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Is a CS Deg Needed to Make Game Soundtracks?

Posted by Cliff on from the unnecessary-education dept.

Kurtiz666 asks: "A good friend of mine has his bachelor's in music composition - he wants to score game soundtracks for a living. He's a very good composer but has had difficulty breaking into the industry, doing only occasional work like soundtracks for plays and such. He thinks getting a CS degree will help him and is making plans to go back to school, but I'm not entirely convinced he needs this degree. I don't want to sound like his mother or anything, but I also don't want him to waste 2 years on school if he doesn't have to. So, how do you break into the game soundtrack field? Are there any software skills you recommend, and is a CS degree really necessary?"

5 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. not just to get a job by denissmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If he is going for a degree just to get a job, it's a bad plan. If he really is interested in computer science as a field he should go for it. It is never a good plan to choose a course of study just for a line on a resume. Over time that line falls farther and farther down the page. It always pays to study what you love - even though you may find it doesn't help you get a job at all.

    --
    I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
  2. I wouldn't think so... by general_re · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I mean, John Williams does not, to my knowledge, have a degree in filmmaking. Your friend is probably better off putting together a portfolio of his compositions, and then shopping it around until he drops. Covering both theme and incidental music would probably be wise, as well as a variety of genres. Don't bother with scores - the people who would hire him likely can't make sense of them anyway. Tell him to call in every favor he's got, get some musician friends into the studio, and do some recording. Lotsa luck to him.

    --
    ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
  3. Find an OSS game by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do the soundtrack for it, for free, and get yourself noticed.

  4. Huh? by pclminion · · Score: 5, Insightful
    That's one of the most bizarre questions I've seen asked. The answer is obviously that it would be a waste of time.

    What on earth does game soundtrack composition have to do with computability, context free grammars, operating system resource allocation, space and time complexity analysis, etc? The entire premise of the question is insane.

    It sounds like this person thinks that CS is where you go to learn to use a computer. That would be like sending an aspiring painter to get a degree in physics so he could learn to use a paintbrush.

  5. So you want to learn CS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Please remove the left recursion from the following grammar:

    S -> SAb
    A -> BSa
    B -> ACSa
    C -> dSD
    D -> BaSBA

    Is this grammar capable of producing sentences of finite length?

    Also, determine an upper bound on the time complexity for computing Ackermann's function. Describe the significance of this function in the context of algebras.

    Next, demonstrate that the grammar of ANSI C is not context-free. What modifications to the grammar would you perform to cause it to be context-free? Is the resulting grammar LL(1)?

    I hope you found all that to be interesting, fun, and relevant to music scoring, because that's what you'll be doing in Computer Science.