New Video Game and Interactive Media Scoring Major Provides Bridge to Industry The new program pairs students with leading game development programs around the country and prepares them for careers across the interactive music industry.
By
Bryan Parys
February 16, 2022
This fall, Berklee's Film Scoring Department will launch a new major focusing on preparing students for careers in the video game and emerging interactive media industries. The Game and Interactive Media Scoring (GAIMS) program will give students the full suite of technical skills they will need for any level in the game audio and scoring world, and will provide opportunities to enter the industry with practical experience. This is one of the few programs thats preparing students specifically to score video games, said Sean McMahon, chair of the Film Scoring Department. If you look at the competitive landscape out there or just other institutions, there are many game development programs and there are many game audio programs, but not really any in video game scoring.
The new major is the culmination of an investment in game and media scoring that began over a decade ago, when the department hired Michael Sweet to develop game-focused curriculum. Those courses came about in response to the formation of the Video Game Scoring Club, which began in 2007 and became the most popular student club on campus. The curricular work that Sweet helped architect led to the founding of a minor in video game scoring in 2010. This is really sort of student driven, McMahon said. What were trying to do is listen, not just to the marketplace, but listening to the students and what the students want.
Coming out of the program [students are] going to have at least one, [and] some of our students are going to have 10 real projects that theyve worked on.
- Jeanine Cowen, assistant chair
We have known that we wanted to have a major for many, many years, said Jeanine Cowen, assistant chair of the Film Scoring Department, commenting on why launching the program in 2022 makes so much sense, now that interactive media is changing the industry landscape. A decade ago, Cowen explained, the technology for scoring video games was proprietary and hard to gain access to, making building a curriculum around it near impossible. When we started teaching the curriculum, things like [software programs] Unity and Unreal were not open. In some cases, they didnt exist, said Cowen. Now, the industry itself has developed in such a way that we do have really common tools that are accessible to everybody.
From Berklee to Blizzard Entertainment
Overwatch composer Adam Burgess B.M. 14 breaks down some of the epic music heard by 50 million gamers worldwide, and shares career tips for aspiring game composers.
The hallmark of the program is the collaboration and networking opportunities students will have with video game development students from some of the top game design programs in the country through partnerships with schools including the University of Southern California, Champlain College, and the University of Wisconsin-Stout, to name a few. Coming out of the program [students are] going to have at least one, [and] some of our students are going to have 10 real projects that theyve worked on, said Cowen.
Even beyond the composition projects themselves, McMahon said that the connections students make through these collaborations will be just as valuable. Students connect while they're students [and so] to me the real value is in these relationships, McMahon said. If they connect well with somebody at this level, 10 years from now thats really when its going to pay off.
The new major's curriculum will give students the knowledge they need to carve out their career path, whether that's building and maintaining a stable freelance portfolio or getting a foot in the door at a company. Cowen spoke about how the gaming industry has risen to the level of the film industry in terms of staff frameworks. When you talk about film composers theres a whole kind of structure of assistants and other jobs within film music. The same thing is true for game music now, Cowen said. Theres a whole structure now, especially at larger companies, that supports people with the type of education that theyre going to be receiving at Berklee.
Composing for Virtual Reality
Richard Ludlow B.M. 14 draws on his Berklee training to help him and his company Hexany Audio provide audio for two- and three-dimensional media, from scoring work to sound design.
With video games and interactive media becoming so stitched into the cultural fabric, the GAIMS major prepares students for an audio industry that is becoming less oriented around media genres. For example, McMahon said that video games are changing the way that we view films. Film production companies want to make films in the way that games are being made now, whether that's video games being adapted into movies-whereas it used to be the other way around-or films taking a less linear approach to narrative. Nobody asks if youre a filmer.' Do you go watch movies?' Nobody asks that, Cowen added. In 20 years, nobodys going to ask if youre a gamer.
McMahon took it one step further, saying, Youre not a film composer [or] TV composer- youre a composer, writing for all media. With this new major, the Film Scoring Department-which will be renamed the Screen Scoring Department in the fall-reflects the industry not just as it is, but where it's going, and will help build that bridge from education to a job. As McMahon put it, Once they graduate, it will be this smooth transition from one side to the other. Thats our goal.
Related Categories
News
Most Popular
Berklee artist Isa Ansin (right) performs at Brighton Music Hall.
Image by Lilly Patterson
For Berklee Artis
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
New Video Game and Interactive Media Scoring Major Provides Bridge to Industry The new program pairs students with leading game development programs around the country and prepares them for careers across the interactive music industry.
