Cécile Le Prado with Gundolf S. Freyermuth and other game educators and speakers (Cécile Le Prado: third from left, front row; Gundolf S. Freyermuth: second from left, second row). 8th Clash of Realities Conference, Cologne Game Lab, November 8, 2017. Credits: Gundolf S. Freyermuth’s Archive: https://freyermuth.com/category/archiv-2017/
This post is by Prof. Dr. Cécile Le Prado, who has collaborated with Prof. Em. Dr. Gundolf S. Freyermuth at the Cologne Game Lab on the development of the sound curriculum between 2015 and 2022. She is a Sound Designer and Music Composer, emeritus professor of Sound Design at ENJMIN and CGL, and a researcher at the CNAM CEDRIC Lab. Her Ph.D. thesis was titled “Designing Sound: Between Determinism, Emergence and Interactivity”.
Check out her contribution below:
Gundolf S. Freyermuth as a Mediator
I met Gundolf and Björn in 2014 at the Game Developers Conference, which a team from ENJMIN (French National School of Video Games and Digital Interactive Media) attended every year. At the time, I was directing the sound specialization in the master’s program in Video Games and Digital Interactive Media. Everything that follows and everything I’ve learned and experienced at CGL is inextricably linked to that encounter, as well as to my conversations with André Czauderna and the entire CGL team.
Teaching at CGL, CGL/ENJMIN Collaboration
In 2015, I joined the CGL team, where I was asked to create a sound curriculum similar to the one I had developed 15 years earlier at ENJMIN. The idea struck me as very interesting: it was a European project aimed at a highly diverse group of students from all over the world. This allowed me to consolidate and further develop my approach to teaching sound in a different setting, in terms of both language and academic level.
In 2018, with the support of the leaders of both schools and Gundolf in particular, the two universities, CGL (Technische Hochschule Köln) and ENJMIN (CNAM: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers), signed an agreement for a dual degree at the master’s level. Working for both schools, I had the opportunity to participate in the creation of this program and to follow its progress until 2022.
For some CGL students, this was an opportunity to discover a different game production environment and potentially join a French game development studio at the end of their ENJMIN-supported internship. For ENJMIN students, in turn, it provided them with guidance in work more focused on research and “Game Studies.”
In retrospect, it seems to me that this cooperation has been a success and a good example of what can be achieved within the Franco-German framework.
Clash of Realities
In 2017, as part of “Clash of Realities,” the annual conference organized by CGL, Gundolf proposed a collaboration with Professor Marcus Erbe (Institute of Musicology at the University of Cologne). The goal was to develop the content for a day dedicated to sound as part of the 8th International Conference on the Art, Technology, and Theory of Digital Games. This was a very good opportunity to highlight the distinctive features of sound design in game development, in relation to game design and ergonomics.
Audiovisual Media: Film and Games
In 2019, Gundolf introduced me to the team at ifs (Internationale Filmschule Köln) and invited me to participate in teaching and mentoring students in the Digital Narratives program. This allowed me to combine my original background in linear audiovisual media, in particular the writings of Michel Chion (a theorist of sound in cinema), with my research and teaching on sound in interactive media. The relationship between image and sound is profoundly altered by the actions of the player or inter-actor. I always keep these connections, this triangulation, very much in mind in my current research at the CEDRIC laboratory at CNAM and in my sound installations.
Thank you, Gundolf, for making all of this possible and thereby helping to advance thinking in the areas of education, creation, and research.
Cécile Le Prado