Once an afterthought in terms of game design and overall music culture awareness, video game music is now an authentic industry of its own. Today, worldwide prominent orchestras perform concerts of music composed specifically for video games and features top of the line film composer soundtracks. Like the purpose of all great scored music, it's supposed to appeal to your heartstrings and drive your emotions wild. Video game music has become over this past decade so indistinguishable from scored music for films, that many have begun to envision a video game to be on the same level as a feature length film. In the past video game music was limited by its hardware but that all changed with the introduction of the CD-ROM. Furthermore, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) decided in the year 2000 to let interactive games compete in the annual Grammy awards.

You have to ask yourself, if performing artist’s use artist managers, what can an artist manager do for a music composer. Essentially promotion will be the focus in managing a composer. Due to artist managers working with various clients they have the contacts to Send your music out, talk to directors about your music catalog and look for commission project opportunities. However, for a composer like myself I prefer to employ an artist manager to handle the business aspect of my career. This will allow me to focus on the creative process, which is the music. There comes a point in a composer’s career when they know that they cannot push their skills as hard as somebody like a manager can push. When a music composer feels overwhelmed by the amount of project details and has countless commitments in a short period of time, in my opinion is where an artist manager can place their worth.

William Ury’s Negotiating for Sustainable Agreements presentation discusses the strategies he has developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project for creating sustainable agreements in diplomacy and business. Ury discusses how much time we already dedicate to negotiation in our everyday lives. Conflict has been suppressed over the years and is now coming to the surface. We have a choice to resolve conflict through family feuds, lawsuits, and wars. Or we can deal with conflicts constructively through listening, dialogue, collaborative problem solving and non-violent actions. You can learn from Ury’s presentation that objective criteria can be used in more ways than just preventing wills from clashing. Using a third side to way in concerns for both parties can also use objective criteria to express concerns in a negotiation that can benefit all negotiators. Learning not to react and gaining the ability to listen will take any negotiation to the next level. This allows you to focus on interest and not positions to learn what is wanted and better assess the direction of a negotiation.

Composer Brian Tyler is best known for his beautiful musical pieces of cinematic orchestral scoring, melded with a groove and contemporary style. Brian has composed for over fifty films and was recently nominated for the Film Composer of the Year award by the International Film Music Critics Association. Lets focus on a movie that score stands out with the use of Brian’s groovy cinematic style of composing. Fast Five was a hit at the box office and part of that is due to Brian’s Hollywood cinematic scoring. Fast Five score was built on a combination of groove music and contemporary music. These genres of music usually don’t go together but Brian Tyler orchestrated these styles together beautifully.

The current release of The Hobbit film has brought fans back into the world of Middle Earth. With that in mind lets re-imagine the musical scores of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Howard Shore may have composed for over more than 60 films, his greatest work would have to be his Oscar and Grammy awarded work on The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. The arrangement of the score is rather massive, shore stated on Runmovies.eu. He had to unearth the music; He didn’t just theorize what it was. Four months of research was done before he even wrote a single note. Therefore, he had to discover and immerse himself in the history. The mythology of the Ring has been around for millennia, so mirroring the fantasy world concept of where The Lord Of The Rings comes from was quite a feat.

The MPAA is an abbreviation for the Motion Picture Association Of America; aside from its name what do we know about this company. Well the MPAA is the support and voice of motion picture and television industries in the United States. MPAA’s members consist of the six major US studios for motion picture. Those six motion picture studios are as follows: Walt Disney, Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. The MPAA prides themselves in the protection of property rights, free and fair trade, groundbreaking consumer choices and freedom of speech to enrich and empower movies.

LINK: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_applebaum_the_mad_scientist_of_music.html

TED speakers seem to always have intriguing ways of speaking to an audience and keeping them engaged.  Mark Applebaum’s TED talk breaks the rules of composing in eccentric ways. Mark’s talk is based around the concept of music steadily becoming boring and how a different approach can make it more interesting. Mark inspires his audience with comedic jokes to keep them engaged in the talk. He also uses visual examples to show the audience what he is talking about, which helps to support his theories on boredom and music. (Mark Applebaum 2012) “Is it music? … This is not the important question. The important question is, is it interesting?” (p. 1) Mark’s view on making music more engaging has pushed him to do projects such as the metaphysics of notation.

When you hear the name Daft Punk, the first thing you think of is decades of amazing electronic music. Well think again, French producers Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter has touched new ground with their roles as film score composers for the movie Tron Legacy. Coming from producing electronic music in a small bedroom to having their music performed by a 90-piece orchestra has proved to be an intense and challenging experience for the French Duo. 

The sounds that transformers make are astonishing; sometimes it’s hard to believe that transformers are fictional characters. Hearing those transforming sounds just sound authentic as if that’s how they would sound if they were real beings. So the question is how do sound designers engineer such believable sounds to fit these massive robotic beings.  Well in an interview with Erik Aadahl on Designing Sound he explains how those unique sounds make it to the big screen. The transforming sound is an iconic brand for the Transformers franchise. The original Transformers cartoon featured a rising or falling 5 beat splatty pitch rhythm sound, which can be created through using Polyphonic synthesis. To recreate that basic transforming sound you would need a 500 Hz tone, adding a flanger plug-in to adjust the rate and create the splatty sound. Then you need to automate a pitch rise from start to finish ramping up the tone, adding a tremolo pattern, and tweaking that to get the 5-part rhythm. That’s basically how the original cartoon transforming sound was created.

Hans Zimmer built a reputation on his electronic sound and quality in scoring for film. Hans's work can be heard through the bass, piano, guitar and synth modulation in the film Inception. When hearing the Inception score for the first time you can’t help but feel the emotions of the characters coming from the music. First, you hear that love is the premise of the scoring, then you also hear this dark ambient feeling. On the technical aspect of the score you recognize these huge orchestral scores layered perfectly with rock guitars. When hearing music in films breaking barriers such as the Inception score, it just makes you think how something like this came into being.