Phillip Corrado

Hi everybody, I'm Phillip Corrado, and I'm a 2nd year Computer Science major with interest in moving into the systems design track of the Fine Arts DAS major. I want to be a dame designer and am interested in everything related to the process of game development. The reason I'm taking this course is because I want to design and make games, and audio design is such a fundamental part in setting the tone and atmosphere of a game or scene in a game that I'd like to become familiar with it to make smart decisions with regards to audio design, as well as understand it and others' choices regarding it better.

I have very little if any experience in music production outside of some simple music mixers as flash games on websites as a kid and as smaller aspects in some games and don't truly know how to play any instruments. While I'm not an active music maker, I'm a fairly avid listener, as my walk to and from school tends to give me 30-45 minutes of music per day, and I try to vary what I listen to. I like a lot of different genres of music, from classical to punk rock, but the bulk of my listening tends to be from soud tracks from things like Frozen, The Book of Mormon, and The Last of Us and progressive or alternate rock from bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, and Kansas.

While I listen to music fairly frequently, I don't seem to follow it as much as my friends of family do, with little knowledge of music that I like from contemporary artists outside of new soundtracks. Here are some of my favorite songs from soundtracks that I've been listening to lately:

Snake Eater (Theme Song) - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater by Norihiko Hibino
This song was used a as direct homage to James Bond opening themes with the game taking place in the 60s and, being a Metal Gear game, focused on espionage.

Build That Wall (Zia's Theme) - Bastion by Darren Korb
Bastion is one of my favorite video game soundtracks of all time, and this is the first piece of music you hear in the game with lyrics, and it's diegetic, being also the first sounds of another human alive for the most part since the game began. Not only does it sound good, the way it was used in the game was extremely effective and cool.

The Last of Us (Theme) - The Last of Us by Gustavo Santollala
The Last of Us was my favorite game of last year and the desperation of the characters and the world they survived in was captured extremely well by its soundtrack.

Fragile (album) - Yes by Yes
While this entire album doesn't really count as a soundtrack as it is a band's album, the song Roundabout in it is used as the closing theme for each episode of the anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, so it technically counts, and honestly I just want an excuse to put this up here.