Opening remarks were made by PNW Chair Dan Mortensen. Then David Christensen, PNW Vice-Chair, continued. David was the Meeting Coordinator this evening, in addition to being an AiS faculty member in Audio Production and the AiS/AES Student Section advisor. He and AiS Audio Production Director Steve Barsotti have been working with Bungie on adding game audio to their curriculum.

Marty O'Donnell, Audio Director, and Jay Weinland, Audio Lead at Bungie Studios, were the presenters. Marty's background includes a Masters degree in Composition from USC; TV, radio and film scoring work; and many best-selling computer games like Riven, Myth, Halo and Halo2. Jay's background includes a BA in oboe and MMT in music teaching from Oberlin, and work on many games from Manley, Electronic Arts, and Bungie such as Need For Speed, ONI, Halo and Halo2.

Armed with Powerbooks (running VPC (Virtual PC)), two projectors to display gameplay and computer screens and 5.1 surround sound, the pair gave a fast-paced introduction to designing sophisticated audio for electronic games, specifically Halo 2 for Xbox. Marty felt that they were more comfortable working with sound on the Macintosh and thus chose to work primarily on that platform, running VPC or using PCs when needed.

They did not cover much of the mundane aspects of acquiring or creating various sounds, such as gun fire, but rather on the method of building sounds into the game engine. Proprietary custom software tools were described that they use to build their sounds into the game. These tools were given odd but otherwise "not significant" names, such as "Guerilla," "Sapien," and "In-Engine."

They described aspects of overall sound design, such as ambience, weapon and vehicle sounds, and sounds of materials vs. objects. The detail of sounds has become increasingly sophisticated as games mature. They also discussed their cinematic approach to music scoring and surrounds, as well as how gameplay dialog, with artificial intelligence and permutations, was handled. Dialog from professional actors was recorded in Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles, at CD quality using time-tested Pro Tools. Hearing a lot of dialog samples out of context was pretty funny, and allowed a chance to hear lines that hardly any gamers get to hear. All together approximately 35,000 sounds and 3,500 chunks of music were used. Marty emphasized that it was important to not have repetitious sounds even when the action was similar, leading to many variations of even common sounds such as footsteps. Game objects are painstakingly tracked to allow sounds to follow accurately, such as multitudes of bullet casings hitting the ground.

The problems of creating a music score for scenes that have undetermined time lengths was discussed. Looping and randomizing small music segments are used.

Quite a few examples were played, such as the game running with various sounds and scenery disabled while debugging text appeared on the screen, and several short movie examples of gameplay scenarios with various sound options.

Their wrap-up thought was perhaps a bit of pseudo-haiku:
"Sound makes it real.
Music makes you feel.
The ear doesn't blink."

Door prize winners were:

• Art Institute of Seattle (AIS) mug: Steve Turnidge
• AIS cap: Vadim Nuniyants
• AIS sweatshirt: Rick Chinn
• AIS flip-flop sandals: Bailey Kitka