Lead Music Designer, systems builder, recording artist. 17 years at PlayStation Studios. Now building the tools that should've existed a decade ago.
"The question that drives everything: if the music in a game is different every time, who composes it?"
Ted Kocher is a classically and jazz-trained trumpet player with perfect pitch who spent nearly two decades as the trusted musical ear inside PlayStation Studios — and is now building at the frontier of what interactive audio becomes next.
Nobody notices a great transition.
That's the whole point, actually. When the music in a game shifts from "wandering through a quiet village" to "oh no, orcs" and you don't consciously register that anything changed — that's not an accident. That's someone like me spending an embarrassing number of hours making sure you never have to think about it.
I've been that person for over seventeen years. My job title has evolved with the industry's general uncertainty about what to call people who do what I do, but the core of it has always been the same: I am the person who designs the systems that make transitions disappear — guided as much by musical instinct as by technical architecture.
Here's what most people don't understand about music in games: the score doesn't play in sequence. It lives inside a state machine. The composer writes a beautiful piece of music — let's say something sweeping and emotional for a moment of loss — and then reality intervenes. The player might linger in that moment for thirty seconds. Or four minutes. Or they might immediately open the inventory menu, which probably shouldn't trigger an orchestral swell. The music has to breathe with the experience, not against it.
A transition is where that negotiation happens. It's the handshake between what the composer intended and what the game is actually doing at 11:47pm when some kid in Ohio is on their sixth attempt at the same boss fight. A bad transition yanks you out. You suddenly notice the music. You notice it because it was wrong — too early, too late, tonally miscalibrated, or simply indifferent to what you just went through.
The best transitions are invisible. But invisible is not the same as effortless. The PlayStation Studios logo — eight seconds of tuned metal and harmonic resonance that plays before a hundred million people start their games — that's a transition. It moves you from the world you're in to the world you're about to enter. It doesn't shout. It opens a door.
That's always been the customer mindset behind the technical work: what does this person actually need to feel right now? Not what does the spec say, not what did the composer originally write, but what does *this moment* require?
Music tells the story the cutscene can't. The transition is the sentence that connects one paragraph to the next.
Get it wrong and nobody notices. Get it right and nobody notices either.
That's the job. I love it unreasonably.
The career started in music editorial — the discipline of making a score work inside a finished film or game, frame by frame and system by system. It's precision work at the intersection of music and technology, and it taught a fundamental truth: the best interactive music isn't placed, it's integrated.
Across 17 years at PlayStation Studios, Ted worked with composers like Gustavo Santaolalla, Ilan Eshkeri, Sarah Schachner, and Nier Automata composer Keiichi Okabe — bringing their scores into games that demanded musical systems as sophisticated as the stories being told.
The through-line across all of it: story and music first, technology in service. That hasn't changed. What's changed is the tools now available to act on that principle.
Ted operates from a Dolby Atmos studio in Traverse City, Michigan — where he teaches, builds, records, and consults.
An artist persona built on the principle that raw vulnerability beats coolness every time. Esoteric electronic ambient with synth-heavy arrangements — Rhodes, Hammond B3, analog gear, and a methodology called the GMA Standard that defines how to approach AI music generation as a music director, not a consumer.
Recent releases: Bracing For The Fall (2025), what we could build instead feat. BAILEY (2026). Also recording as AIDAxPOUROVER.
Apple Music Spotify