Facebook Hires The Team From WaveGroup Sound, An Audio Production Company

VentureBeat has confirmed with Facebook that this was not an acquisition, but it has hired the team behind audio production company WaveGroup Sound. The headline has been changed to reflect this. Original story with more background below.

Facebook has made an interesting acquisition, having picked up WaveGroup Sound, an audio production company headquartered in Burlingame, Calif., that specializes in sound for games, and that produced tracks for the Guitar Hero series, as well as Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution titles. It also makes sounds for many startups, hardware devices and mobile apps.

The team that formed WaveGroup has now become the full-time in-house sound design team for Facebook, according to the company’s LinkedIn page. They’ve also already worked for FB plenty as a contractor, creating the in-app sounds for apps like Messenger, SlingShot and Instagram Bolt according to an announcement confirming the news posted to Facebook.

WaveGroup’s last project for a client outside Facebook was creating the music for the just-released Star Wars iOS game Star Wars: Commander, a real-time strategy game that pits Empire against Rebel forces. WaveGroup also created the sounds for the Jawbone Era, a Bluetooth headset created by that accessory maker, as well as its Jambox speaker series.

Perhaps the company’s most visible work has had a lot to do with producing cover versions of existing songs that separate the tracks, making them especially easy for people to remix or use in other interesting ways. This kind of thing could come in handy at FB, too, in terms of helping to build tools that let users remix and share their own content, a la Facebook ‘Look Back’ video.

More likely it’ll just keep providing all the sounds for Facebook’s growing stable of external apps, such as the few but well-executed ones found in Instagram’s new Hyperlapse mobile app. Facebook is increasingly looking like an app-building studio, and securing a top-tier in-house sound design crew only serves to reinforce that impression

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