Game Audio Relevance - Launch

A year since the first installment and eight pages of game audio related goodness later and today is the dawning of a new day.

As a project of the IASIG, with the help of a team of volunteers, on the behalf of the Game Audio community, I'd like to introduce a new game audio related knowledge base:

http://gameaudiorelevance.iasig.org

Game Audio Relevance is all about providing game audio relevant links, articles, and videos in a curated and searchable means. While there are many other sources for game audio related articles and information, a “web search” does not always turn up reliable information. The purpose of this blog is to:

• Provide content that is searchable using tags, with grouping based on searchable titles and the “tag cloud".


• Broadcast these links across other social media as a game audio related stream of constantly updating information. (in particularly via the Twitter #GameAudio hashtag)


• Replace static webpages that host links but don’t provide cross referencing, search, or tags.

The name "Game Audio Relevance" is meant to portray that the information one will find is relevant to, but not necessarily exclusively about game audio. For example, many articles about audio recording or synthesis are relevant to game audio though not about game audio specifically.

Subscribing via RSS or Twitter @IASIG_GamAudRel will keep you up to date on new posts and keep you in the loop on developments as we move forward.

What started as a monthly round-up of links culled from the net, and increasingly from the fine contributors to the #gameaudio hashtag on twitter, turned into a serious endevour that only partially succeeded in providing a resource for those seeking knowledge. I say partially, because on more than one occasion I found myself scrubbing through my own pages to try and find that one link that was somehow tangentially related to the topic posted in the title heading linked in the post. What I found was that, once posted, these links became lost on the page and ceased to provide any function other than as a static post of interesting stuff spat out in a single place.

If you've been hanging around game audio for awhile you'll know that good information exists, but can sometimes be hard to find. While there are a ton of great historic game audio resources and related link piles, internet search is still the most powerful way to begin digging into a specific area or topic in order to find relevant links within a narrow focus. Besides that, there are so many corners of the web where content experts are sharing their experiences in an open an honest way that may never fall into the widely cast net of research but possibly holds a critical perspective.

Or maybe you just like watching the waterfall of information as it rushes past the RSS feed.

With over 800 links already tagged, clouded, and cross referenced across the site you might find it interesting that:

78 Posts Tagged with Synthesis
69 Posts Tagged with Procedural Audio
50 Posts on the ever elusive Interactive Music 
and another 32 Posts Tagged with Adaptive Music

Rob Bridgett edges out Alexander Brandon with 33 and 22 Posts respectively that mention or were written by them. (I'll wager there are darker corners of the world hiding other texts from each of them that have yet to be cataloged)

And a whole bunch of other stuff that can be found through the Tag Search.

Whether you find yourself nostagically researching Koji Kondo, Middleware, or wanting to dig deep into the history of MIDI, Game Audio Relevance should be the jumping off point for your research.

If you are an author who is interested in having your game audio related writing cataloged and referenced or if you have time and interest in helping to grow this project, drop a mail to the address on the about page and we'll set you up with a streamlined web interface for contributing relevant links.  

Keep those links coming and let's all ride the wave of knowledge in to the beach together!