Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
58 M PS E . O R G Eric Marks MPSE: Before you got into the industry, how did you first become interested in game audio? Becky Allen, Audio Director at Halo Studios: I came from a serious classical music family, so that was always my foundation. I remember being around 6 years old when we got Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, and those sounds were completely different from anything I'd heard before. I'd lie on the floor and just listen—I was transported. That was really the beginning of my fascination with sound beyond acoustic instruments. I also had a little tape recorder and would go out and record things. That kind of technology wasn't part of my family's world, so my interest in it was entirely my own. It started with Switched-On Bach. EM: How did that ultimately lead you toward games and the career you built? BA: I continued on—I became a flutist, an opera singer, I did theater. I didn't get into composition until Hampshire College, where I took a class on 20th-century music. The first time I heard Steve Reich's Clapping Music, I thought, "What is that?" The way he used sound and rhythm differently— it opened everything up. From that point on, I became a composer. I was a philosophy major, focused on aesthetic philosophy, but I started doing compositions and performances and got deep into the composers of the '50s, '60s, and '70s—John Cage, the minimalists. That whole period awakened this idea that you can take a concept and apply it to sound. I still love that. That's what eventually led me to game audio. It wasn't really a field yet. I went from undergrad to graduate school at CalArts, where I studied electronic music with Morton Subotnick. We had big floppy disks, EMU IIs, and our first two-track Pro Tools—the very first version. I always loved the combination of acoustic and electronic. That era, around 1998–99, was when audio could finally be delivered as wave files rather than chip audio. Our program was unusual—we had real studios, Moogs, Buchlas, and a serious technology focus. Very few programs were doing that. We were well-positioned, even if the industry itself was just getting started. I was also part of something called the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology—a new CalArts program that launched during my time there. I served as Morton Subotnick's assistant and TA, helping get it off the ground. We partnered with a place called the Electronic Cafe and did video projection performances streamed over a 14.4 modem. Trying to coordinate a live performance at those speeds was absurd, but it was thrilling. That was the frontier of MIDI, of networked media, of early internet—and I was right there.