Music Rendering in Unreal Engine: The Harmonix Music Plugin for MetaSounds – Buzz Burrowes – ADC23

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Music Rendering in Unreal Engine: The Harmonix Music Plugin for MetaSounds - Buzz Burrowes - ADC 2023

MetaSounds is Unreal Engine's graphical audio authoring system. It provides audio designers the ability to construct powerful procedural audio systems that offer sample-accurate timing and control at the audio-buffer level. Harmonix, the game studio behind the rhythm action games Rock Band and Dance Central, and the music mashup games Drop Mix and Fuser, joined Epic Games in the winter of 2021. Since the acquisition, the Harmonix audio development team has been hard at work building music specific plugins for MetaSounds that add tight musical synchronization and rendering.

In this session, the technical lead of this team will give an overview of the problem space (tightly coupled audio/visual/gameplay synchronization in single-player and multi-player games), describe the ways in which they have been able to extend the MetaSounds system with a set of custom plugins, and demonstrate the functionality these plugins add to MetaSounds and the Unreal Engine.
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Buzz Burrowes

Buzz was an audio recording engineer in Los Angeles, CA in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1995 he joined Sony Computer Entertainment America prior to the North American launch of the first PlayStation. Originally hired as the Chief Audio Engineer, responsible for for overseeing the construction of recording studios and a hiring a staff of sound designers and composers, he ultimately took on the additional responsibility of designing and developing Sony's proprietary audio engine. He is credited on over 50 of Sony's first party titles. In 2009 he left Sony to join Harmonix Music Systems, the original creator of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. At Harmonix he again took on the role of Audio System Architect, building the low level software systems that empowered Harmonix game designers to create musical experiences like the "auto-mashup/remixing" games DropMix and Fuser. Buzz is now at Epic games, with the title "Distinguished Audio Programmer". He is currently focused on porting the Harmonix music technology to Unreal Engine's MetaSound system.
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC23 Team:

Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra

#adc #audiodev #unrealengine #audio