We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Caio Jiacomini a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Caio thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on so far was a video game called A Taste of the Past developed by Sondering Studio, in which I worked on as a sound designer and composer. The game is a narrative sidescroller that follows the journey of Mei, a Chinese-American high schooler, after she wakes up in a train to the afterlife where she gets to reconnect with her late mother through cooking.

The original prototype of A Taste of the Past was developed for the Ludum Dare game jam, a game development marathon where teams have 72 hours to make a game. After the game jam, we were flooded with comments from people telling us how our game had touched them so deeply they were left in tears. Which I guess is a good thing for art to do.

Seeing so many strong reactions to our prototype made us feel like we were on to something, so we spent the next year revising and building on top of it to make it a full release we could be proud of. We couldn’t have hoped for a better result: we’ve had over 30 thousand downloads in less than a month after release and nother flood of comments telling us how emotionally potent the game was.

What drives me as a composer and sound designer is being able to create experiences that resonate emotionally with people I’ve never met, and the reactions that so many people had to my work on A Taste of the Past is something I’d never have imagined. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the message a stranger sent me on Instagram saying that they are gonna take my music with them for the rest of their life as a way of remembering their late mother.

Caio, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hi there! My name is Caio Jiacomini and I’m a Brazilian sound designer, composer, and audio developer currently based in Boston, MA. I’m passionate about fusing creativity with technology in order to deliver meaningful and immersive experiences for video games and media. I work mostly with independent game developers creating custom sound design and music for their games, as well as implementing dynamic audio to help make their games as immersive as possible.

I also release my own music as an artist as a way to explore the multifaceted relationships between human expression and technology. My latest release is a generative music EP, meaning music that’s composed aleatorically within a set of rules defined by the composer, called Púrpura.

On top of that I also develop my own virtual synthesizers and audio effects plugins. The one I’m most proud of developing is Granulera, a granular synthesizer that was designed for creating all sorts of aleatoric textures. My most notorious one so far has been Vendaval, a synthesizer that models the sound of wind. If you’re a musician or sound designer, you can get them on my website for free! I love making tools that are useful to other people and really cherish it when people share with me how they used them in their own projects – I recently got a random message from an Australian sound designer telling me they used Vendaval to make sounds for a virtual reality project and won an award!

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Elect government officials who support the arts. Music and art are intrinsic experiences to the human condition. It’s how we have been creating social bonds and community since prehistoric times and I believe one needs to engage with art in order to live their humanity to the fullest extent. We need strong art and music programs in our schools that are part of the core of our educational system, not something that’s an extra and a “nice to have”, so that children can engage in art from an early age. We need federal and local governments that act as patrons of the arts and hold the arts in as much regard, in terms of budget, as they do bloated and inefficient police departments.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

If you’re into game audio at all, Twitter actually is a really good place to be that I was kind of late to get into. The game audio community there is super welcoming and there are a lot of accomplished composers and sound designers, many of who probably worked on your favorite games, sharing their techniques, career advice, project breakdowns, and offering their time to mentor newcomers. That said, Twitter can be an incredibly overwhelming place, but it also offers a lot of tools for curating what shows up on your timeline. If you’re careful with that, it can be a really good platform to foster community.

Contact Info:

• Website: caiojminiaudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caiojmini/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caiojmini/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/caiojmini

Image Credits
Jaimi Qiu, Julia Lee, Isabelle Szeto