Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
148 M PS E . O R G of Vhagar to Toothless, where do we want the vocalizations to land for this dragon?" And another big part of it is just having fun with it all. Be excited about what you're about to create. Games are created by teams, not just a single individual, so the more you can talk to everyone else working on a feature and really understand the thought processes behind all the decision-making, the more cohesive everything will be. What tools and technologies are integral to your work in game audio? Have you adopted any new tools or techniques recently that have changed how you work? PH: This is probably a more obvious answer at this point, but it doesn't make it any less true—Reaper, NVK Tools (for Reaper), and the Kilohearts suite of plug-ins. Reaper is, and I think will forever be, my favorite DAW; I can't get over how much it has changed the way I work. NVK is up there because of how much faster my workflow is. NVK Create helps with the brainstorming, Variations helps with quick iteration, Folders helps organize my sessions... Every single NVK tool is a massive benefit. Kilohearts is so easy to understand and set up, and I can iterate so fast that it's the first plug-in suite I turn to when I'm starting a new design. Snapheap and Phaseplant are both game changers for sound design. I used to design in Ableton Live, and the one thing I've been missing in Reaper has been Ableton's Effect Rack. Snapheap gives me most of what I want from Effect Rack in a neat little bundle, and the amount of variety it's given me in my designs has been unmatched. How do you balance the desire to innovate with the technical constraints and limitations of game development? PH: I think figuring out how to scale up systems while maintaining a stable build is what keeps the innovation flowing, and where the balance lives. As you push a technical system forward, at what point do you start seeing diminishing returns? Also, is what you're doing actually helping, or is it just making things more convoluted for everyone else to use? How much can you automate or future-proof, without it actually being harder to use or too expensive on machine resources? What trends are you seeing in game audio that are exciting or concerning to you? PH: There are a lot of games coming out that are giving audio a highlight in some fantastically creative ways. Hi-Fi Rush and Tchia come to mind, as well as the player- controlled guitar moments in The Last of Us: Part 2. Teams are leaning more and more on audio to be a significant part of the storytelling. It's awesome. In terms of concerns, likely unsurprising, but I'm not a fan of where AI (artificial intelligence) is going. I think workflow improvements using AI are where we've seen the most positive progress in this technology, as it gives us more time to be creative. However, we are now starting to see content generation in AI. My biggest concern is how many of these generative systems are plagiarizing the works of many talented sound designers, voice artists. and musicians (as well as visual artists and everyone else being affected) to train their output databases. The more they train on these high-quality sources, the more high quality we will see in the AI output, and the "cheaper" it will become to get passable sound design into media. This is going to affect jobs and livelihoods more and more as time goes on if this kind of content generation continues to be allowed. More immediately, it will make it significantly more difficult for juniors and up-and-comers to find open roles, especially as lower budget projects look for cheaper ways of gathering audio source and larger budget teams try to cut costs and speed up workflow in earlier iterations of work. I do think there can be a place for generative AI, provided the content they are training on has been approved by all parties. But until more regulations are in place for all of this, I will remain hesitant over its usage. What project are you most proud of and why? PH: Honestly, I think what I'm most proud of now is the community we've built up over the last couple of years in the "Sound Design" Discord server. It started as a small server, but we've grown it into a decently sized place for everyone from beginner to advanced in sound design. It's not exclusively for game audio and we have several film and music folks in there as well. We have monthly sound design challenges, have had a couple of fun industry talks, and lots of amazing information is being shared. I really love what it has turned into, and I hope it continues to grow and thrive. Can you tell me more about your