At the upcoming Music and Gaming Fest , January 4-7, the Videri String Quartet will team up with award-winning composer Austin Wintory and visual artist Angela Bermudez to create a unique event. As the quartet plays Austin's music, Angela will paint whatever it inspires in her. As Rosie Samter, the Videri's violist explains, they've NEVER done anything like this before! Putting together a concert of Austin's music meant creating a whole new arrangement of his beautiful score for his most recent

Barnabas Smith of Adelaide, Australia, is a ludomusicologist. What is that, you ask? It's the scholarly study of video game music! Smith is applying his research to delve deep into the open-world music of Grand Theft Auto 5 and analyze how it seamlessly blends a great score by Woody Jackson and Tangerine Dream and others with hundreds of licensed songs. As he explains in our conversation, there's more to GTA 5 than it first appears: Barnabas reckons he's spent hundreds of hours in the world of

On December 18 , Nathan McCree will realize a dream that's been years in the making, as his iconic music for the original three Tomb Raider games will be performed by the Royal Philharmonic! Nathan shares some fun behind-the-scenes stories about how the concert is coming together in our conversation: Nathan wrote all the music for Tomb Raider 1 in a very short time, and he was back on a tight deadline to arrange the pieces he chose for this concert, as well as writing some original material over

Mikolai Stroinski 's new music encourages players to lighten up as they "kick each other's butts" playing the soon-to-be-released tavern card game, Gwent, ​an expansion of the world of The Witcher 3 from CD Projekt Red . In our conversation, Mikolai said that he really had fun writing slightly tongue in cheek music for the new Monster Deck! Because of the tunings of the instruments used by the band Percival, all of the music for The Witcher 3 was written in the same key. Mikolai said it was a

Eagle Flight , Ubisoft's new Virtual Reality game, lets you soar as an eagle above a future Paris, populated only by animals. Inon Zur composed the score, which he told me presented some interesting challenges: Designing the music to accompany a wild Paris gave Inon freedom to layer many different sounds, from tribal percussion to soaring strings and voices and even his favorite instrument, the piano. He says the overall feeling he gets watching birds of prey fly is their incredible confidence,

As Destiny, the epic adventure from Bungie enters its third year with the Rise of Iron expansion, composer Mike Salvatori says the music has expanded as well, to over 250 minutes of new material, written along with Skye Lewin and C. Paul Johnson. The main theme is especially compelling, and as Mike explains it was kind of like a "gift from the universe!" The process of recording the soundtrack is complex, with instrumental groups recorded separately. Mike says even though the venue, a beautiful

Burly Men at Sea , created by David and Brooke Condolora of Brain & Brain isn't your typical seafaring adventure, and Plied Sound 's original music isn't your typical soundtrack either. Nate Sandberg and Matt Joynt had lots of fun creating a "handcrafted" soundtrack and sound design and it shows, as you'll hear in our conversation. The three Burly Men have thrilling adventures, encountering a Kraken, selkies and even a messenger of death, all handled with great humor in the music and sound

Gordy Haab understands what makes John Williams' epic music for Star Wars unique. Haab wrote the OST for Star Wars Battlefront from Dice Studios and EA Games. As Gordy explains, there's way more to the music than just the familiar themes, and it was his job to discover the key to Williams' sound. In his music for the latest Death Star expansion, Gordy says he went "really dark" with the music -- including the menacing themes John Williams wrote for the thrilling conclusion to A New Hope. Gordy

Darren Korb is the composer and sound designer for Supergiant Games . Pyre is their most ambition project yet, and as we'll hear, Darren channeled his love of classic rock for the soundtrack. Although he's a gifted composer and performer, making the switch from gamer to heading up the music and sound design for Supergiant on their first game, Bastion , he had a pretty steep learning curve. Like the Kid in Bastion , Darren took it one step at a time. The team at Supergiant is small, and they put

Greg Edmonson said he was thrilled with new vinyl releases of some of his favorite projects, the OSTs of Firefly and Uncharted 1-3. In our conversation you'll find out how his unique fusion of multi-cultural music has taken him on an incredible journey. Adapting the soundtrack for both projects has been a labor of love. Greg won a BAFTA award for his innovative soundtrack for Uncharted 2, and he said that Sony re-mastered the music for the vinyl release from iam8bit, so the sound would be the