Abstract Video games, overall, use an extremely wide variety of sounds and techniques to represent the voices of characters in their game worlds. This broad repertoire of sounds includes relatively realistic recordings of voice-acted speech, highly abstract synthesized tones, and myriad other novel sounds that are in some ways realistic and in some ways abstract. Similar to music, the sounds representing voices in games can be sites of great creativity and meaning-making, for both developers and players. And similar to music, these sounds are at once aesthetic objects—something that players can like or dislike, and something that contributes to a game's overall style—and a means through which players can interpretively glean information about a game's world, characters, and story. Often, such meaning can arise through similarities with other music and sounds outside of the context of a specific game. Sounds that represent characters' voices, in particular, provide an intriguing opportunity to explore meaning-creation through various connections with the sounds of real-world voices, technology, and even music. In this talk, I explore aesthetics, physicality, and meaning in the synthesized sounds that represent characters' voices in the acclaimed independent video game Celeste (Maddy Makes Games, 2018). Kevin Regamey and Power Up Audio created Celeste's unique voice sounds with tools typically used for music production (the digital audio workstation FL Studio and a MIDI keyboard) while also modeling certain sonic characteristics of speech (pitch slides, formants that yield vowel-like sounds, attention to prosody, and other considerations). Yet these sounds do not include language, and they feature highly stylized timbres and pitch ranges, for example, to abstractly represent the voices of individual characters and their varying emotional states. To explore meanings that might arise from these sounds, I first briefly situate Celeste's voice sounds in wider contexts of representations of voices, and I consider the broad types of information that players might expect to gain from Celeste's voice sounds, given these sounds' various abstract and realistic qualities. I next consider the design and behavior of Celeste's voice sounds, and I closely examine these sounds' sonic qualities, including timbre and pitch. I suggest that meaning and imagined physicality here can arise both somewhat realistically, through these sounds' similarities to real-world voices, and more metaphorically, through their evocative and highly stylized characteristics. Five Friends Master Class Series – Honoring Robert SamelsThe Five Friends Master Class Series honoring the lives of five talented Jacobs School of Music students—Chris Carducci, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi, Zachary Novak, and Robert Samels—was established in 2012 with a gift of $1 million from the Georgina Joshi Foundation, Inc. This annual series of lectures, master classes, and residencies by a number of the world's leading musicians and teachers focuses on areas of interest most relevant to the lives of the five friends—voice performance, choral conducting, early music, music theory, composition, and opera. The Georgina Joshi Foundation was established in 2007 as the vision of Georgina Joshi's mother, Louise Addicott-Joshi, to provide educational and career development opportunities for young musicians and to encourage and support public performance of music. The gift to the school establishes a permanent way for the world to learn about each of the five friends, their musical talents and passions, and to encourage the development of similar talents and passions in current and future music students. The establishment of this endowment by the families is administered by the IU Foundation. Bass-baritone and composer Robert Samels was born on June 2, 1981, and died in a plane crash on April 20, 2006. He was a doctoral student in choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and had studied voice with Giorgio Tozzi and Costanza Cuccaro. He began his vocal studies with Alfred Anderson at the University of Akron and Andreas Poulimenos at Bowling Green State University. Samels had recently appeared as Mr. Gibbs in the world premiere of Our Town by Ned Rorem, as Marco in the collegiate premiere of William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge, and as Joseph and Herod in the collegiate premiere of El Nino by John Adams. In September 2005, he conducted the premiere of his own opera, Pilatvs. As a member of the Wolf Trap Opera Company for 2006, he would have added three roles that summer, including Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro, Friar Laurence in Roméo et Juliette, and Pluto in Telemann's Orpheus. Other opera credits included the title roles of Don Pasquale and Il Turco in Italia, as well as Leporello in Don Giovanni, Falstaff in TheMerry Wives of Windsor, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the summer of 2004, he performed Creon in the New York premiere of John Eaton's Antigone. Samels also frequently performed in the oratorio repertoire. In the spring of 2005, he was selected as a semi-finalist in the annual competition of the Oratorio Society of New York. He was an announcer with public radio station WFIU, as well as the host and producer of its Cantabile program. A soloist with Aguavá New Music Studio, he had recently performed a concert at the Library of Congress. Samels was an associate instructor in the Jacobs School's Music Theory Department, where was loved and admired by his students.