After working as a freelance music composer, Akira Yamaoka joined Konami on September 21, 1993. He is best known for composing all of the music and sound effects for the Silent Hill video game series (excluding Silent Hill: Play Novel for the Game Boy Advance and "Esperandote" in Silent Hill, composed by Rika Muranaka). Since Silent Hill 3, he has taken on a more prominent role as the series' producer while also composing music.

Yamaoka's music has strong melancholy undertones and is often associated with dark ambient, industrial, trip-hop, and rock genres. Since Silent Hill 3, he's been collaborating on vocal compositions with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and Joe Romersa. Much of his work from previous titles was compiled for Christophe Gans' Silent Hill movie adaptation in 2006.

In 2005, he performed his music from Silent Hill 2 live at Leipzig's third Symphonic Game Music Concert. Yamaoka also accompanied the orchestra with an electric seven-string guitar while performing music...

Raiden, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, and Joseph Joestar have all been voiced by Richard Epcar.

Fun Facts & Trivia:

• Anime series such as Transformers R.I.D., Samurai X, Digimon, Eagle-Riders, and Teknoman are among the most popular.
• In Transformers R.I.D., he auditioned for the role of Optimus Prime.
• He was sent to Norway by Dream Works to dub The Road to El Dorado and Chicken Run into Polish.
• Since the 1980s, he has been a Transformers fan.
• Robotech was his first voice role. Harmony Gold made the V.A.s stay up all night recording, he recalls. He's astounded that Robotech is still a popular anime series.
• Comedy, dialects and accents, drums, horses, impersonations, most sports, singing, some martial arts, and stage combat are among his skills and abilities.
• He is Ellyn Stern's husband.

Memories of Richard:

(On how he became a voice actor.) "At the time, my girlfriend, Ellyn Stern, was asked to audition for a voice in a movie that was being dubbed into English. She...

Hello, Jon here.

Most of you probably know me as being the voice of Honest Trailers and other big name voice acting projects. I'm a full-time professional voice actor and have been featured in over 100 movie trailers for theatrical film, DVD/Blu-Ray, and even TV promos for shows like Community. I've also done over 200 commercials, video games, audiobook, and documentaries.

One of my primary sources of income is through something called ADR. There are many facets and skills people can dedicate themselves to regarding ADR for film and television. What is ADR exactly? Well, let's take a look.

"Siri, what does ADR mean?"

"Checking..."

"The answer is advanced digital recording!" Siri says...

Close. But more realistically, the term we are looking for is Automated Dialogue Replacement. 

ADR usually entails either the replacement of poorly recorded dialogue, incorrect inflections, or bringing in additional dialogue that was not...

In honor of our upcoming workshop with dynamic game composer Willbert Roget, our first official Strawberry Hill Studio blog post will be an excerpt from an 2016 interview with Will on the topic of interactive music for games. Check out more of Will's podcast Game of Themes here.

Today we are here to talk about Music and Video-Games.

From Pong in 1972 to the most recent AAA games, there is no question on how much the industry has grown and how much farther it will go. In addition, the simple individual sound of pong evolved into a huge amount of music and sound effects added to these games for the past twenty years, which bring the player to a much more immersive experience.

On Game of Themes, our host Wilbert Roget talks about the process of making music for such games, from indie to AAA. Will is a renown composer for games such as Lara Croft: Temple of Osiris and Star Wars: First Assault. On his podcast we will hear important composers, sound designers and audio designers talk...