Brian Schmidt

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This article is about the pinball and video game composer. For the astrophysicist, see Brian P. Schmidt.

Brian L. Schmidt is a music composer for various video games and pinball games. Schmidt is also the creator of the BSMT2000 audio DSP, which is used in various pinball games and video arcade machines. Currently, he is the program manager of the Xbox Audio and Voice Technologies division at Microsoft. Brian has undergraduate degrees in both Music and Computer Science as well as a Masters degree in Computer Applications in Music, all from Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois. Brian started in the industry in 1987 as an employee of Williams (WMS) writing music and music software for pinball machines. While at Williams, he worked on Black Knight 2000 with Ed Boon (who later went on to create the Mortal Kombat series) and several other pinball machines. At WMS he also wrote the music for the arcade game NARC. His main theme from NARC went on to be recorded by the Pixies. After two years at WMS, Brian left to be an independent consultant, during which time he wrote music and created sound effects for close to 120 video and arcade games and pinball machines including John Madden Football and the "Desert Strike" series. In 1998, Brian was recruited into Microsoft where he worked on DirectX before moving over to the Xbox team in late 1999. At Xbox, Brian was responsible for the overall audio system architecture; he also created the startup sound for the original Xbox. Brian continues in his role developing audio technologies such as XACT and was responsible for the audio architecture of the Xbox 360. Brian Serves on the Board of Directors of the Game Audio Network Guild (GANG), the advisory board of the Game Developers Conference and is a well known industry speaker and published author