Dave Murrant of Sony Computer Entertainment America led a panel that brought some first-hand experience from the, let’s face it, still relatively new platform. Murrant was joined by Charles Deenen of EA, Marc Schaefgen of Midway, and Rex Baca and Monty Mudd of SCEA, and the consensus was that the platform, being new, has yet to reveal its true potential. That and the audio crews need a bit more time to take real advantage of the 48 k across the board and 7.1 Dolby True HD. It’s underused as a platform, perhaps, but the potential is there, all agreed.

There was talk of RAM allocation and larger budgets, data sets and throughput, compression schemes and occlusion. But tucked into all the tech was the very real acknowledgment that jobs are changing! The next-gen consoles, all agreed, have allowed the industry to begin creeping toward job specialization. Once, there were just one or two audio people on a title, and they did every job, from field recording to edit to implementation. Sometimes they were the programmer. Today, however, the demands and capabilities are so much greater that a variety of jobs can exist. And though implementation has always been a part of the authoring, today it is the job in most demand: the technical sound designer, for lack of a better phrase. Someone with great ears, solid tech, a creative mind and works well with others. Students, are you listening?

Nice job from first-party and third-party developers. I expect that next year this will be a lively panel with lots more examples.