 Thank you. Good morning. I assume that's exactly how you expected this morning would start. I'm going to very jealously say that all that applause just now was for me. Therefore, can we please have a proper round of applause for these musicians? Weeks and weeks and weeks, they worked and worked and blood and sweat to learn that music. And by that I mean an hour last night. So needless to say, they are amazing. So I am Austin Wintry and I'm a little bit of an unusual type for a conference like this. So you're probably wondering what is a composer doing in a conference that specializes in obviously policy, discussion, economics, liberty, business. Actually you're probably wondering more sort of foundationally who the hell am I. So hi, I'm me. This is me. Here's who I am attempting to look very fancy. This is more realistically how I am awkward and sort of, you know, trying to pass off something charismatic and utterly failing. I come from Los Angeles so stereotype legally obligates me to show you a photo of me with somebody famous. The reality is the short answer is I'm a composer. I work in all smatterings of areas. I do games, film, TV, theater, basically anyone that'll have me case in point being at FECON. And my work has been nominated for seven British Academy awards. I won two of them. My colleagues at the American Society of Composers and Lyricists gave me a video game score of the year two times in a row and a different set of colleagues in the Game Audio Network Guild have given me a total of 26 nominations in their so-called gang awards among them 11 wins in categories like music of the year, composition of the year. My music has charted on the Billboard charts and I received the first ever Grammy nomination for a video game score. And with all of that not not with all of that laid down you're still wondering why I'm here because here's the thing what is everything I just said mean? Jack shit literally nothing especially when facing this the blank page does not care at all anything that happened yesterday it's just as merciless and terrifying no matter what nice things people have have done for me. So if that awards and whatever else is grateful if I am if they mean nothing and if they're pointed at my music and I'm not really here to talk necessarily specifically about music raise the question what am I here to talk about? I think it leads to a question of how exactly do I get jobs? I'm still wondering that but we're going to try to walk through it that leads to a question more sort of foundationally of what is it that I sell and that's sort of the question I want all of us to think about and it doesn't necessarily have to mean in some business sense although I have a feeling that's going to be a theme amongst everyone here. So I want to give first a rudimentary explanation of how my field particularly the world of video games everything that you saw in the montage the medley was all that was all video games probably very obvious but now we're all on the same page so let me explain how games work I think a lot of people have this perception that it's all very tron-like that this is what it looks like to design a game sometimes it actually is accurate usually it looks a lot more like this for hours and hours and hours at a time followed by extended periods of this and when you're really lucky you end up looking like this at least on a good day in reality it's actually it's a really complex field it's also very technical field with incredible technical sort of art and creativity and I want to talk a little bit about one of the games that I worked on featured just now the little medley this is a game called Journey often as a composer I'm brought in pretty early in the process it's different in films where you're brought in often at the 11th hour when everybody's freaking out and panicked and they've run out of money and everything has kind of gone to hell it's like welcome to the team in games the the tendency tends to bring in composers a little bit earlier than that and in the case of a game like Journey I was actually brought in from the beginning so spent fully three years working on this game for those unfamiliar it's a game where the player is this solitary character that one a sort of nameless identity list ageless genderless culturalist avatar that is designed really so you could kind of project whatever identity you know of yourself basically onto the environment is mostly this kind of desert I know that I in my haste I picked an excellent high resolution image to showcase the game but that's a desert with a kind of mountain in the distance it's meant to be a kind of hostile feeling environment keeping feeling because the game actually has no challenges it's it's not a hard game it's very unvideo gamey when you think of the traditional game mechanics where you get frustrated and you have to try to get better and better and better this is not a skill-based game at all but there nonetheless wanted to be this implication of a kind of dire circumstance and deserts have a good way of making us feel that way in other words it's about time spent in the world not really skills mastered navigating the world and all of that as you would probably imagine impacts heavily how I conceive of the music on a technical level it's evolving in a very dynamic and real-time way around how the player navigates that world so you know for example as the player approaches certain milestones and sometimes it's as innocuous as like that sand dune or something that they wouldn't necessarily perceive as anything noteworthy nonetheless I've worked with the programmers and the engineers so that you know as they approach it the music can crescendo and it can build energy and rhythm and all that sort of thing and then they peak you know the mountain is revealed and then the music gently comes down and all of this is being done in some cases algorithmically or in some cases through a lot of kind of like working behind the machines like this desperate monkey to stitch it all together so that the player has this very seamless experience another core component of journey is that it's actually a multiplayer game again with the high res imagery but you can connect with another player who is also very kind of identity neutral and explore this world together and your only way of communicating is through a sort of chirping mechanic where you hit one of the little buttons on the controller and a little burst of light comes out of your character and there's a whole kind of implied language and all of this is heavily impacting what I'm doing in fact some of the design decisions because I'm working in parallel with the whole team evolve based around the music in fact it was one kind of funny semi noteworthy moment while working on the score where they showed me a very very rough mock-up with unfinished graphics and bugs and it would crash half the time and all that because remember this is software and they said here's what we want this to be and they described something very emotional and very kind of stirring so I wrote this piece of music based around what I was imagining the final product would look like and then I remember they put that music in the game and then they said they looked at sort of what they thought was going to be the final version of that scene and it just was so ridiculous and the music was scoring this dramatic epic and it felt like it was basically a PowerPoint presentation and I said I ought to reel that back and they said actually no we should make the game fit what you did because this emotion is actually really awesome and really sort of powerful and the game is falling flat to be clear that's kind of a rare conversation normally it's all the composer's fault and we have to go and reevaluate what we're doing but this was a really specialist experience but also not wildly different from the way a lot of the game industry works so as I said it's a multiplayer game and the music is bearing that in mind in a technical way as well because things like your literal proximity to the other player is constantly remixing the music and changing how it sounds so that you would have a very different musical and therefore emotional experience playing the game if you find someone out in the world or if you never do because I didn't mention before that the way the multiplayer mechanic works is that you'll just be wandering along and then someone just appears because the system is scanning who in the world is playing the game here's two players that are approximate each other to each other so it just connects them so in other words if you wanted to sit down on the couch and play with your friend you're out of luck you have to literally have two separate playstations and you can't even force them to connect the whole idea is kind of a blind matchmaking and the underlying goal of that is to create a game where we learn to empathize with each other and we learn to connect with each other in this just very sort of uncontrolled unmitigated way so I write all the music I spent you know in this case years and years doing it then a final step is to actually go and record the various instruments and produce it and make a final result here's me with last year's keynote speaker at fee con Tina Guo whose cello solos form the core this is a photo of us almost 10 years ago looking just barely not infants and and so the the captain morgan's is often an important part of the creative process as well and so we go and we record soloists we record an orchestra I realized this orchestra is actually serving as a kind of live proxy to the one behind their heads in the photo but that's also relatively common sometimes people think that video games all still sound like tetris and it's actually pretty common to record orchestras in case that's of novel information to anybody here so needless to say this takes a lot of flexibility it takes a lot of patience it takes certainly creativity and it might create the impression that that's sort of what I do and therefore what I sell I want to give you a little demonstration of exactly the power of how this works I gave the musicians basically no warning I was going to do this so if this goes to hell you can blame me if we would in the intro bar 29 so we all see movies hopefully especially after today we all play video games yes yes good I'm seeing total consensus and something that even despite our general cultural literacy with these forms we don't necessarily appreciate or or or realize is just how much the music manipulates what you see and what you hear so if you would give me bar 29 here is the world's most generic sentence the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog isn't this a noble sentiment I'm communicating right okay thank you now for our round two that I explained the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog I might have cheated with a little bit of alteration of my performance but you'll see it's obviously very simple and very idea that the moment the music starts to turn a little darker what was one moment ago noble and and and beautiful becomes ominous and dark and and creepy and that's basically what I do for a living is figuring out what does the subtext need to be what am I trying to say so maybe that is what I sell it's this package of understanding that this notion of this combination of my training my experience etc but I actually don't think that's what it is and especially I don't think that's when I have opportunities why I'm getting them so I'm going to kind of approach this a little circuitously because I have often found myself facing a kind of a dilemma an esoteric one but nonetheless the dilemma is what do I care about most the art itself meaning sort of music and storytelling through music do I care about that or my career prospects so I know it's kind of an odd sounding dilemma but this is where I think the notions of entrepreneurship and the free market really come to bear which I guess that is sort of why I'm here the manner with which this dilemma tends to manifest is that professional conferences not unlike this which we have loads of in the game industry or even something as simple as like a facebook exchange where somebody reaches out often a composer kind of early in their career just getting started and they they ask me for simple advice sometimes it's technical advice sometimes it's musical advice or or even legal advice which I strongly disencourage them listening to me from or about and creative advice whatever that case now I could have the attitude that you know to hell with you it's a dog eat dog world and I am either going to ignore your request for advice or perhaps more insidiously I'm going to give you deliberately horrible and sabotaging advice or maybe even just useless advice but this kind of defensive approach is predicated on the idea that I don't actually believe in my own creative potential my own sort of creative power it's a belief that one day this the well that I have to draw from every day is going to is going to dry up and it's also built on this sort of implication that helping my colleagues comes to the detriment of my own career and that somehow I'm only as good or as valuable as that advice that I might give out but as in most things in life it's plainly obvious that this is not zero sum so that's a sort of a ludicrous conclusion to draw so obviously I don't think that's true but secondly in my case at least so far I'm lucky enough to say that inspiration has actually always felt kind of easy and I think the main reason for that is that I actually really really love games and I love film and I love television and all the areas in which I work so when I sit down to write one it's usually just a flood of inspiration because the medium itself is so inspiring and the biggest stress that I have is figuring out what in the hell to sort of take out of the equation which ideas are coming to mind turn out to actually be other utter horseshit and which ones are actually really good that's far more stressful than just staring paralyzed at the the blank page and using one example I did a game called abzu and I mean even just looking at one frame of this I can't I can't not start writing music I just thought the game is so exceptionally beautiful and not just visually the way it feels in your hand so everything about it just starts speaking to me and I I can't I can't stop or slow down so in this case much like journey and a bunch of others I thought okay I can imagine something grand something sort of beautiful and and fluid not trying to be literal with the underwater setting of the game but it has a certain constant motion so I found myself going an orchestral route but I also thought you know what I love is harp and then being the ludicrous person that I am I said actually no it'd be awesome is seven harps and lucky enough to be able to make that happen and also we had a large choir and all sorts of weird bells and lots of electronics and all that sort of thing so as you can see inspiration is not really the problem and therefore I could never justify a refusal to share ideas on the basis that I'm going to somehow run out on my own let me give you another example a different game I worked on called the banner saga funny enough this one is kind of a perfect proxy to a lot of the themes of this conference because it's basically a game about sort of scarcity and it's a game in which you play a sort of caravan of Viking inspired it's all done in this beautiful hand drawn Ivan Dural if you're familiar with the great American painter the the whole aesthetic of the game is kind of a love letter to his style and everything is quite literally drawn by hand in this sort of 1960s Disney aesthetic which I just felt an absolute love with but also the notion of the story and this idea of people being out kind of on the raggedy edge of civilization just trying to get by as it turns out I also had a very limited budget so this notion of scraping by on peanuts spoke very directly to my own just pragmatic considerations of how the hell to pull this off I knew I wanted something very kind of potentially cold and stark and without a lot of the traditional warmth you might hear in a soundtrack which led me to the idea of what if I recorded a wind ensemble I can make a kind of something that can feel very cold but also very large and all the warmth you get from strings is just not in the equation it's a little hard to tell but there's no strings in that orchestra well turns out there's usually like 50 strings and so by getting rid of them you save quite a lot of money notice there's none up here either so that turned out to address everything it addressed the budgetary constraints and the creative constraints another thing that I might add is that game music game scoring the video game industry like most industries is very fluid and dynamic where aesthetics and tastes are always changing and so a solution to a dramatic problem that I have on Monday that I throw out might turn out to be really valuable Tuesday and I think that's a really cool thing so it's entirely possible that you don't even need all new ideas all the time sometimes reevaluating things you previously thought were garbage and dusting them off you might find new value and new meaning what's more one of the things that I find so entrancing about it is that it's it's more than just the notes on the page it's actually about the creative exchange of minds it's about people collaborating and finding all of these solutions that I'm talking about together so everything that I've talked about on these previous games that I worked on didn't happen in a vacuum of me just telling the game developers here is what I'm going to do it was me working with them so that we could concoct you know our music for our game instead of my music in their game and that collaboration and partnership ends up being everything and I think it's probably hopefully what the people who hire me like best about the sort of reflections afterward on why they hired me the question of what was it like to actually work together so then circling back to this question of what it is that I'm selling it's less of a product and more of a process so it's not so much what I do but how I do it and so that could very well be the thing that I'm selling and obviously it's not how in some technical sense like I'm going to approach it x y z way with the software or with the musicians or whatever it's the if the how of the connection amongst fellow minds so going back to my little dilemma if if I found myself at this crossroad of like should I be helping these people well how can I even how could I lose creative exchange how could I ever be usurped or have stolen from me the idea of just the person-to-person interaction now obviously there are industries out in the world that do sell widgets and I don't not one of those but I understand that there is traditional needs for kind of defensive mechanisms in place to protect people's property and that sort of thing and and but I'm saying that the takeaway might be that that's never just it I mean obviously you only need to think about things like customer service to realize that the process is at least as important and in my case I think it's probably everything but let's say for a moment that I actually did run out of ideas one day and then I did just stop getting opportunities to work there I find myself kind of at that dilemma again where I have to decide okay well do I care about the art of music or do I care just about hanging on to my career for dear life because it would look in that situation like it's careening off a cliff and about to all end in a spectacular disaster but I think it's obviously still a false dichotomy in a world of free markets and constantly improving solutions there's no reason that the notion of creativity wouldn't also be one of those things that's continuously evolving and and getting better and I have to accept the idea that I might not always have the best idea and that my solutions won't be the most satisfying to the potential collaborators which means I need to be okay with the fact that if I actually love this art itself that one day they might stop hiring me and go after some of my colleagues instead and I get to watch from afar and enjoy the fruits of their labors as an observer but actually the truth the matter is I think that's okay because if I'm not offering something unique or compelling then I it's ridiculous to try to jealously hang on to it because what in the hell am I actually hanging on to and if I do have something compelling to offer then the art benefits from trying to share that maximally because the whole reason I became a composer was out of a love for this art it wasn't sort of entrepreneurship first found something I was reasonably good at and then just went after it it was what do I love what do I think I'm good at hey okay now how do I try to earn a living there and so it's astonishing how often opportunities come about when you actually stop worrying about obsessing over opportunities it took me a long time to learn that never mind also a golden rule that everyone here is going to understand is that competition pretty much always makes things better and in a metaway I think of competition as an industry-wide collaboration to improve the art itself we're always one upping each other and finding more interesting solutions and new musical ideas and all that sort of thing and this is not a platitude this is not something that just sounds cool on a hallmark card I think it's important to live this principle on a daily basis the art form that falls stagnant is one that not only stops exciting me as a consumer but one which would actually make my job harder to do I would have a harder time getting jobs if suddenly everything was kind of becoming stale and boring so in other words a climate in which artistry and creativity is generally declining is one in which risks start becoming shunned and the aesthetic and taste becomes increasingly conservative and narrow and that's not something I really want to participate in which leads me to a kind of side point that I think all entrepreneurship and everything creativity in general is an outgrowth of how you live your life an open mind and a general curiosity about what you know may lie under a rock in front of you combined with this sort of generous spirit of bolstering up everyone around you I think is not just the way that I build my business but it's the way that I just want to be you know it's just how I want to live it's just the kind of person that I want to be so learning to take risks as an offshoot of that isn't just something that I think we need to do and bear in mind I don't mean stupid risks just entirely for their own sake but learning to make risks where the risk itself is actually something beautiful and like any other muscle this is something that has to be practiced and worked at and you get better at it the more you go obviously we live in a world where scarcity versus abundance is a constant reality and a constant discussion and we're always looking for ways to allocate resources for maximum effectiveness and that kind of creates this dichotomy where just philosophically you have to ask yourself do I want to live in a world where I think in terms of abundance and I'm therefore embracing constant opportunity and there's never a fear of that running away or a world in which I let scarcity rule all my thoughts and my main MO becomes about avoiding risk obviously I think that's kind of a false dichotomy I'm into those today one can easily find abundance in every sense through the pursuit of risk the embrace of scarcity generates abundance as counterintuitive as that is for most people although I think probably not to this crowd but I have a good story to illustrate that so when I did this game that I was speaking about journey one of things that happened is the game was met with incredible had an incredible reception it got a lot of praise right out of the gate reviews were very good and the user reaction was very good and one thing that happened was everyone took my soundtrack album and immediately started putting it up on YouTube so that's might be a little hard to see here but that's just some random person's upload of the music and you might be like pirates damn thieves but I was actually flattered I thought they weren't doing this as you know privateers they were just trying to share it so I went on those YouTube videos and I commented and I said things like I like to periodically check in here and see you know this means the world to me and I would thank them and notice that that got thousands of likes and I was just doing it because I wanted these people to know that I was okay with what they were doing because I understood their motivation for doing it well this actually got noticed here's the front page of Reddit good guy game music composer sees his music uploaded on YouTube and doesn't act like a little bitch about it this was literally on the like reddit.com is the one of the top trending posts so of course I went on there and I said well let me be clear here and I said what I just said I don't think people are doing this because they're assholes I think they're doing it because they are actually loving um well of course going on here and noticing communicating with people like that well then this happened here was iTunes that week this is worldwide bestsellers and you can see Journey ended up 30 against like Adele and oddly enough Bonnie Rait and so it was one of those that when people saw hey this guy is into total ass or apparently a little bitch that made them feel like you know what I'm actually going to go buy this album it was absolutely amazing and I always think it's really astonishing what happens when you don't look down on the people that you're hoping will be interested in your product so back to my little dilemma it's obvious that this isn't really a dilemma at all it's a complete concoction and if anything everything that I can can do to contribute to this incredible art form that I love not only benefits me as a consumer but it actually creates more opportunities for me within it so with that bearing in mind going to my original question what exactly then is it that I sell um it's it's obviously all the things I've been talking about but it's in a way none of those because you know the musical notes themselves the process the collaboration the embrace of risk it's all of that and yet it never feels satisfying when I asked myself what what could it be that it is truly at bedrock on some fundamental level that it is that I'm selling it's clearly raw magnetic sexuality no actually it's something else and it took me a long time to figure out what I thought it was and the wake of Journey there was all this remarkable grounds well like I said with the the uploading of the video and that sort of thing but also people started writing testimonials to their experience playing the game and so what I realized was sometimes when you take big risks creatively and personally and all that something like this can happen here's something that somebody posted I'm going to read this somebody on just a random blog wrote apotheosis which is the name of the piece of music that I wrote for the finale of the game they said never in my life have I listened to a song such as apotheosis the first time I listened to it while reaching the top of the mountain I had felt such a rush of emotions my chest felt heavy and my vision was haunted with the scenery this combination was such a shock to my senses that whenever I listen to it now I can't help but cry not the sobbing or sniffling kind of cry but more of the silent kind where I forget I need to breathe and tears just flow out I could not describe the emotion I feel when I listen to this song it's not happiness or sadness it's not rage or forgiveness it's not envy or compassion but if I could try to describe this to you I would feel like it would be the emotion of knowing I am meant for something that I have a purpose and a direction in which to go it's the feeling of knowing you are truly alive that I have a beating heart and a soul that I am human and because I am I can accomplish great things that I can create and destroy I can build bonds or choose to walk away in a different direction that I'm able to love and be loved and that I'm able to give life to another I've never had this happen to me because of a song memories of my journey with strangers who I've come to love flash over and over through my mind mixed in with important events in my life here on this earth and at the end all I can see is the light at the top of the mountain knowing my own real journey is not over but all I know is that when it is over whenever that will be and regardless of my trials or however high that mountain I will not be finishing it alone none of us is ever alone for me that is what this is actually about that's what markets are about that's what art enshrines and that's what truly in the end I think that I'm trying to sell it's about catalyzing a sense of togetherness amongst me and my collaborators but also amongst me and the potential audience and the creators in general the community of creators and audiences and the more those barriers that separate us dissolve the more everybody kind of elevates one another and as idealistic as that sounds that's what I think markets essentially are an expression of it's a philosophy rooted very empirically in the real world in a couple of hours you'll have a chance to see me and fees very own Sean Malone the bastard mind behind things like out of frame and a lot of other amazing content online and the painter you can see here on hila bermudas we are going to explore creativity in this kind of thing live right in front of you at one of the 1145 breakout sessions the ideas all of us are going to start with a blank canvas and engage in a wordless storytelling together she will paint he and I are going to play and we're going to just engage with the room and we have no idea what's going to happen it's terrifying it might be a disaster we'll see but I think it takes everything I've been talking about and it distills it into one you know 30 or 40 minute period that we call deologos at the start I shared with you music from various games of mine and I'm going to end with music from one more game I was approached by the French company Ubisoft a few years ago to write music for their massively epic multi hundred million dollar franchise called Assassin's Creed and I pitched to them this in keeping with the scale of that intimate neoclassical quasi sort of Victorian set of waltzes and so I will just end by letting you be the judge on if that juxtaposition actually works and if the risks bore fruit and so with that thank you for having me once more for these guys thank you