Site Contributors :: Richard (aka TheShroud13)

Biography

Though my serious involvement with music is a recent and almost accidental occurrence, it has nonetheless grown to be a very serious passion of mine, and in fact nearly a defining part of my life. Video games, on the other hand, have been a staple part of my life since childhood, and remain a passion of mine that can rival my passion for music. Fortunately those two principal passions of mine are frequently allowed to mingle thanks to the many remarkable scores that exist for video games.

I generally avoided music solely for listening purposes as a child for one reason or another, which I'm not going to deal with right now. Video games and music were really my only intake of music from later elementary school through middle school. I really never paid a great deal of attention to video game music until I rented Lufia II from a local video store at the age of 10. The game was, in general, so very different from games that I had played before. It was a game with an emphasis on puzzles and storytelling as opposed to pure action, and with some really neat music to go along with it. The soundtrack had a profound effect on me, so I really started to learn music by transcribing themes from the game. I was in a band at this point, but never really took it seriously, and my knowledge of notation was all I really came out of that class with.

My impression with Lufia II led me to pursue similar games, and I was quickly pointed to Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, and the Final Fantasy series. I played the first two games, and came away rather impressed before finally taking on the challenge of Final Fantasy VII. This game made me seek out Final Fantasy III via the miracle of emulation, and that's when I really got hooked on video games. The combination of music, and story that I experienced in Final Fantasy III was absolutely cathartic, and got me hooked both on music and the RPG experience in general.

By the time I had reached my junior year in high school, following a rather poor academic semester, I started really thinking about the future. I realized that I didn't have the patience to pursue a lot of the more academically centred fields of study. I thought that music would be the perfect way to go, but I really had no talent in the field. So, I decided to go take some singing lessons in the hopes that I could improve my aural skills and create some compositions that might attract the attention of composition programs. Just as a note, that still hasn't happened, and my aural skills remain atrocious, but still.

When my teacher heard my voice, she thought that I had a good chance of getting into a music school as a voice student, so we devoted the rest of our time to developing some material for auditions, which would be in a little under a year. Nothing really interesting happened from that point on, but the end result of it all leads me to my current educational position, a voice performance major at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I still have dreams of studying composition, and possibly developing the talent to compose with a purpose beyond that of a hobbyist.

My arrival to Square Enix Music Online happened a little less than a year before I was added to the staff, after I had sung as a chorister in the Chicago Dear Friends concert. I was a little anxious to see how people were reacting to our performance and after snooping around the forums for a while, decided it would be a community worth being a part of. I joined, kept mostly a low profile, and upon discovering that there was in fact a main page, elected to see if they were looking for staff help. They were, and now I'm here.

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