This is the third edition of Character Development and Storytelling for Games, a standard work in the field that brings all of the teaching from the first two books up to date and tackles the new challenges of today. Professional game writer and designer Lee Sheldon combines his experience and expertise in this updated edition. New examples, new game types, and new challenges throughout the text highlight the fundamentals of character writing and storytelling. But this book is not just a box of techniques for writers of video games. It is an exploration of the roots of character development and storytelling that readers can trace from Homer to Chaucer to Cervantes to Dickens and even Mozart. Many contemporary writers also contribute insights from books, plays, television, films, and, yes, games. Sheldon and his contributors emphasize the importance of creative instinct and listening to the inner voice that guides successful game writers and designers. Join him on his quest to instruct, inform, and maybe even inspire your next great game.

Welcome to the third volume of Game Audio Programming: Principles and Practices-the first series of its kind dedicated to the art and science of game audio programming. This volume contains 14 chapters from some of the top game audio programmers and sound designers in the industry. Topics range across game genres (ARPG, RTS, FPS, etc.), and from low-level topics such as DSP to high-level topics like using influence maps for audio. The techniques in this book are targeted at game audio programmers of all abilities, from newbies who are just getting into audio programming to seasoned veterans. All of the principles and practices in this book have been used in real shipping games, so they are all very practical and immediately applicable. There are chapters about split-screen audio, dynamic music improvisation, dynamic mixing, ambiences, DSPs, and more. This book continues the tradition of collecting modern, up-to-date knowledge and wisdom about game audio programming. So, whether you've been a game audio programmer for one year or ten years, or even if you've just been assigned the task and are trying to figure out what it's all about, this book is for you! Key Features Cutting-edge advanced game audio programming concepts with examples from real game audio engines Includes both high-level and low-level topics Practical code examples, math, and diagrams that you can apply directly to your game audio engine. Guy Somberg has been programming audio engines for his entire career. From humble beginnings writing a low-level audio mixer for slot machines, he quickly transitioned to writing game audio engines for all manner of games. He has written audio engines that shipped AAA games like Hellgate: London, Bioshock 2, The Sims 4, and Torchlight 3, as well as smaller titles like Minion Master, Tales from the Borderlands, and Game of Thrones. Guy has also given several talks at the Game Developer Conference, the Audio Developer Conference, and CppCon. When he's not programming or writing game audio programming books, he can be found at home reading, playing video games, and playing the flute.

Voice recognition is here at last. Alexa and other voice assistants have now become widespread and mainstream. Is your app ready for voice interaction? Learn how to develop your own voice applications for Amazon Alexa. Start with techniques for building conversational user interfaces and dialog management. Integrate with existing applications and visual interfaces to complement voice-first applications. The future of human-computer interaction is voice, and we'll help you get ready for it. For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based devices. Add options for users to buy upgrades or other products from your application. Once all the pieces are in place, learn how to publish your Alexa skill for everyone to use. Create the future of user interfaces using the Alexa Skills Kit today. What You Need: You will need a computer capable of running the latest version of Node.js, a Git client, and internet access.

Translation, accessibility and the viewing experience of foreign, deaf and blind audiences has long been a neglected area of research within film studies. The same applies to the film industry, where current distribution strategies and exhibition platforms severely underestimate the audience that exists for foreign and accessible cinema. Translated and accessible versions are usually produced with limited time, for little remuneration, and traditionally involving zero contact with the creative team. Against this background, this book presents accessible filmmaking as an alternative approach, integrating translation and accessibility into the filmmaking process through collaboration between translators and filmmakers. The book introduces a wide notion of media accessibility and the concepts of the global version, the dubbing effect and subtitling blindness. It presents scientific evidence showing how translation and accessibility can impact the nature and reception of a film by foreign and sensory-impaired audiences, often changing the film in a way that filmmakers are not always aware of. The book includes clips from the award-winning film Notes on Blindness on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal, testimonies from filmmakers who have adopted this approach, and a presentation of the accessible filmmaking workflow and a new professional figure: the director of accessibility and translation. This is an essential resource for advanced students and scholars working in film, audiovisual translation and media accessibility, as well as for those (accessible) filmmakers who are not only concerned about their original viewers, but also about those of the foreign and accessible versions of their films, who are often left behind.

This book presents recent advances in nonlinear speech processing beyond nonlinear techniques. It shows that it exploits heuristic and psychological models of human interaction in order to succeed in the implementations of socially believable VUIs and applications for human health and psychological support. The book takes into account the multifunctional role of speech and what is "outside of the box" (see Bjoern Schuller's foreword). To this aim, the book is organized in 6 sections, each collecting a small number of short chapters reporting advances "inside" and "outside" themes related to nonlinear speech research. The themes emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling socially believable speech interfaces, ranging from efforts to capture the nature of sound changes in linguistic contexts and the timing nature of speech; labors to identify and detect speech features that help in the diagnosis of psychological and neuronal disease, attempts to improve the effectiveness and performance of Voice User Interfaces, new front-end algorithms for the coding/decoding of effective and computationally efficient acoustic and linguistic speech representations, as well as investigations capturing the social nature of speech in signaling personality traits, emotions and improving human machine interactions.

Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++ presents everything you need to know about digital signal processing in an accessible way. Not just another theory-heavy digital signal processing book, nor another dull build-a-generic-database programming book, this book includes fully worked, downloadable code for dozens of professional audio effect plugins and practically presented algorithms. Sections include the basics of audio signal processing, the anatomy of a plugin, AAX, AU and VST3 programming guides; implementation details; and actual projects and code. More than 50 fully coded C++ audio signal-processing objects are included. Start with an intuitive and practical introduction to the digital signal processing (DSP) theory behind audio plug-ins, and quickly move on to plugin implementation, gain knowledge of algorithms on classical, virtual analog, and wave digital filters, delay, reverb, modulated effects, dynamics processing, pitch shifting, nonlinear processing, sample rate conversion and more. You will then be ready to design and implement your own unique plugins on any platform and within almost any host program. This new edition is fully updated and improved and presents a plugin core that allows readers to move freely between application programming interfaces and platforms. Readers are expected to have some knowledge of C++ and high school math.

- Filled with contributions from world-leading academics and practitioners, from a variety of backgrounds and countries. - Highly interdisciplinary overview of live music, which will be relevant to professionals and students interested in music business, music technology, music production and performance. - Includes papers on cutting-edge issues, such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

Game Audio Fundamentals takes the reader on a journey through game audio design: from analog and digital audio basics, to the art and execution of sound effects, soundtracks, and voice production, as well as learning how to make sense of a truly effective soundscape. Presuming no pre-existing knowledge, this accessible guide is accompanied by online resources - including practical examples and incremental DAW exercises - and presents the theory and practice of game audio in detail, and in a format anyone can understand. This is essential reading for any aspiring game audio designer, as well as students and professionals from a range of backgrounds, including music, audio engineering, and game design.

This book is divided into three elements. Part I provides a broad introduction to the foundations of computer music instruments, covering some key points in digital signal processing, with rigorous but approachable mathematics, and programming examples, as well as an overview of development environments for computer instruments. In Part II, the author presents synthesis and processing, with chapters on source-filter models, summation formulae, feedback and adaptive systems, granular methods, and frequency-domain techniques. In Part III he explains application development approaches, in particular communication protocols and user interfaces, and computer music platforms. All elements are fully illustrated with programming examples using Csound, Python, and Faust. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in music and signal processing, and for practitioners and researchers.

The Apple-Certified Way to Learn Record, arrange, produce, mix, and master music with this bestselling, Apple-certified guide to Logic Pro. Veteran producer and composer David Nahmani uses real-world professional Logic Pro projects to guide you through step-by-step instructions and straightforward explanations, ranging from basic music creation to sophisticated production techniques. You'll trigger Live Loops in real time, record audio and software instruments, create and edit sequences, and build arrangements. You'll create both acoustic and electronic virtual drum performances. You'll use Quick Sampler to create stutter effects and vocal chop, and explore ear candy production techniques, such as parallel processing and turntable start and stop effects. You'll use Smart Controls to map knobs, buttons, and drum pads on a MIDI controller or an iPad. You'll harness the power of Smart Tempo to sync up all your audio and MIDI. You'll use Flex Time to stretch audio and correct the timing of recordings, and you'll tune vocals with Flex Pitch. You'll mix, automate, and master the song with EQ, compression, delay, reverb, limiters, and other plug-ins to achieve a professional sound. Finally, you'll create a 3D spatial audio mix with Logic Pro's new Dolby Atmos plug-ins, using binaural rendering to experience that immersive sonic experience on your headphones. Downloadable real-world, professional Logic projects Step-by-step hands-on exercises Accessible writing style that puts an expert mentor at your side Ample illustrations that help you quickly master techniques Lists of keyboard shortcuts used in each lesson Tips to improve your workflow Online personal support on the author's website The Apple Pro Training Series is Apple's official self-paced learning resource. Books in this series offer downloadable lesson files and an online version of the book. Additional information on this and other books in this series can be found at peachpit.com/apple. For more on certification, visit training.apple.com. Also in the Apple Pro Training Series: Final Cut Pro macOS Support Essentials

This illuminating, engaging book offers an introduction to the art of sound design and postproduction audio, written especially for for directors, producers, sound designers, and teachers without a technical background in sound. Building on over 50 years of combined expertise in teaching, filmmaking, and sound design, experienced instructor and author Peter Rea and sound designer Matthew Polis offer a cogent, clear, and practical overview of sound design principles and practices, from exploring the language and vocabulary of sound to teaching readers how to work with sound professionals, and later to overseeing the edit, mix, and finishing processes. In this book, Rea and Polis focus on creative and practical ways to utilize sound in order to achieve the filmmaker's vision and elevate their films. Balancing practical, experienced-based insight, numerous examples, and unique concepts like storyboarding for sound, A Filmmaker’s Guide to Sound Design arms students, filmmakers, and educators with the knowledge to creatively and confidently navigate their film through the post audio process.

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction to the craft of making-as well as creatively cannibalizing-electronic circuits for artistic purposes. With a sense of adventure and no prior knowledge, the reader can subvert the intentions designed into devices such as radios and toys to discover a new sonic world. You will also learn how to make contact microphones, pickups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, mixers, and unusual signal processors cheaply and quickly. At a time when computers dominate music production, this book offers a rare glimpse into the core technology of early live electronic music, as well as more recent developments at the hands of emerging artists. This revised and expanded third edition has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments in technology and DIY approaches. New to this edition are chapters contributed by a diverse group of practitioners, addressing the latest developments in technology and creative trends, as well as an extensive companion website that provides media examples, tutorials, and further reading. This edition features: Over 50 new hands-on projects. New chapters and features on topics including soft circuitry, video hacking, neural networks, radio transmitters, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, data hacking, printing your own circuit boards, and the international DIY community A new companion website at www.HandmadeElectronicMusic.com, containing video tutorials, video clips, audio tracks, resource files, and additional chapters with deeper dives into technical concepts and hardware hacking scenes around the world With a hands-on, experimental spirit, Nicolas Collins demystifies the process of crafting your own instruments and enables musicians, composers, artists, and anyone interested in music technology to draw on the creative potential of hardware hacking.

The book presents the history of time-domain representation and the extent of its development along with that of spectral domain representation in the cognitive and technology domains. It discusses all the cognitive experiments related to this development, along with details of technological developments related to both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text to speech synthesis (TTS), and introduces a viable time-domain representation for both objective and subjective analysis, as an alternative to the well-known spectral representation. The book also includes a new cohort study on the use of lexical knowledge in ASR. India has numerous official dialects, and spoken-language technology development is a burgeoning area. In fact TTS and ASR taken together constitute the most important technology for empowering people. As such, the book describes time domain representation in such a way that it can be easily and seamlessly incorporated into ASR and TTS research and development. In short, it is a valuable guidebook for the development of ASR and TTS in all the Indian Standard Dialects using signal domain parameters.

Working with Sound is an exploration of the ever-changing working practices of audio development in the era of hybrid collaboration in the games industry. Through learnings from the pre-pandemic remote and isolated worlds of audio work, sound designers, composers and dialogue designers find themselves equipped uniquely to thrive in the hybrid, remote, and studio-based realms of today's fast-evolving working landscapes. With unique insights into navigating the worlds of isolation and collaboration, this book explores ways of thinking and working in this world, equipping the reader with inspiration to sustainably tackle the many stages of the development process. Working with Sound is an essential guide for professionals working in dynamic audio teams of all sizes, as well as the designers, producers, artists, animators and programmers who collaborate closely with their colleagues working on game audio and sound.

The Game Music Toolbox provides readers with the tools, models and techniques to create and expand a compositional toolbox, through a collection of 20 iconic case studies taken from different eras of game music. Discover many of the composition and production techniques behind popular music themes from games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Mario Kart 8, The Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter II, Diablo, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and many others. The Game Music Toolbox features: Exclusive interviews from industry experts Transcriptions and harmonic analyses 101 music theory introductions for beginners Career development ideas and strategies Copyright and business fundamentals An introduction to audio implementation for composers Practical takeaway tasks to equip readers with techniques for their own game music The Game Music Toolbox is crucial reading for game music composers and audio professionals of all backgrounds, as well as undergraduates looking to forge a career in the video game industry.

This book provides rare insights into the difficult and complex dialogues between stakeholders within and outside the music industries in a time of transition. It builds on a series of recorded meetings in which key stakeholders discuss and assess options and considerations for the music industries' transition to a digital era. These talks were closed to the public and operated under the Chatham House Rule, which means that they involved a very different type of discussion from those held in public settings, panels or conferences. As such, the book offers a much more nuanced understanding of the industries' difficulties in adjusting to changing conditions, demonstrating the internal power-struggles and differences that make digital change so difficult. After presenting a theoretical framework for assessing digital change in the music industries, the author then provides his research findings, including quotes from the Kristiansand Roundtable Conference. Following from these findings, he develops three critical concepts that explain the nature as well as the problems of the music industries' adaptation process. In conclusion, he challenges the general definition of crisis in the music industries and contradicts the widely held view that digitalization is a case of vertical integration.

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.

Novel Techniques for Dialectal Arabic Speech describes approaches to improve automatic speech recognition for dialectal Arabic. Since speech resources for dialectal Arabic speech recognition are very sparse, the authors describe how existing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) speech data can be applied to dialectal Arabic speech recognition, while assuming that MSA is always a second language for all Arabic speakers. In this book, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) has been chosen as a typical Arabic dialect. ECA is the first ranked Arabic dialect in terms of number of speakers, and a high quality ECA speech corpus with accurate phonetic transcription has been collected. MSA acoustic models were trained using news broadcast speech. In order to cross-lingually use MSA in dialectal Arabic speech recognition, the authors have normalized the phoneme sets for MSA and ECA. After this normalization, they have applied state-of-the-art acoustic model adaptation techniques like Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) and Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP) to adapt existing phonemic MSA acoustic models with a small amount of dialectal ECA speech data. Speech recognition results indicate a significant increase in recognition accuracy compared to a baseline model trained with only ECA data.

Game Audio with FMOD and Unity introduces readers to the principles and practice of game audio through the process of creating their own First Person Shooter (FPS) game. All the basics are covered, as well as a simple introduction to coding. Using the free software Unity and FMOD Audio Middleware, the reader will be able to create a game of their own and develop a portfolio that demonstrates their capacities in interactive sound design. Perfect for classroom use or independent study, Game Audio with FMOD and Unity also comes with a full suite of audio assets provided on a companion website.

Intelligent Speech Signal Processing investigates the utilization of speech analytics across several systems and real-world activities, including sharing data analytics, creating collaboration networks between several participants, and implementing video-conferencing in different application areas. Chapters focus on the latest applications of speech data analysis and management tools across different recording systems. The book emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of the field, presenting different applications and challenges with extensive studies on the design, development and management of intelligent systems, neural networks and related machine learning techniques for speech signal processing.

- One of the first titles to be published on the state-of-the-art of Soundwalking as a practice - This book offers a unique, interdisciplinary approach which considers cultural studies, environmental studies, politics, as well as sound studies - Brings together voices from both academic and professional spheres

This book is a theoretical and practical deep dive into the craft of worldbuilding for video games, with an explicit focus on how different job disciplines contribute to worldbuilding. In addition to providing lenses for recognizing the various components in creating fictional and digital worlds, the author positions worldbuilding as a reciprocal and dynamic process, a process which acknowledges that worldbuilding is both created by and instrumental in the design of narrative, gameplay, art, audio, and more. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games encourages mutual respect and collaboration among teams and provides game writers and narrative designers tools for effectively incorporating other job roles into their own worldbuilding practice and vice versa. Features: Provides in-depth exploration of worldbuilding via respective job disciplines Deep dives and case studies into a variety of games, both AAA and indie Includes boxed articles for deeper interrogation and exploration of key ideas Contains templates and checklists for practical tips on worldbuilding

Capture great sound in the first place and spend less time "fixing it in the mix" with Ian Corbett's Mic It! With this updated and expanded second edition, you'll quickly understand essential audio concepts as they relate to microphones and mic techniques and learn how to apply them to your recording situation. Mic It! gives you the background to explore, discover, and design your own solutions, enabling you to record great source tracks that can be developed into anything from ultra-clean mixes to massive, organic soundscapes. Beginning with essential audio theory and a discussion of the desirable characteristics of "good sound", Mic It! covers microphones, mono and stereo mic techniques, the effect of the recording space or room, and large classical and jazz ensemble recording. This second edition also features new chapters on immersive audio, immersive recording concepts, drum tuning, and recording techniques for audio for video. Mic It! provides in-depth information on how different mic techniques can be used, modified, and fine-tuned to capture not only the best sound, but the best sound for the mix, as well as how to approach and set up the recording session, prepare for mixing, and avoid common recording and mixing mistakes. * Train your ears with practical audio examples on the companion website. * Develop and test your knowledge as you learn, with concise, applicable exercises and examples that cover the concepts presented. * Record the best sound possible in any situation with Mic It! Corbett's expert advice ranges from vital knowledge no novice should be without, to advanced techniques that more experienced engineers can explore to benefit and vary the sound of their recordings. Whether you only ever buy one microphone, are equipping a studio on a budget, or have a vast selection of great mics to use, with Mic It! you'll learn how to make the most of the tools you have.

This book provides cutting-edge research in the growing areas of Audio Education and Popular Music Pedagogy Offers an ideal blend of theory and practice as well as acknowledging the practical elements of music production pedagogy A variety of international viewpoints are included, making it accessible to educators in the US, UK, Australia and beyond

Featuring a distinguished editorial team who have brought together a group of international and reputable scholars. The collection is interdisciplinary by design, encompassing cultural theory, gender and race studies, musicology, and record production analysis Offering analysis of tracks from the blues, hip-hop, R&B, pop, Motown, funk, disco, rock, metal, and country An ideal companion to William Moylan's previous work, Recording Analysis, which outlines the framework upon which these analyses are developed