A very Unreal Halloween: playable Theremin, scenes from cinema

People continue to do wild things with Unreal Engine and MetaSounds. Celebrate Halloween with an interactive Theremin deep dive tutorial and some classic cinema scenes from Halloween and The Shining recreated as ambient environments.

First up, composer/sound designer Brian Michael Fuller has a ton of tutorial content around Unreal Engine and MetaSounds. We’ve been waiting on this one ever since the first teaser. It’s slightly ridiculous – a Theremin you play by walking around in 3D – but also hilariously fun and perfect fodder for folks trying to learn.

Here was the first look at how the Theremin would work, all generated as live synthesis:

Now we get the full tutorial to go with it, just uploaded today, so grab some candy and have at it:

Now, to be clear, I feel fairly certain that Lev Termen and many of the instrument’s adherents would be glad to be rid of the association of the Theremin with sci-fi, horror, or Halloween.

On the other hand, if I ever expect to be haunted by a ghost from electronic music’s past, I think Maestro Termen is probably the leading candidate. Huh… unrelated, I don’t remember owning a Great Seal of the United States like just appeared on my wall. That’s weird. Oh, well, I’ll be going to sleep soon all here alone with no one around who can hear me, so let me finish up this story first.

So yeah, people are also posting fascinating recreations of favorite scenes from movies like the Halloween series and The Shining, complete with dynamically generated sound scores and music. It’s a great exercise, and as beautiful as the scenes themselves are visually, the sounds are what make them really compelling – and it’s presumably another case where Epic’s sound engine can come into its own.

All these come from the channel Sinister Ambience. Enjoy. It’s like having one of those Yule Log things, but way more goth.