Brian L. Schmidt

Who is Brian L. Schmidt?

Brian L. Schmidt is a music composer for various video games and pinball games. He began in the video game music and sound industry in 1987 as a composer/sound designer and programmer for Williams Electronic Games in Chicago writing music and creating sound effects for pinball machines and coin operated video games. In 1989, Schmidt left Williams to become one of the video game industry's first independent composer, sound designer and audio technologist under the company name of Schmidt Entertainment Technologies. While a consultant, he worked on over 120 console and arcade games. Schmidt is also the creator of the BSMT2000 audio DSP, which is used in various pinball games and video arcade machines and the QSound "Q1" 3D game sound chip used by CAPCOM. In 1998 Brian was recruited by Microsoft to become Program Manager for DirectSound and DirectMusic. From 1999-2008, Schmidt was the program manager of the Xbox Audio and Voice Technologies division at Microsoft and was responsible for much of the audio architecture for the Xbox and Xbox 360. He created the start up sound for the original Xbox console, using 'old-school' techniques to create an 8-second sound using only 25 kilobytes of memory. Brian is also credited with bringing real-time Digital Surround to video gaming with the inclusion of Dolby Digital Live on Xbox.