Projects

As part of my employment at the University of Portsmouth's Center for Creative and Immersive XR, me and the team were tasked with the ideation, design, creation, and implementation of an escape room-like trail for the historic landing craft at the D-Day Story Museum in Portsmouth.

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I was the lead on the project, which involved music composition, sound design, programming, circuit design, soldering, testing, and implementation.

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In this project, a collection of Raspberry Pi's were used to create unique puzzles which created a fictional narrative based upon the history of the landing craft itself.

• The first creation the users interact with is a 3D printed handheld device, featuring 4 buttons, 1 speaker and 1 UV LED. Two of the buttons would cycle through audio files which gave a general overview of each puzzle. Another button would give the users more detailed clues, and the last button would activate the UV LED for use in a later puzzle.

• The second creation would be a simple randomised audio playback system, which featured a background soundscape, random one-shot sounds, and randomly timed conversations.

• Thirdly, a LED strip would pulse Morse code, giving one part of the answer to the overall experience.

• Fourthly, and my personal favourite, was a dance puzzle. This puzzle requires a small amount of context; in the 1970s, the landing craft became a nightclub in Liverpool. The team created a fake bar and fake posters; on these posters were lyrics to songs that play in the background, and poses that the users would have to recreate based on what song was currently playing - composed by me and other members of the team. Successfully posing would advance to the next song, until all poses have been done. This is shown in the image above

• The fifth creation was an old HMV radio. I replaced the original functions of the dials with my own; two 'frequency' dials and one volume dial. A message would be constantly playing underneath white noise, and turning the two frequency dials to the correct places would raise the volume of the message whilst lowering the volume of the white noise.

• The sixth creation is an old rotary telephone, which, similar to the radio, had the original functions replaced. When the correct number is dialed, an audio file is played back.

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This was a huge project for me, and required me to learn how to navigate a Linux system, program in Python, understand circuit diagrams, and solder. If I had to choose a favourite moment from this project, it would be when I finally got the rotary phone working - the feeling of relief when I figured out how it works was fantastic.

The fantastic team at the Center for Creative and Immersive XR built an incredible VR experience which allowed the user to swim through the wreck of the Mary Rose. During this experience, an interview we conducted with Alex Hildred - one of the originals divers on the expedition - would play. I was tasked with editing the audio such that it fit within certain time constraints and fit with the background music. This included some basic compression, background noise reduction using careful EQ'ing, some long-tailed reverb, and a dash of delay. This gave the voice more grandeur and presence within the experience. I also oversaw the main composition, as well as the transition from the main, moody, atmospheric music to the more joyful music as the ship reconstitutes itself.

Whilst doing my Masters, I had the opportunity to compose and implement sound and music into a game. For this, I chose to use Wwise as the audio engine. I composed a main theme, and used this motif throughout the game, much like my work on Journey To The East. Using Wwise allowed me to easily create interactive music which reacted to player and used randomness to remix certain aspects of the music; vertical remixing was key in adding variety here. Unfortunately, lack of back-ups and issues with Wwise meant that the game launched without music. Since then I have learned how to properly manage Wwise and Unreal, and am looking forward to future GameJams.

Journey To The East is a small in-broswer comedy-romance visual novel, which details a teacher who has just finished their training finally moving to China to teach. On this project I was solely responsible for music composition. This involved the creation of a main theme, and several other pieces which used the motifs present in the main theme to form a coherent string throughout the experience. This was a fun project to work on, owing to it's simplicity and comedic nature.

In my limited spare time, I am slowly creating a series of small audio toys that facilitate creativity and novel ways of creating music and sound in Unreal engine, utilising Metasounds and real-time synthesis.

This was an interesting project, where I was given an advertisement and was asked to edit pre-recorded sound and music, and sync it with the video. The audio given to me needed editing, mixing, and arranging to be usable for this advert. For many of the voices and vocalisations, I needed to randomise several parameters; pitch, EQs, LPF frequency, and so on, to minimise repetitions. Patterns in audio become extremely obvious with repetitions, so the focus of the project was to create variety without recording that variety.