Akira Yamaoka, Mary Elizabeth McGlynn

Akira Yamaoka (山岡 晃 Yamaoka Akira, born February 6, 1968 in Niigata, Japan[1]) is a musician and video game composer, having scored dozens of titles released by Konami. Yamaoka attended Tokyo Art College[2], where he studied product design and interior design. He joined Konami on September 21, 1993, after previously being a freelance music composer. He is most well known for his work for the Silent Hill series of video games, for which he composed all the music and sound effects in all four games (this excludes Silent Hill: Play Novel for the Game Boy Advance and "Esperandote" in Silent Hill...

Akira Yamaoka (山岡 晃 Yamaoka Akira, born February 6, 1968 in Niigata, Japan[1]) is a musician and video game composer, having scored dozens of titles released by Konami. Yamaoka attended Tokyo Art College[2], where he studied product design and interior design. He joined Konami on September 21, 1993, after previously being a freelance music composer. He is most well known for his work for the Silent Hill series of video games, for which he composed all the music and sound effects in all four games (this excludes Silent Hill: Play Novel for the Game Boy Advance and "Esperandote" in Silent Hill, composed by Rika Muranaka); much of his work from previous titles has been compiled for the 2006 Silent Hill movie adaptation, directed by Christophe Gans. In the third and fourth games (which are available on the PlayStation 2 and PC and the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC respectively) he worked in collaboration with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and also played a more important role as the games' producer.

His music from Silent Hill 2 was performed live in 2005 at the third Symphonic Game Music Concert in Leipzig, Germany. Yamaoka's sound commonly contains strong melancholy undertones and generally identifies with the dark ambient, industrial, and trip-hop genres. Yamaoka also performed music from Silent Hill at the world-premiere of PLAY! A Video Game Symphony on May 27, 2006 in Chicago, Illinois, and accompanied the orchestra with an electric seven-string guitar. He also composed songs in BEMANI Series of KONAMI, also songs featured in Silent Hill were being Transplanted in BEMANI His first original album, iFUTURELIST, was released in January 2006. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL..