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.
Chris Nash
Director / Founder
nash.audio
Chris Nash is a software developer, composer, educator and researcher in things that go beep in the night. Following a PhD on music software design at Cambridge, he has worked on technology and music projects across academia and industry, including for the BBC, Steinberg/Yamaha, and multiple start-ups, and independently develops and maintains several software projects, specialising in computer music and making music programming more accessible, including Manhattan (a hybrid DAW/programming language), Klang (a C++ dialect for audio), rapIDE (a plug-in based C++ IDE) and reViSiT (an award-winning plug-in based sound tracker) - and the forthcoming open-world game, This Little World (featuring The Future Sound of Bristol).
Dr Nash is the architect of pointblank (London)’s pioneering MuSE (Music Systems Engineering) course, developed in collaboration with industry to be the world's first professional audio developer degree programme, as well as Senior Lecturer in Software Development for Audio, Sound, and Music at UWE Bristol. In 2022, Chris founded nash.audio, a non-profit organisation supporting creativity and learning in music technology, and the development of tools for audio programming.