Daily Inspiration: Meet Caio Jiacomini

Today we’d like to introduce you to Caio Jiacomini.

Hi Caio, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I started my journey in music and audio when I was ten years old. My grandfather was a luthier, so he gave me an acoustic guitar he built as a gift. That guitar is one of my most prized possessions to this day. I started learning how to play it and immediately fell in love with the act of creating music.

I’ve always loved learning, so from that point forward I let my curiosity lead me through several disciplines of music and audio. I got curious about how songs are written, which led to me being curious about how songs are recorded and produced and teaching myself all of that. The more technological side of music and audio really captivated me, so I started going deeper into music production and composition. I then moved to the US to pursue my undergrad degree at Berklee College of Music, dual majoring in Film Scoring and Music Production & Engineering.

During college, my roommate had a friend who was a filmmaker and was looking for a sound designer to collaborate on a short film, so I worked with him on a couple of films out of curiosity. I immediately fell in love with the power that audio has when paired with film to enhance, or even subvert, the emotions portrayed on the screen. I’ve also played video games all my life, and around that time it kinda of clicked for me that games have audio, I love audio, so why not start making audio for games?

So, I started learning how to do game audio and started joining game jams to meet people and get some experience in the field. Which ended up leading me on yet another tangent and learning programming so I could build my own audio tools and interactive audio systems for projects.

From there, I made very good friends both from college and game jams, which directly led to my first few projects and, eventually, to my latest role at Epic Games doing sound design for Rocket League.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I took a long and winding road to get to where I am, and there was a lot of self-doubt at every corner. It was a long journey going from learning guitar to doing sound design and audio programming for games, and for a long time, I felt like I lacked focus and was just meandering without a sense of purpose. I knew that I wanted to work with music and audio but didn’t quite feel at home and really confident until I started getting into sound design and the technical side of game audio. And then, once I started focusing on those areas, it felt like I was playing catch up for a long time. All throughout that journey, I was always putting in really long hours studying, working restlessly every day to perfect my craft as much as I could.

I always caught myself wishing I had found my focus earlier, thinking that if I would only have focused on this earlier, I’d be in a much better place. Which is of course false, but game audio and music in general are such competitive fields that it’s easy to let yourself fall prey to self-doubt. Looking back, I can now see the value of the road I traveled and that all the experiences I had played a fundamental part in shaping who I am today as a creative professional.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a sound designer, audio software developer, and composer who specializes in audio for video games. I love the intersection between creativity and technology that happens in games and work mostly in that domain. Most recently, I worked at Psyonix doing sound design for Rocket League, shipping two seasons of the game and bringing some Brazilian flair to the sound of Season 11. Currently, I’m working as the audio director of Starweave, an indie narrative tactics RPG game about empathy, destiny, and the roles we are forced to play.

What sets me apart from others is the breadth of my skill set. I’m just as comfortable recording and designing compelling sound effects as I am coding and designing complex interactive audio systems. I also develop audio software and have released four effects and synthesizers that have been used by my customers to make award-winning sound designs. My skill made me an asset to the audio team at Psyonix, where I got to work on pretty much every aspect of Rocket League’s audio: from mixing audio for trailers and designing complex car engine audio systems to developing proprietary audio software for the company.

On top of having developed proprietary audio software for Rocket League.

One project I’m really proud of is a virtual reality app I co-developed called Trapped in the Garden. Me and a friend from college took it upon ourselves to expand the CsoundUnity library – a solution for real-time audio synthesis for the Unity game engine – to make it easier to develop audio-centric apps with it. So, we built a series of tools to expand on the library and developed a couple of virtual reality applications to showcase our work and the possibilities it offers for developers. So we developed Trapped in the Garden, which is a recontextualization of the piece Trapped in Convert written by Dr. Richard Boulanger in 1979 – a seminal piece in the history of computer music. We took the instruments and sounds from that piece and arranged them in an interactive sonic playground, where the user can walk around and play with and manipulate these sounds, so the app itself kinda works like a weird abstract musical instrument that you can just jam with. We ended up publishing a paper about our work in an international conference in Ireland, also landing a spot in a concert to perform music with the Trapped in the Garden app live. That was an amazing and very unique experience to be on a stage wearing a virtual reality headset and using it to make music in front of a live audience. That was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life; it’s not every day that you get to make music in virtual reality in Ireland.

We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
One surprising thing is that I used to play table tennis competitively as a teenager. Me and a couple of friends would practice every Saturday morning at a local sports club back home in São Paulo and play in local youth competitions and tournaments. The fun thing is that our school had a table tennis table for students to play during recess and we would just play for fun and beat everyone else.

Contact Info:

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

Image Credits
Lala Thaddeus, Julia Lee, Isabelle Szeto, Julia Lee, Jaimi Qiu, Mateo Ferro