Monthly Archives: July 2014

4 Unusual Things for a Game Composer to Try

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

In a cool article for Ask Audio Magazine, G. W. Childs IV suggested 5 Unusual Things Every Sound Designer Should Try.  These tactics were designed to shake the cobwebs off the creative process of sound designers, opening minds to new possibilities (including binaural recording techniques, plug-ins for randomizing audio content, adding reverb to dry audio sources by playing back the recordings in actual reverberant spaces, etc.)

In the spirit of that article, I’m going to offer 4 Unusual Things for a Game Composer to Try.  If you’re a game composer, you can play with some of these techniques.  I’m not going to say that you should, but if it sounds like fun, then go for it.

Use Sound Design Musically

One of the most energizing ways to get inspired is to use the actual aural building blocks of your game’s environment in a musical way. For instance, in the Speed Racer video game I incorporated lots of sound effects associated with the sport of racing into the music, including doppler effects that were worked into musical transitions, tire screeches mapped to the keyboard to accentuate their natural pitches so that they could be used harmonically, and crowd cheers worked into the rhythm section.  These elements helped my music feel more connected to the game, and kept me invigorated as I worked.

Get Sneaky with your Genres

Lately, the genre mashup has become very popular, in which two disparate musical styles are layered together in order to produce a novel effect.  Mashups can help keep a composer inspired, but even better — why not sneak that second genre into your track?  There’s no reason for us to be overt about it, and hiding a second genre within the first can give a composer a sense of wicked enjoyment.  For instance, while creating music for such bright and airy projects as Shrek the Third and SimAnimals, I worked in subtle avante garde orchestral approaches that included unusual meters and dissonance. The influences weren’t particularly overt, but they kept the composition process fresh and interesting for me and helped the music feel more unique.

Turn Tracks on their Heads

Some years back, I was involved in a project (which I will not name) that required me to take a large portion of music I had previously composed in one style and completely rework it into another style altogether.  This was a thoroughly drastic change, from a light-hearted approach to a dour and heavy-handed instrumental treatment.  The essential core elements of the track (meter, melody, tempo) had to remain the same, however.  It was a challenging puzzle to solve, but it also opened me up to creative possibilities I wouldn’t have conceived any other way.  In that spirit, if at any time we’re feeling creatively blocked while working on a track, maybe it might be fun to turn the track on its head — change its essential personality — while maintaining its skeletal structure.

Don’t Forget Your Old Gear

As our careers progress, we’re likely to build up a large assortment of high-tech equipment and state-of-the-art software tools.  After a while, we become accustomed to our workflow with these tools, and there ceases to be any novelty to the creative process.  At these times, it can be fun to drag out the old gear and put it to use.  Not only can the vintage stuff add some needed retro zest to our sound palettes, but it can also reignite those creative juices by reminding us of the days when we were starting out and filled with starry-eyed yearning.

So that’s it — 4 Unusual Things for a Game Composer to Try.  If any of it sounds like it might be helpful, then please give it a whirl!  And let me know in the comments if you have any other unusual strategies for getting the creative juices flowing.

The Great MIDI Comeback?

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

I recently read a great article by Bernard Rodrigue of Audiokinetic in Develop Magazine, heralding the return of MIDI to the field of video game music.  It was a very well-written article, filled with hopeful optimism about the capability of MIDI to add new musical capabilities to interactive video game scores, particularly in light of the memory and CPU resources of modern games consoles.

It also reminded me strongly of another article I read, from 2010.

Four years ago, Microsoft Sound Supervisor West Latta wrote for Shockwave-Sound.com that “we may see a sort of return to a hybrid approach to composing, using samples and some form of MIDI-like control data… the next Xbox or Playstation could, in fact, yield enough RAM and CPU power to load a robust (and highly compressed) orchestral sample library.”

So, it seems that the game audio sector has been anticipating a return to MIDI for awhile now (I wrote at length about the history and possible future of MIDI in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music).  The question is – has the current generation of video game consoles evolved to the point that a quality orchestral sample library could be loaded and used by MIDI within a modern video game?  So far, I haven’t come across an answer to this question, and it’s a very intriguing mystery.

Certainly, the availability of an orchestral sample library in a MIDI-based interactive video game score would depend on factors that are not all hinged to the technical specs of the hardware.  Would the development teams be willing to devote that amount of memory to a quality orchestral sample library?  As games continue to participate in a visual arms race, development teams devote available hardware horsepower to pixels and polygons… so, would the music team be able to get a big enough slice of that pie to make a high-quality orchestral MIDI score possible?

I’m keeping my eyes open for developments in this area. Certainly, the return of MIDI could be a game changer for composers of interactive music, but only if the musical standards remain high, both in terms of the music compositions and the quality of the instruments used within them. Let me know in the comments if you’ve heard any news about the great MIDI comeback!

 

Breathing Music: The Role of Silence

Posted by Winifred Phillips on
Image by GagDonkey.com

 

The Designing Sound blog recently devoted a series of articles to the topic of silence, including an elaborately philosophical article on the nature of silence as a Zen state of altered consciousness (Silence is the Sound of Listening, by Miguel Isaza).

My main impression from the article was an emphasis on sound as the state of calm in which we (as listeners) become receptive to the world of aural phenomena constantly surrounding us.

 

The article brought to mind a few ideas that I thought I would share about the role of silence in the creative output of a game composer.

Sometimes when we as game composers receive creative guidance in regards to the musical style of a project, we’ll be instructed to do the following:

Let the music breathe.

The idea of “breathing music” can be interpreted in several ways.  It can mean that the music should dwindle intermittently into absolute silence so that the game’s soundscape can essentially “take over” for a few moments, before the music resumes.  It can also mean that the music should be written with sparse instrumentation and lots of unoccupied space in the frequency spectrum, resulting in the impression of lots of brief silent pauses that allow the sound design environment to filter through the lattice of musical elements.  Finally, it can mean that the music is composed of a series of crescendos and diminuendos, whereby the musical score swells dramatically and then recedes into a near-silent state on a regular basis.

All of these approaches share one aspect in common: the music is structured to allow the sound design to move regularly into the foreground, pushing the music further into the background of the player’s conscious awareness.  With this in mind, should we interpret this instruction to “let the music breathe” as a desire to deemphasize the music in favor of other aspects of the game’s aural design?

On page 52 of my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, I discuss an interesting study conducted by Stanford University, which casts a very different light on the effect of silence on the experience of listening to music.  The study revealed that when listening to a piece of music, our minds become most attentive and filled with the most anticipatory focus when the music becomes silent for a moment.  For instance, in the short pauses between the movements of a symphony, the listener’s attention to the music peaks.

So, when we’re asked to let the music “breathe,” perhaps we can interpret this to mean that we should include those brief pauses that cause the player to pay more attention to our music than they had before.  As Miguel Isaza wrote in his article for Designing Sound, the act of becoming silent awakens our consciousness to the world of sound around us.  Perhaps by using silence as a tool in our game music, we can awaken gamers to the world of music we have created.

 

Game Music and Gamer Anticipation

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

DS_Icon

When the circumstances of a gameplay scenario create a sense of anticipation, this is usually engineered for a good reason.  The developers want the gamer to be tensely expectant of the monster attack, or the sniper ambush, or any other enemy-type that might leap out and yell “boo!”  In the article, “The Story in Surround – Game narrative and sound,” author Cormac Donnelly of Designing Sound makes a case for the role that audio can play in creating that sense of expectation.

The theory hinges on the idea of “mental modeling,” in which we develop expectations about the outcome of future events based on our past experiences.  Donnelly suggests that by initiating specific sound design elements in advance of certain in-game events, we can train the player to associate the sound with the impending event.  This can then be used to manipulate the emotions and even the subsequent actions of players who will respond to the sounds with immediate reactions based on their “mental model.”

It’s an interesting concept that we, as game composers, can also apply to our own work.  In cooperation with the audio teams, we can plan music systems that include music precursors to significant events. These anticipatory musical elements can then become built into the players’ “mental model” concerning the event in question.  This music becomes one more way in which the game can sculpt the emotional dynamic of gamers and nudge them in specific directions.

The article by Cormac Donnelly, “The Story in Surround – Game narrative and sound,” appeared on the Designing Sound web site – it can be found here.

Music and the Anxious Gamer

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

OUPblog

An interesting article from the Oxford University Press blog examines the importance of audio in video games, with an emphasis on its effect on player performance. Do gamers play more successfully with immersive music and sound effects, or is their performance improved in a more silent play-space?

According to studies conducted by the author Siu-Lan Tan, gamers perform better with game audio turned on rather than off, although this performance improvement seemed most pronounced among experienced gamers.  For newbies, the game audio and music seemed to increase initial anxiety levels at the start of the game, and these players benefited from turning the audio off initially and replacing it with unrelated music playing from a boombox in the room.

What does this tell us?  In my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, I explore this idea along with a possible approach that game composers can take in order to alleviate the problem (Chapter 3, page 40):

“A player may be initially overwhelmed or even discouraged by the apparent complexity of the game.  This can pose a very large barrier to access.  As game composers, our job here is to offer emotional reassurance to the player.”

The chapter continues with an exploration of musical choices that can enhance player concentration and alleviate stress.  This is one of the many ways in which music can aid players in performing at their best throughout the course of a game.

The article by Siu-Lan Tan for the Oxford University Press is called, “What’s the secret to high scores on video games?” and you can find it here.