Brian Schmidt is one of the early pioneers of the game audio industry. The 2008 recipient of the Game Audio Network Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and 2017 inductee into the Pinball Expo Hall of Fame, Brian has been creating game music, sounds and cutting edge technology for more than 35 years. With a credit list of over 140 games and a client list including Electronic Arts, Zynga, Microsoft, Sony, Capcom, Sega, Data East, Namco and many others. Brian has used his combined expertise and experience in music composition, sound design and his deep technical knowledge to further the state of the art in game audio and his music has been featured in TV, Film and in the CD-set, Legends of Game Music.

Brian began his career in game audio in 1987 as a composer, sound effects designer and music programmer for Williams Electronic Games in Chicago writing music and creating sound effects for pinball machines and coin-operated video games. While there, he was the primary composer of the such as the iconic video game NARC and lead composer and audio lead for Black Knight 2000. His main theme from NARC was later recorded and released by The Pixies. In 1989, Brian left Williams and became one of the industry’s first independent game composers, where he worked on such games as John Madden Football, the Desert Strike Series, Mutant League Football and the award winning Crueball. Other credits include Guns and Roses Pinball, where he worked closely with Slash to create a truly interactive Rock and Roll game experience.

 

In 1998, Brian was recruited by Microsoft to lead the direction of game audio technologies.While there, he joined the then-fledgling Xbox organization as the primary architect for its audio and music system.Brian has been credited with bringing Dolby Digital Surround Sound to interactive gaming through his efforts at Xbox (where he also created the original Xbox startup sound).Through his ten-year tenure at Microsoft, Brian continued to drive and advance game audio technologies through tools such the award-winning “XACT” (Xbox Audio Creation Tool); the first-of-its kind tool to provide interactive mixing for video games.Brian was also responsible for the overall audio system of the Xbox 360 game system, including the XMA audio compression format, winner of the G.A.N.G “Best New Technology award” and finalist in IGDA’s “Best new technology” category.Brian currently works as a consultant to the video game industry working with companies large and small.

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Brian is the creator of GameSoundCon, the industry's largest conference dedicated to composing video game music and video game sound design. Brian is a frequent and in-demand speaker on game audio and game audio technologies, having given literally hundreds of educational and inspirational talks at events all over the world.Events such as the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft’s Gamefest, Sega Devcon, and the Audio Engineering Society Conference, SiGraph and esteemed institutions such as Yale University, Northwestern University and Digipen have invited Brian to share his knowledge and insight into the industry.

 

Brian received undergraduate degrees in music and computer science from Northwestern University in1985,where he created the first dual degree program between the School of Music and the Technological Institute. He went on to complete his Masters in Computer Applications in Music in 1987, where portions of his thesis work was published in the prestigious Computer Music Journal and presented by invitation to the AES special conference on Audio Technology.

 

Brian currently serves as President of the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), a position he was elected to in 2012, sits on the advisory board of the Game Developer Conference, is a former steering committee member of the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group (ia-sig) of the MMA, and has been a featured keynote speaker at GDC, Project BBQ and the Montreal Interactive Games Summit (MIGS).

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Brian is also the inventor or co-inventor of the following patents in music, sound and game technology

•    Schmidt, Brian, Spatial audio for interactive environments US 11792598 (2023)

• Schmidt, Brian, Technique for directing audio in augmented reality system US 11445305 (2022)  

•    Schmidt, Brian, Technique for directing audio in augmented reality system US10536783B2 (2020)  

•    Schmidt, Brian, Mixed Reality Spatial Audio US10863301 (2020)

•    Schmidt, Brian, Spatial Audio for interactive audio environments US10863300 (2020)
•    Schmidt, Brian, Mixed reality system with spatialized audio US10390165B2 (2019)
•    Schmidt, Brian, Mixed reality spatial audio US10616705B2 (2020)
•    Schmidt, Brian, Distributed audio capturing techniques for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) systems US10531220B2 (2020)
•    Schmidt, Brian, Efficient rendering of virtual sound fields US10667072B2 (2020) 
•    Schmidt, Brian, Mix Buffers and command queues for audio blocks  10157625 (2018)
•    Schmidt, Brian, Mix buffers and command queues for audio blocks 9646623 (2017)
•    Schmidt, Brian, Game Console Communication with a Device,  7,991,890 , 2011 
•    Schmidt, Brian, Strategies for reading information from a mass storage medium using a cache memory,  7,747,823 , 2010
•    Schmidt, Brian, Packet Multiplexing in multi-channel audio,  7,706,415 , 2010
•    Schmidt, Brian, Music replacement in a gaming system,  7,663,045 , 2010
•    Schmidt, Brian, Determining latency and persistency of storage devices and presenting a save/read user interface through abstracted storage,  7,590,779 , 2009 
•    Schmidt, Brian, Integrating External Voices,  7,395,208 , 2008 
•    Schmidt, Brian, Dynamic audio buffer creation,  7,386,356 , 2008
•    Schmidt, Brian, Audio Buffer Configuration,  7,376,475 , 2008
•    Schmidt, Brian, Strategies for reading information from a mass storage medium using a cache memory,  7,337,273 , 2008
•    Schmidt, Brian, Audio Generation System Manager,  7,305,273 , 2007
•    Schmidt, Brian, Accessing Audio Processing Components,  7,254,540 , 2007
•    Schmidt, Brian, Scripting solution for interactive audio generation,  7,162,314 , 2007 
•    Schmidt, Brian, Recursive multistage audio processing,  7,110,940 , 2006
•    Schmidt, Brian, Audio buffers with audio effects,  7,107,110 , 2006
•    Schmidt, Brian, Synthesizer multi-bus component,  7,089,068 , 2006
•    Schmidt, Brian, Infrastructure for generating a downloadable, secure runtime binary image for a secondary processor,  7,076,774 , 2006
•    Schmidt, Brian, Secondary processor execution kernel framework,  6,996,699 , 2006

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