7 new podcasts worth hearing: Game audio basics, synethesia, ‘Soundboxing’, soundscapes & much more:

Here are new podcast episodes that will give you insight into everything from VR audio to EQing – and take you on a nice walk through the 6.

You can learn about the mysteries of synethesia on South Matters, the divide between devs and gamers on SoundBytes, every game audio term you need to know on Beards, Cats, and Indie Game Audio, devices that want your attention on Twenty Thousand Hertz, the interesting gameplay of Soundboxing on Voices of VR, Merlijn van Veenon’s workshops on Sound Design Live, and take a sound-walk through Vancouver’s downtown eastside with CBC Radio. Happy listening!

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Episode outline: ‘”Monday’s yellow, Tuesday’s brown, Wednesday’s blue, Thursday’s light brown… If you ask people where lemons are on a piano, they will all put their hands at the top of the keyboard…”

That’s Nick Ryan, sound artist and composer – but what on Earth is he talking about? Well, sometimes people get all mixed up. Specifically, their senses are mixed. It’s called synesthesia – a perceptual phenomenon in us humans where we experience one sensory stimulation with or through a secondary sense – letters, numbers or sounds have specific colours to them, words have specific textures, and so on. One in 23 of us understand the world in this way, to varying degrees.

In this ultimate episode of the second series of Sound Matters, our unflagging host Tim Hinman straps on his sensorial spelunking kit and goes looking (and listening) for the mystery of synesthesia. Happily, he also travels to Jamaica with Professor Julian Henriques of Goldsmiths College, University of London, and talks sound systems, feeling the bass, and the important difference between mere science and SCIAANCE. Come with us in this last episode of the second series of Sound Matters. Relax and set your senses free. Brought to you by Bang & Olufsen.’

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Episode outline: ‘This month we decieded to cover some basics. We go over a bunch of terms and ideas that make up game audio and how we do things. This is mostly ment for developers and beginners. And to hopefully generate questions and more ideas for us to cover. If you’re thinking of doing your own audio but have no idea where to start, or how to talk to an audio person, this could be a good place to start.

Calling this one part 1 cause we want to hear from our listeners on what we missed, what you disagree with or need to correct. Let us know and we’ll build up part 2.

As well we talk about a quick bit about Mattia Cellotto’s new dry ice library. More info available here.’

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Episode outline: ‘Hello! Welcome back to episode thirteen of our monthly podcast about games and game audio. We’re back after a short break! It’s been a whole year since we started this crazy thing and we’re so thankful to you all for listening! In this episode we discuss the pressures of the games industry, the Battlefront 2 backlash, sound design warm-ups, practicing Wwise, and why the best Christmas music is by Elvis.

As we’re celebrating our 1-year anniversary, and also with Christmas and New year rapidly approaching, we’re excited to announce our holiday competition! We’ve reached out to some good friends of the podcast and put together some cool prizes that you can win – all you need to do is listen out for the competition question in the episode, and tweet your answers to the podcast twitter account! First three people with the right answers will win – winners will be announced in the January episode!

Up for grabs we’ve got:
First prize – Any library from A Sound Effect worth up to $100 (ex VAT) !!
Second prize – Ringing Rocks Library by Thomas Rex Beverly!
Third prize – rOtation by Collected Transients!
And all three winners will receive a copy of Barney’s upcoming debut library – when it’s ready !! :)

A HUGE thanks to Asbjoern from A Sound Effect, Thomas Rex Beverly and the good people at Collected Transients – please go and support them. You can visit the A Sound Effect website, as well as their Facebook page and Twitter; Thomas has his own site, and you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter; and you can check out Collected Transients site, as well as follow them on Facebook and Twitter. We’re so grateful for these guys helping us out, we hope you go and invest in their work!’

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Need specific sound effects? Try a search below:

Episode outline: ‘There are sounds we interact with every single day and never give a second thought. Our phones, computers, cars, and other devices are constantly communicating with us through user interface sounds and it’s their job to be heard, but not distracting. In this episode, we speak Will Littlejohn, Facebook’s Director of Sound Design, and Conor O’Sullivan, Sound Design Lead at Google, about the sounds they create that help connect families, friends, and communities.’

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Episode outline: ‘Soundboxing is a VR rhythm game that has found a community of people who use it for exercising in VR, with some people reporting that they’ve lost up to 50 pounds from playing it. Soundboxing is similar to Audioshield in that you punch orbs set to the rhythm of songs streamed from YouTube, but rather than using an algorithmic approach Soundboxing allows users to record their own runs, which means that all of the content is user generated. Soundboxing allows users to record and edit their own runs by playing a song and punching an invisible wall, and the scoring system encourages streaks, which results in helping to cultivate and track flow states.

I’ve really enjoyed playing Soundboxing, and it’s an engaging game that has a lot of options to allow you to follow creators, curate playlists, and customize your gaming experience. For example, you can record a run with you dominant hand, and then flip the recording so that you can train yourself to become more ambidextrous. The official Soundboxing website also has user profiles, with an impressive set of archive and search integrations compared to other VR game websites.

Soundboxing was created by solo indie developer Eric Florenzano, who was working on a VR browser for Reddit and discovered how compelling it was to record your embodiment in the process of trying to figure out what comments look like in VR.’

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Episode outline: ‘In this episode of Sound Design Live, I speak with sound consultant and educator Merlijn van Veen while attending his Calibration and Design Techniques for Modern Sound Systems workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. We talk about the way that audio analyzers used in sound system tuning can easily be abused for micromanagement and over EQing, my learnings from the workshop, and your questions on line array vs point source.’

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Episode outline: ‘Paul Kennedy joins sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp on a sound-walk through Vancouver’s downtown eastside, and explores how opening our ears to our surroundings can open our minds.’

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