Akira Yamaoka is a Japanese composer and sound designer best known for the Silent Hill series, for which he wrote music from the first game in 1999 to Silent Hill: Downpour. Hired as composer, he also became the series’ overall sound designer, creating every sound effect and supervising voice direction, and later oversaw production on newer entries.
Starting from rock and grunge, he used Silent Hill to move into industrial music, ambient, noise and trip-hop, and to break with horror-game clichés of the late 1990s: sound cut to nothing at the moment of a scare, bursts of noise in moments of apparent calm, and few of the conventional cues of scary music. Writers have heard in his textures echoes of air-raid sirens, background radiation and the hum of a dialysis machine, interrupted by sudden lacerating distortion. He has named Goblin’s music for Dario Argento’s Suspiria as a close ancestor of his work on the series.