in Melbourne, Australia. picard added after for comedic effect whoops !
From November 2021 to Feb 2022, I had the opportunity to contribute to the audio for Project Lyra, Epic Games' Demo Project for Unreal Engine 5.0. This was my second foray into the world of Unreal, after spending five years working on the UE4 game #Solar Ash . My primary task was to explore Metasou...
A video workshop demonstrating how to make synthesizers parts for music more organic and expressive. Special thanks to Tomás Palazzi who asked me to talk about this, and to EPX for giving me a forum to do so !
an hour of waves, by popular request.
Dino Polo Club recently released the Workshop update for #Mini Metro , which allows users to create their own maps for the game. To further help with this I've created a tutorial video and a toolkit. The toolkit contains a written guide, as well as a JSON schema set up for Visual Studio Co...
I gave a talk at ENJMIN 2020 about the gibberish-based procedural voiceover system we built for the 2016 game Reigns. Transcript: My talk is called "Reigns: A Thousand Years of Deterministic Babble". This talk it's about a voiceover system that we created. We're going to talk about what wor...
Transcribed for Piano by David Peacock Download (PDF)
'Oklahoma', originally written as a fan request, about a couple separated by geography. Transcribed for Piano by David Peacock Download (PDF)
My colleague Noah Kellman asked me to write the foreword for his recently published book, ‘ The Game Music Handbook’. In visual media, there is a tendency to treat music like polish. Hired late in the process, composers typically begin working on a project that's otherwise nearly complete. Our ta...
'Turning Teeth', an original song written for the band 'Silversun Pickups' from the film 'Under the Silver Lake' with lyrical contributions from Director David Robert Mitchell Transcribed by David Peacock Download (PDF)
It's rare that I'd want to share what is essentially a review of my work, but I don't think I've seen one where someone so completely 'got' one of my albums as much as Joe Dorsey gets ⌾Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar. There are a lot of insightful connections drawn here that go beyond the album i...
This musical excerpt features samples from a recording of 'Petrushka', composed by Igor Stravinsky. The Mud Water Project was a multidisciplinary theater project bringing together turf dancers, ballet dancers, music and spoken word artists. Utilizing acting and improvisational dance, whil...
For all you freelancers out there, I built a 'project personality matrix', for fun and to hopefully help me to continue to make thoughtful work choices. The idea is to grade current/future/past projects in different categories that matter to you, which gives you a score out of a 100. It's fasci...
I was recently asked to contribute a guest mix to Lynchland: "I thought it would be fun to put together a narrative sort of mix, only using songs shorter than 60 seconds, and keeping the work of David Lynch in the back of my head." Tracklist 00:00 The Books - PS 00:49 Joanna Broul - The Soundi...
A squad of fearless geeks who stand for honor, friendship, and doing stuff.An animated series by Encyclopedia Pictura, directed by Isaiah Saxon & Sean Hellfritsch. Music and mixing by yours truly. Listen to the soundtrack ⌾here. add album ... -->
I gave a talk at GDC 2018 as part of a session at the AI Summit called 'Beyond Procedural Horizons'. I talk about how we combined data sonification and concepts taken from the musical approach known as Serialism to build the game's soundscape. Transcript Serialism & Sonification in Min...
I gave a microtalk at GDC 2018 as part of a session at the Artificial Intelligence Summit called 'Turing Tantrums: Devs Rant!'. I shared a thought experiment about exploring the possibility space of abstracted data relationships that cross disciplinary boundaries. Unlikely data marriages! ...
* 2020 * Subpixel. Originally published on Gameumentary in 2017 but updated : We talk about prog rock, composing for orchestra, personal philosophy, early musical memories, workflow, social media, Level, Mini Metro, January, Under the Silver Lake, Triple Frontier, and Hyper Light Drifter. * 20...
A nice look at the harmonic choices in games like FEZ & Hyper Light Drifter that ties them to some of the larger trends in 20th/19th century music.
This interview originally appeared on the Native Instruments blog. You’ve found great success both in videogames and film scoring work. What are the main ways in which the creative process has differed between the two? Do you find yourself using hugely different production workflows depending on ...
'Disasters for Piano' is a collection of my works arranged (for piano) by David Peacock. Links: ⌾Album, Sheet Music Book, Free PDF One day, I saw an Instagram video of someone performing a short snippet of 'Forgotten' from FEZ on piano. I was really taken by David's style, watched all o...
Podcasts & Video Interviews * 2020 * Steven Melin. We discuss the major projects I've turned down, including Stranger Things. We also chat about how to discover your style as a composer and how to navigate career direction in a world of endless possibilities. Composer's Concepts We talke...
Documentary Filmmaker Lucras Negroni visited my studio in LA and we spoke over the course of two days about various aspects of my work and career.
'The Apple Palace', an original piece for Marimba. Written during a residency at Avaloch Farms in Boscawen, NH. Transcribed by Doug Perry Download (PDF)
this is a working draft. While Peter and I both did quite a bit of coding on Mini Metro, we have very different ways of thinking and communicating. We had to overcome cross-disciplinary differences as well as the nuances of being from different English-speaking countries. We both learned quite a lo...
Arranged for Piano by David Peacock
I gave a microtalk at GDC 2017 as part of a session called 'Composer Confessions'. Transcript: I often find the beginning of a project to be the most exciting period. There's a sense that anything is possible, which has often propelled me down many avenues in search of the 'thing'. Along ...
Jonathan Brodsky & I answered some questions about our work on the game ‘Beasts of Balance’.
Gunhouse was a very unique and fun project for me. I set out to create a soundtrack primarily using loops. I was inspired by a conversation I had with my friend and colleague James Primate about a talk Darren Korb gave about his work on the game Bastion. That soundtrack contains a lot of premade ...
A short by Eran Hilleli. Music & Sound by yours truly.
As an artist, being pigeonholed is an unfortunate reality that comes with the territory. It can be frustrating to be cast into the same pools as things you might find distasteful, poorly executed, or weakly related ... But these associations are rarely malicious. They are judgments, often based o...
I spoke with Peter Curry of Dinosaur Polo Club at Konsoll 2016, in Bergen, Norway. We spoke about the audio systems.
A stop-motion short by Kirsten Lepore. Music by yours truly. Soundtrack: ⌾Bad Jubies I had the pleasure of scoring Kirsten Lepore's guest directed, Emmy award-winning episode of Adventure Time from Season 7, 'Bad Jubies'. This is one of my favorite shows and I wanted to honor the feeling of ...
*this is a giant, everchanging collection of micellaneous tidbits about my life and career.* On The Moniker I had a habit as a kid of creating fictional entities just so I could create visual designs. I wanted to form a band, but before calling any friends I came up with a name and a logo. The gr...
I grew up in a musical household in Staten Island, NY. My step-father was the music director of our church and in a Beatles cover band called 'The Blue Meanies.' He would hold band practices in our basement, and I would go down there to play the drums. My mom sings and plays the piano, and my sister...