Meet Caio Miguel Jiacomini | Sound Designer, Composer, Audio Developer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Caio Miguel Jiacomini and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Caio, why did you pursue a creative career?
I pursued a creative career because I simply had to. Since I started getting deeper into music and audio as a teenager, I knew that was gonna dominate my life forever. I just felt this sort of gravitational pull towards audio and the more time passed the stronger that pull became. This is a common sentiment from my other friends in music. It’s never a fully conscious decision to pursue music as a career, it’s this thing that slowly possesses you and, when you realize it, there’s simply nothing else you can see yourself doing, no other possibility.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m a sound designer, composer, and audio developer working in the games industry. I started my journey when I was 10 years old, when my grandfather gave me an acoustic guitar he built himself for my birthday. My parents then found me a teacherI and I started learning how to play it. I immediately fell in love with the act of creating music. I’m very thankful for how that gift ended up changing my life completely.

From there I kind of meandered around learning several aspects of music and audio production. I taught myself and took courses on songwriting, composition, mixing, recording, orchestration, synthesis. To be honest, I felt like I lacked focus for a long time. Then everything started sort of clicking when I realized I could join my life-long passion for video games into my audio work and work creating sound for games. The interactive framework that games operate in fascinated me from the get go.

Even after finding that focus I still couldn’t stop myself from trying to learn everything that crossed my path. Besides getting more in-depth into sound design,I started to get really in-depth into the technical side of game audio, which also led me to start developing my own synthesizers and audio effects plugins.

The high point of my career so far has definitely been getting to work doing audio for Rocket League. The team at Psyonix is super open-minded so I was able to flex both my creative and technical muscles equally. I got to do work on every audio aspect of the game for seasons 11 and 12, from doing audio for trailers to developing proprietary audio software for the game.

One project that really stood out to me at Psyonix was getting to do sound design and music for season 11’s flagship arena Estádio Vida. I’m from Brazil and Rocket League’s season 11 was heavily influenced by Brazilian Carnival, so it was a lot of fun to pay homage to my culture on such a huge game. I had a lot of audio recordings that I took in São Paulo where I’m from that I got to use to design audio for the arena and getting to write some original samba music for the game was such a blast as well.

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, but now I can see how what felt like a meandering lack of focus, gave me valuable baggage that informs my work up to this day. I’m glad I was able to let my instincts and curiosity guide me through my life and grateful for being able to work doing what I love the most.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
My favorite place in the city I’d make a point to show to anyone visiting is The Last Bookstore in downtown. It looks like a normal bookstore when you first come in, but as you make your way to the second floor, there’s a plethora of little nooks and crannies and endless labyrinthine hallways filled to the brim with books, with all these archways made up of piled books. It’s just all designed in a way that makes it feel really immense and infinite. There’s also a small art gallery there with some really amazing stuff. It really has an otherworldly feel to it, It’s the kind of place you have to see it to believe it.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I wanna give a shoutout to the game audio community as a whole. It really is one of the most welcoming communities I’ve been a part of and I love how everyone, regardless of seniority, is always eager to share neat tips and tricks and learn from each other. There’s very little ego I encountered in the game audio space and the community gives me a lot of hope for the future. I also want to shoutout all my friends and family who have given me nothing but support all my life.

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, Jaimi Qiu, Julia Lee, Isabelle Szeto,