Portfolio

Music Demo Reel 2024

The above demo showcases a variety of excerpts from music I've composed and produced over the last year, covering electronic dance music to epic orchestral scores. The track list includes:Into the Midnight Fire - Trance, EDM
Beyond the Rain - Orchestral, Fantasy
Panic - Orchestral, Synth, Epic
Tension - Orchestral, Horror, Ambient
Dance With Me - House, EDMDance With Me and Into the Midnight Fire are available on all streaming music services under my pseudonym Ursonis. Other examples can be found on my SoundCloud page.

Sound Redesign - SciFi Student Film

For this Berklee project, I was given a predetermined, limited set of raw sounds to use as my palette to design sounds that fit the scene. As such, many sounds were designed from atypical sources - for example, the female character's footsteps were created from processed bullet casings falling on the floor. Other sounds, such as the gun charging up, were created by importing samples into Logic Pro's Alchemy synth and using granular or spectral synthesis techniques to alter and modulate the sounds.

Music, Sound Design and Implementation - Stealth

In this project, I was tasked with designing both sound effects and an adaptive music score for a short level of a stealth game. The aesthetic of the game uses a mixture of human and sci-fi elements, so I tried to capture that mixture by composing a hybrid orchestral/synth score and utilizing both home-recorded and library samples as well as synthesizer-designed effects. The music has two states: a calm, sneaky cue while the player is exploring unnoticed by the guards, and a high-intensity "panic" cue once they trigger the alarm and are being attacked. I finalized the project by directly implementing all the sounds and music into Unity and using the built-in mixer to polish the overall levels.

Music, Sound Design and Implementation - Horror

For this project, I created a custom Unity game project based on the Roll-a-Ball demo and designed custom sounds and adaptive music to create a horror-based experience. The sounds were created by layering a mixture of home-recorded and processed library samples. The adaptive music score progresses from silence, to low levels of tension, and finally to high levels of tension as the player moves closer to one of two possible endings. In this demonstration, the player chooses the "bad" ending, resulting in a terrifying finale.All audio was implemented using the FMOD middleware connecting to the Unity game engine. Many different parameters were used to create a varied and immersive soundscape - for example, the players footsteps speed up and slow down relative to the speed of the ball moving about the level, and various background sounds play randomly in the distance to ensure an unpredictable ambiance. Throughout the scene, the player can collect various cube objects acting as items, each with their own unique sound effect to represent a different type of collectable. At around 0:45, the player enters a room with a sound source emanating from the center that automatically pans across the stereo image based on the player's location relative to it. Finally, the music progresses as the player moves across invisible triggers, and can change back and forth between low and high intensity states.

Adaptive Music - Fantasy Exploration and Combat

In this FMOD demonstration, I composed and implemented an adaptive music score based on a typical fantasy adventure game with intense combat. The music changes based on an intensity parameter, representing the player's out of combat, near combat, or in combat state. Three distinct musical layers seamlessly blend together and fade in and out as needed based on the current intensity level. A custom asymmetrical speed setting allows the music to quickly transition into more intense states, while slowly transitioning away from them.

UI Sound Redesign - Cooking Fever

In this example, I redesigned UI sounds for a mobile game called Cooking Fever. As an exercise, I was limited to recording 90% of the sounds myself using only my mouth as the source, the only exceptions being the Kitchen Upgrade and XP sound effects which utilize some processed library sounds. For everything else, I recorded lip pops, teeth chatters, and a variety of other mouth-only sounds, then processed them using various techniques including pitch shifting, time stretching, reversing, and more.

Foley and Ambient Sound Redesign - The Last of Us

In this demonstration, I redesigned the ambient and foley sounds for a scene from the popular video game The Last of Us. I recorded and processed most of the sounds myself, from the various footsteps on different terrains to some of the background ambience and wind. Only a handful of library sounds were used to enhance and blend with my recorded samples, such as the crickets and birds in the background. Note that the brief for this project requested that I not include Ellie's (the female character's) foley, so her footsteps and other movement sounds are intentionally omitted.

About

Jordan Grelle is an experienced composer and producer with a background in both traditional classical music as well as modern electronic music production and sound design. He recently completed his second Bachelor’s, studying Electronic Music Production and Sound Design through Berklee College of Music's online degree program, and released his debut EDM single under the pseudonym "Ursonis" in November 2023.

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