It’s Time To Be Real
Live Workflows for Human Creativity in Games
What if you could fundamentally author procedural audio graphs and native DSP against a running packaged game and publish it without an export import cycle?
This talk breaks down and demonstrates a live workflow where a procedural audio graph connects to a running, packaged game via shared memory. It receives game data into the graph in real time and renders audio back to the game as the game plays. In the demo, one person will be playing the game, while the other person is designing the sound. When the sound is right, the designer will one-click publish the graph to the running game. No export. No reimport. No restart.
The demo features Rhizome Audio, a new real-time procedural audio tool that features live-editing, deep tools around sound file asset management and, and integrations with DAWs, audio middleware, and game engines. Rhizome Audio's 3rd party plugin system will also feature and demonstrate an integration with Klang and rapIDE - an LLVM-based AOT compiler for C++ DSP, which enables coding native DSP directly in the graph.
Together, these tools represent a broader argument for real-time creative feedback loops: human-oriented workflows that allow humans to make decisions in the moment, against real data, with immediate and tangible results.
Aaron McLeran
Founder
Rhizome Audio
Aaron McLeran is the founder of Rhizome Audio, where he is building a node-graph procedural audio plugins and game engine integration tools for real-time audio. He served as Audio Engine Director at Epic Games from 2015–2026, where he was the company's first audio programmer, developed Unreal Engine's cross-platform audio renderer — shipped under a live Fortnite service — and led the team that built MetaSounds for UE5. Earlier in his career, he co-created procedural music systems for Spore in collaboration with Brian Eno, was a technical sound designer on Dead Space 2, and was an audio programmer on several Call of Duty games and Guild Wars 2. Aaron holds an M.S. in physics from Notre Dame and an M.S. in media arts and technology (MAT) from UC Santa Barbara, where he studied under Dr. Curtis Roads.