ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on women in games, immersive sound, and audio for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, and MR, respectively). Women who began early in game sound design include Khris Brown, Pam Aronoff, and Emily Ridgeway. Winifred Philips is practitioner and expert in video game music. Eiko Ishiwata and Ayako Yamauchi from Japan also specialize in composing music for games. Sally Kellaway has expanded her experience in games to include machine learning. Anastasia Devana at Magic Leap specializes in mixed reality. Fei Yu has worked with the China Film Group as a recording engineer and was music supervisor for Revelation Original Soundtrack, which garnered many awards and nominations. Statistics from the GameSoundCon Game Audio Industry Survey (2017) reveal that the percentage of women in the composing and sound design industry is 12.7 percent, and there is a gender pay gap (Schmidt). Audio for video games includes the subdiscipline of sound design; however, unlike sound for film and television, expertise with computer programming is required. Some “middleware” programs such as Wwise and FMOD reduce the need for coding experience. Dialog recording and music composition may not require coding knowledge but an understanding of how these elements work within the game are mandatory. Music for video games requires an understanding of layering elements for continuous playback in a gaming environment. Immersive sound refers to sound reproduced from loudspeakers placed around the listener in order to create an enveloping auditory illusion. Binaural sound is meant to simulate a 360-degree sphere of sound using only two channels of audio (left and right ears) and is used in some game sound design as well as audio for VR, AR, and MR.
