By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. Next week, I’ll be giving a lecture during the Game Developers Conference 2021 event. During my lecture, I’ll be talking about the music I composed for Sumo Digital for both the Sackboy: A Big Adventure and Spyder video games. My lecture is entitled, “From Spyder to Sackboy: A Big Adventure in Interactive Music,” and will take place on Friday July 23rd at 3:40pm PT. Although GDC is still an all-virtual affair, the event does provide lots of opportunities for experts within the game development community to share their knowledge, coupled with forums enabling game audio folks to network and learn from each other. In addition to my prepared lecture, I’ll also be participating in a live Speaker Q&A that will take place right after my presentation. It should be a lot of fun! Really looking forward to sharing my experience working with Sumo Digital simultaneously on these two fantastic games.
This was an incredibly rare and awesome opportunity for me to compose music for two projects simultaneously in development by the same company. Because of this, I found the comparisons between the two games fascinating.
My talk will delve into the mechanics of the dynamic music systems in both games, 
As composers, we’re often asked to provide a general atmosphere that adds either character to gameplay or distinctive flavor to menus. If it’s a horror game, maybe we’re being asked to provide a crushingly heavy drone of doom during tense exploration, with soul-shuddering tone clusters bubbling up from the darkness and then sinking back down into the murky depths. For a whimsical game, we might be creating airy, open textures with little mischievous accents from the mallets or woodwind section… or maybe we’re creating a brightly whimsical melody for an opening menu or splash screen. If it’s a fantasy roleplaying game, we may be providing softly ambient tracks for exploration, with a pensive flute wandering gently through Gaelic figures. Or maybe we’re creating a thunderously epic main theme for an opening menu, designed to emphasize the world-shattering stakes of the adventure to come.
For instance, as part of the musical score I composed for Lineage M (just released this month as the latest entry in the popular Lineage franchise), I composed an epic musical theme intended to convey both in-game character and distinctive flavor for the user-interface. The theme reflects both the essential nature of the gameplay protagonist (a gothic warrior known as the Reaper) and the huge scale of the battle for the Kingdom of Elmore. Here’s a video from the Official NCSoft music channel on YouTube that shows how my Lineage M music is used during the game’s opening title screen:
Carefully composed arrangements featuring acoustic and electronic instruments can go a long way towards adding character and identity to a game world. However, in examples such as my theme for Lineage M, the effect is wrought purely by the dramatic underscore, composed of electronic or acoustic instruments that are essentially musical by nature.
But for the Sackboy: A Big Adventure and Spyder games, I ventured a little farther afield, and incorporated an assortment of non-musical sound sources into my musical arrangements. These sounds were diegetically-inspired elements in the non-diegetic score. That is, the sounds originated from non-musical sources, and were meant to give the impression that they exist within the in-game environment. As we know, diegetic music is considered to exist in the fictional world, so that most of the characters can hear it and react to it. A roving bard character in a fantasy game, or a blaring radio in an open-world city game… these would be great examples of diegetic music in a fictional world. Non-diegetic music exists only for the benefit of the audience, and is not considered to exist in the fictional world. By using sounds that seem to exist within the fictional world, but rolling those sounds into a non-diegetic musical score, we seek to make our music feel more intrinsically tied to the game world. I used this technique in both Spyder and Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and I thought I’d share an example of this approach from both games:
Sounds of the deep blue sea
These sounds included recordings of water drips and splashes, electronic noises that imitated gurgling, and swooping metallic sounds that evoked rippling light and gushing water. I also captured a popping noise using the mouth of a bottle, which I applied in both pitched and non-pitched versions within the musical score.
First, here’s a recording of some of these sounds, isolated from the musical compositions in which they were used:
Now, here’s a short excerpt of the beginning of a level in the Kingdom of Crablantis. Notice how these aquatic, diegetically-inspired sounds help the music to blend better with the undersea environment.
Futuristic spy gizmos of the past
Now, let’s check out how these sounds functioned in the game. Here’s an excerpt from the main menu, which is a circumstance in which the sounds can be heard very clearly and are quite evocative of the “Spy Headquarters” aesthetic that the menu system evokes:
Conclusion
So I hope that you found this discussion about diegetic sounds interesting. Incorporating sounds that seem to belong to the fictional narrative is one of the greatest ways to tie our music more closely to the action of the game. During my GDC 2021 lecture, I’ll be exploring the interactive music systems of these two games, comparing and contrasting the dynamic implementation strategies. Really looking forward to it!
