Greetings, audio friends! My name is Christian, and I’m thrilled to join the team here at Creating Sound to cover audio programming.
Video game audio and programming share a common bond that goes right back to the very foundation of the industry. The earliest sounds, and even music, had to be programmed into the game, utilizing the hardware to generate tones. This existed in some form or another right up until the Sony Playstation era, whereby digitally recorded audio became more practical due to the increased storage capacity.
Many games and game companies, however, continued to use MIDI and synthesis as the basis for their sound, and so the requirements of programmers to generate wavetables, sound fonts, and to build/implement the MIDI system, was important.
With the current technological advancements in this generation of video games, the role of audio programmers have expanded into building and maintaining entire audio engines that handle implementation, real-time effects processing, and adaptive music; and these features can be unique to each individual game depending largely on the game design itself.
I have a background in both computer science and music, and though I initially wanted to become a film/video game composer, having been introduced to the various implementation tools now in use has really sparked my fascination with the technical side of game audio. It seemed only natural to combine those two skills of mine, and currently I am devoting a lot of my time toward programming audio plug-ins and developing my knowledge of audio processing. Building systems and features to support the vision of the audio and game designers is just too cool of a thing!
I look forward to sharing much of the fascinating things to be found in the world of audio programming here on Creating Sound!
