Working alone in a home office can be kind of isolating. Falling asleep to silence can be difficult. Finding just the right level of audio background sounds for a tabletop gaming session can be a chore. Luckily, there's a YouTube channel I came across recently than can solve all three of those scenarios and then some: The Guild of Ambience . The youtube channel is a passion project of a graphic and sound designer from Australia that focuses on fantasy-influenced environmental soundscapes for mood, sleep and relaxation.
For expample, if you're a Game Master wanting to give your players a little more immersion while everyone's in Ye Olde Tavern waiting for the adventure to begin, you could queue up this video:
Or if some gentle nature sounds with the occasional village ambiance is your thing, you can try this:
My favorite is this video here-- a gentle soundscape with an hour of original music that presents a gentle shifting of moods:
PC Gamer has a great interview (and over-view) of the work of Mick Gordon, who most recently won praise for the bone-crunchingly, demon-slayingly hard rocking soundtrack to the recent DOOM reboot. As they introduce him:
“Back when Bethesda and id Software were making announcements about the recently rebooted Doom... [it was announced that] Mick Gordon was onboard to compose the soundtrack His work on Wolfenstein: The New Order and Killer Instinct is cherished among those games’ playerbases, and the intensity of both owe a lot to his anarchic (but still impressively subtle, when it needs to be) approach to getting visuals and music swinging to the same beat. Based in Australia, Gordon’s been around for a while. He’s worked on two Need For Speed games, as well as Shift 2 Unleashed and ShootMania Storm, to name a few examples. Currently he’s working with Arkane Studios on its Prey reboot, which—as he relates below—will mark a departure from his recent, foot-to-the-floor audio rampages.”
I'm not kidding about the DOOM soundtrack being awesome. One of the few complaints about the handling of the game's release was "why wasn't the soundtrack released on day one with the game?"-- though that was eventually rectified with the release of an official soundtrack. Gordon himself released an in-depth look at his process behind the music in a two part video series on his official youtube channel, available below:
