Parker Piedmont
Computer Music Man
I'm a composer, producer, and software engineer in the Seattle area. I started my musical journey as a saxophonist but soon developed a taste for the more artificial sounds of synthesizers. I've been writing music since I graduated high school, and I love to combine the organic elements of my saxophone performance background with the mechanical elements of electronic music. Sort of a both-halves-of-the-brain thing, you know? Anyway, in my free time, I can be found stirring up trouble in my D&D campaign and trying new restaurants around Seattle.
New Album Incoming!
Album art by Emilee Piedmont.
Solace and Respite
Solace and Respite is an album I'm writing to score my dad's series of short nature videos. My goal with this album is to produce relaxing music that communicates the tranquility of the scenes in the videos. For this album, I've taken a "less is more" approach, layering singable melodies over recognizable chord progressions and filling in the remaining space with lush effects and ear candy, illustrating the emotions captured in my dad's videos.
Evolvy Bugs
Album art by Landon Wright.
Evolvy Bugs is a student project I worked on during college. It's a mobile shoot-em-up set in outer space where the player fights hordes of aliens. The game uses evolutionary computation to adapt the enemies to the player's play style, ensuring the player is never too successful for too long.
Evolvy Bugs has seven maps, each set in a different environment in outer space (such as battlefield ruins or an icy nebula). I set out to capture the image of each of these environments in music. I also wanted to capture the somewhat hopeless tone of the game, as the objective is not to win, but rather to not lose for as long as possible. Since the game is set in space, I leaned heavily on synthesizers and washed them in expansive reverbs and delays.
I wrote the music of Evolvy Bugs to be interactive and implemented it in the game using FMOD. I rendered the stems and mixed the music vertically in real time according to the intensity of the game. As the number of enemies increased, so did the number of instruments, and if any especially difficult enemies appeared, a set of arpeggios would fade in to warn the player that they were in trouble.