Ian Berman ’15 is a sound artist working on audio for independent video games and art projects from his home in Berlin, Germany. On March 19, Ian’s sound design for the game despelote won the “Excellence in Audio” award at the 27th Independent Games Festival (part of the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco March 17 to 21). Despelote is a slice-of-life adventure about soccer and community, fully voiced in Spanish, which Ian has been working on with his NYU friend and collaborator, Julián Cordero, for over 5 years. For the game, Ian spent a month in Quito, Ecuador, capturing the city’s nature and urban soundscape, as well as thousands of lines of improvisational dialogue. The game will be released across all major platforms on May 1.
Ian also works with the Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, collaborating on projects and exhibitions that explore Machine Learning audio tools and custom training data. For their latest exhibition, The Call, at London’s Serpentine Gallery, Ian supported the development of generative audio models with research teams in France and the US, led the post-production of a large public dataset of choral recordings, and helped mix and install new compositions for multichannel playback in the gallery. The exhibition will be traveling to other European cities in 2025-2026.
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