About – Marie Havemann

Marie Havemann is a Freelance Composer and Sound Designer for Games with a Studio located in Berlin, Germany. With a decade of experience in the games industry, and expertise in music, sound, and game technology, she has created audio for teams of all sizes, from MMORPGs to Indie.

She has a background as a musician (guitar, bass, piano, and violin) & engineer, and a master’s degree in sound, specializing in Game Audio, and loves to take on the responsibility of creating the entire Audio Experience for most of the projects she works on. She enjoys working closely with Developers to understand the unique needs of the project and to translate these needs into Audio Design Solutions that create the most meaningful and powerful Experiences, no matter the project size.

Within the last years, she redefined and extended the soundscape and soundtrack of the popular MMO, Albion Online, by Sandbox Interactive, where she is currently working as the Senior Audio Designer, while also working with several Indie Studios on unannounced titles on the side.

Her Journey Before the Games Industry

Born in Saxony, Germany, Marie moved to Berlin when she was 18 to pursue a career in music as an audio engineer. She was working as a recording and mixing engineer with bands for several years while finishing her Tonmeister Apprenticeship (Deutsche Pop). But this neither sated her passion for games nor her love for writing music – so she decided to devote all of her attention to Game Audio and entered the games industry as a freelancing composer and sound designer in 2013, while she was still studying music composition and sound design. She finished her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in „Sound“ at Filmuniversity Babelsberg in 2013 and her Master of Fine Arts Degree in „Sound for Picture“ in 2017 – whilst also taking compositional classes of the Filmmusic courses during the last 3 years of her master’s program. Both her theses researched Game Audio and Implementation.

During her 10 years in the industry, she worked for a variety of customers from Germany and Europe, including companies like DeepSilver, Stainless Games, and Dynamedion, and is fluent in Wwise and FMOD as well as with Unity and Unreal. With her love to detail and experience in different styles ranging from electronic over hard’n’heavy to orchestral; and from realistic to cartoony, she can help you get the best out of your project!

From Stage to Crowd: Empowering through Panels, Articles, Workshops, and Talks:

2017 Most Wanted: Music Berlin: Panel about “Sound & Space: Exploring the Depths of Spatial Sound and New Media Experiences”
2018 DEP Summit: Panel on „Stuck Audio Concepts and how to improve them“
2019 Workshop for Native Instruments at Global Game Jam (NI x SAE x GGJ): “Creative Workflows in Game Audio Design” plus additional Blog Article
2019 „Making Games“ Magazine 03-04: Article publication about Voice Direction „Voices beyond the usual“
2019 Reeperbahn Festival: Panel about Game Music
2021 Game Audio Conference Norway: Talk about “Making yourself at home in middleware – A holistic approach on creating adaptive music systems with FMOD and Wwise”
2022 Soundtrack Cologne: Talk “Designing adaptive music systems: A holistic approach” and Panel “Composing for Videogames”
2022 Wwise Up On Air Livestream „Evolving the Structure of Albion Online’s Dynamic Music Systems“
2022 Gamevention Neumünster: Panel “Composing Music for Video Games: Respect the Score”
2023 Reboot Develop Blue: Talk with Julie Elven: “Creating Immersive Game Soundtracks: A Practical Guide to Music Design, Collaboration and Budgeting”

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