Vincent Diamante on Composing, Teaching, and Inspiring the Next Generation

I’m Vincent Diamante. I was born in the Washington DC area and grew up in DC in Maryland, for a lot of that early part of my life. It was a good time. Just basically me being a pretty good student with a passion for piano. I just focused so much on piano sometimes to the detriment of other stuff. There was a principal in elementary school who said, “You can't make a living doing piano. So don't worry about music class. You have to be a better student.” Which is kind of funny because I was a pretty good student anyway. It's not like I was failing classes or anything. I always knew when I was young that I wanted music to be a part of my life going forward.

So I focused hard on piano and then I was learning stuff about how to write music on computers in high school. I also grew up on that early internet of the mid-90s and discovered what other people could do with computer music. That was really exciting. I went to school specifically for electro, acoustic, media, and music composition. Then I learned about interactive media and video games and all sorts of other places where I saw music and entertainment connecting. And I just knew this was going to be my life.

There was a local video rental place called Arrows. And for some reason, they were also an internet service provider in the mid-90s. I saw newsgroups online where people just shared things that were just really fun and creative. I came across these talented and technically-minded music trackers, people engaged with computer music who were just incredibly passionate about music. So I'm like this little pre-teen hanging out with all these much older people who were making wonderful music with computers while I was just trying my best to figure out and catch up to what they were doing. They were like my online mentors. I was just so focused on music back in the day that I couldn't help but find those people.

It was incredibly fun and that was the thing. It was all about just seeing what music could be. Music that could fit into four kilobytes. Fitting 50-60 minutes of music on a floppy disk. Music that was incredibly intricate and complex and sounded like it was a rich synthesizer even though it was just a collection of little bits and slices of note samples.

I think so much of it, so much of the enjoyment stems from the fact that it is so much bigger than just you. There is a lot of fun to be had when you're working with programmers, artists, character designers, and animation. I especially love working with animators, to make a sound that feels like it connects directly with the intent of the character. For example, what if you want a character to feel the frustration of not living up to their parent's expectations? The writer is thinking about that when designing and creating the script and the artists are thinking about that when designing the face and everyone is thinking about that so I want to think about that, too. I always find it really fun to learn so much about what's going on in the artist's head as they're developing all these parts of the game.

I think one of the most rewarding times came when other people I was working with expressed their surprise that I found something that they hadn't seen yet. I was writing a piece of music for a character, and they were still working on the character. After listening to the music that I wrote, it immediately motivated them to find the way the character needed to be. They took the original art and then pushed it further because of where the music was coming from. One of the artists came up to me and said, “I'm listening to the music and having these feelings. Now I understand things and I changed the rhythm of the animation slightly so that their running is not as symmetrical.” And this gave their character far more personality than before.

There are so many cool people here who I've met. I've known about some of them even before they were with Whistler. Everything that all these individuals are doing is really exciting for me. We need to continue to aspire to grow, right? I guess it's possible to just do things without growing, but that doesn't seem very fun. So, being connected with other people, specifically, all the people here.