Aaron McLeran

Founder

Rhizome Audio

About Me

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.

Sessions

  • It’s Time To Be Real

    Live Workflows for Human Creativity in Games
    11:20 - 12:10 UTC | Tuesday 10th November 2026 | Bristol 2
    Beginner
    Intermediate

    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 […]

  • Procedural Audio Pipelines

    Principles, Promises, Problems, and Practices
    14:00 - 14:50 UTC | Tuesday 10th November 2026 | Conservatory
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    How do we get from infinitely complex real-world sounds to compact and convincing interactive models for virtual worlds? How do we realise the potential, and overcome the practical problems, of procedural audio? Can new pipelines and workflows make developing more realistic models easier? Procedural audio — the real-time synthesis of real-world sounds — has long offered the promise of more dynamic, authentic game audio experiences, but like its musical cousin, physical modelling, is held back by practical problems of performance, realism, scalability, and development effort. Samples, libraries, randomisation, layering, middleware tricks, and AI-generated variants are often cheaper, easier, and better-sounding […]

  • Channel Agnosticism in MetaSounds

    Simplifying Audio Formats for Reusable Graph Topologies
    09:00 - 09:50 UTC | Tuesday 11th November 2025 | Conservatory
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    This talk introduces Channel Agnostic Types (CAT), a new approach to decoupling digital audio processing from fixed channel configurations and spatial audio formats, developed as part of Unreal Engine’s MetaSounds system. While traditional audio engines usually tie DSP graphs and audio rendering to rigid spatial audio pipelines, CATs introduce a flexible, extensible buffer type capable of supporting arbitrary channel layouts—including conventional multichannel, sound-field formats, and object-based systems. Combined with the new MetaSound Node Configuration API, this work enables reconfigurable MetaSounds to support any audio format, dramatically reducing asset duplication and complexity. More broadly, it presents a model for designing format-agnostic […]