Saturday, April 26, 2014

All over the place

It's been a long time! I haven't updated for so long because I've been travelling the world. Considering the luck I've had with three studios in a row shutting down on me, this time I had the money saved and the time to spare, so went and ticked a whole bunch of things off my bucket list - Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Canada.

So here I am again, six countries and over 20 cities later, financially quite a bit poorer but what a lot of brilliant experiences I've had. Took a lot of photos. Ate a lot of fantastic food. Lost a lot of hats.

What does this have to do with audio? Well, a good chunk of what I did was sight-seeing, but I brought my handheld recorder with me. A lot of Asia was a terrible wash in this department - Japan might be the international champion of noise pollution. But I managed to catch a least a couple of recordings of the iconic train crossings. Was ready to cry when walking on a nightingale floor though, and not being able to catch anything in the recording beyond mellow background jazz!

I did however record some amazing ambiences in Lousiana's bayous, a variety of snow footsteps (in Canadian 'Spring'), sea lions in San Francisco, and a whole host of other interesting sounds encountered along the way. I'm still going through them, and probably will be for a while yet. Maybe later I'll put them up on SoundCloud.

Attended GDC as well, which was very inspiring. Despite something like eight years in the industry now, it was my first time attending and a hell of an experience. It's exciting to see audio tools growing better and better, giving more and more autonomy to audio designers. Lots of great ideas for where we can look into taking games audio next. Plus it was a fantastic chance to meet and talk with more audio people, and get my fingers back on the pulse of what's happening in the games industry after the last several months of globe-trotting.

I find myself a bit indecisive what to do next though! I would like to get back into a studio environment, working on a team and really dancing on the bleeding edge of audio integration tools and techniques, but it's a big time for indies right now too! And I have all the equipment I need to set up a very nice home studio for freelancing as well. Life's a bit uncertain these days, but that's audio. No end of things to keep me busy though, hopefully I'll remember to post about some of them!