Graves is standing in a small room, just between his main studio and the closet where he stores his four Mac Pros and various pieces of server equipment. The corners of the tiny room are filled with an odd tangle of instruments, some of which aren't instruments at all, but rather objects Graves has conscripted as part of his orchestra of unusual sounds. There are even a few items that look like wind chimes he's had custom-made, but he can't talk about those - or the game he's using them to score.

Right now he's holding an upright bass, a massive instrument, and he's slapping it like he's playing the drums on his dashboard sitting at a red light.

"[This] was one of my first purchases when I moved out here," he says, "and just being able to bow it the way you would an orchestral bass and get some crazy effects and stuff, I do that. But just this ... [I'm] getting all kinds of slappin'."

Graves beats the strings with his hands, each hit producing a thin, wavering rumble. It is a sound unlike anything you would expect from the instrument. Graves is using the instrument in a way it was never intended to be used, but the music he is making with it sounds so right you'd have a hard time arguing he's doing anything wrong.

The music he's producing also sounds strangely familiar. Listening closer, it's almost the music from the video gameDead Space, the music that won Graves some of the most prominent of his more than two dozen awards.

"That's the technique," Graves acknowledges, "but they use their bows in Dead Space, like this." Graves then produces a pair of bows and begins hammering on the bass strings like he's tapping a xylophone.

Suddenly we are in the game, with the music swelling around us. The resonance of the strings and the big bass echo and rumble. The odd melody sounds almost like a guitar, but not quite. It is as if 10 different musicians are playing 10 different instruments simultaneously, but instead it's just one guy - the drummer.

"[In Dead Space] they might mute the strings and it gets one sort of a sound and it's painful if you do it right," Graves says. "It's kind of like playing the congos but you hit it hard enough so you get that string slap, and it's just something different. This is a very popular thing that I like doing and ... I can have a piece of plastic holding the note up here, so that I can play different notes and it's just kind of a drone and you just record it into a computer, boost the low end and it's this percussive 'Is that a synth? Well it's not a drum, so what is it exactly?'

"That's what I really enjoy doing. Just beating on different things."