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Meeting held Wednesday, March 27th, 2019, 7:30PM at Digipen Institute of Technology Redmond, WA

AES PNW Section Meeting Report
The Music of Destiny
with
Skye Lewin - Music Director and Composer, Bungie
Michael C. Salvatori - Composer, Bungie
Josh Mosser - Senior Music Mixer/Editor and Composer, Bungie
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Steve Turnidge, PNWAES Chair, Glen Lorbecki, PNWAES Committee, Michael C. Salvatori, Skye Lewin, and Josh Mosser with Bungie, Lawrence Schwedler, PNWAES Committee and DIGIPEN.
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Distinguished panel from Bungie, Skye Lewin - Music Director and Composer, Josh Mosser - Senior Music Mixer/Editor and Composer, and Michael C. Salvatori - Composer.
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The Music of Destiny session drew a considerable audience from both the audio and gaming communities.

Audio recordings of the meeting:
96k MP3
Meeting Audio (63.6MB MP3)  
(Note:Audio from game cut-scene clip in this recording has been shortened to reduce file size.)

Photos by Gary Louie, Audio Recording by Rick Chinn


The Section met at Digipen Institute of Technology for its March 2019 meeting, featuring three members of the music team for Bungie's very popular "Destiny" video game series. Skye Lewin (Music Director and Composer), Michael C. Salvatori (Composer), and Josh Mosser (Senior Music Mixer/Editor) discussed their inspiration, workflow, and the concept of creativity on a deadline when delivering symphonic soundtracks containing hundreds of minutes of original music, elaborately sound designed cinematic sequences, and dialog in umpteen languages. About 82 folks attended (17 AES members) the presentation in Digipen's Plato auditorium.

The trio began by talking about the process of doing the music for the game, from start to finish. A cinematic section of the game was played to demonstrate the sound. Discussion included getting the emotion and feelings needed, gameplay considerations, collaboration, and mixing all sound elements like dialog, music and effects. Michael jokingly likened the whole process to a clown car - organized chaos.

For the majority of the evening, several dozen questions from the audience were then thoroughly discussed, ranging from the time involved for various tasks, the recording of the live music, musical themes, a typical workday, careers, working with the rest of a game's designers, hidden gems, and how gameplay affects the music. Destiny fans asked some very specific questions.

During the mid-meeting cookie break, door prizes were awarded:

  • AES AVAR 2018 Tee-shirts: Dave Crowther, Chad Meyer, Lindsay Smith, Shauny Jang
  • AES AVAR 2018 tote bags: Suzanna Jelseny, Michael Timmins
  • Belden CAT cable tool (courtesy Belden): Rory Given
  • Mini potentiometer tweeker tool (courtesy Uneeda Audio): David Schneider, Chris Sabin
About our Presenters:

Skye Lewin - Music Director and Composer at Bungie Skye is a musician, composer, songwriter, record producer, and music editor. He currently serves as Music Director and Composer at Bungie  and is a co-founder of the record label and music production company Sound Chemistry.  His work can be heard in video games, records, film and television, including Destiny, Fargo (2014), Banshee, CSI: Miami, and Entourage. He is the recipient of several awards, including four Primetime Emmy nominations and three M.P.S.E. Golden Reel Awards.

Michael C. Salvatori - Composer at Bungie Michael is an American composer  best known for his collaboration with colleague Martin O'Donnell  for the soundtracks to the Halo video game series.  Salvatori became acquainted with O'Donnell in college; when O'Donnell was given a job offer to score a colleague's film, Salvatori and O'Donnell formed a partnership and eventually created their own production company, TotalAudio. Salvatori continued to manage TotalAudio and worked on his own music for clients such as Disney  and Wideload Games.  He most recently co-composed the soundtrack to the 2014 video game Destiny  and its expansions, The Taken King  (2015) and Rise of Iron  (2016). He also composed music for Destiny 2  (2017) and its expansion, Forsaken (2018). 

Josh Mosser - Senior Music Mixer/Editor and Composer at Bungie Mixer, Engineer and Sound Designer with experience in Games, Music, Television, and Film.


Reported by Gary Louie, PNW Section Secretary


Last modified 08/09/2020, 18:05:00, dtl