By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hey there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be presenting a lecture this March at the Game Developers Conference 2025 about my Grammy Award-winning score to Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! “A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music” will explore both the historical research and creative process that went into the composition of this Medieval and Renaissance-style score. So excited to share what I learned composing the score for the game Kotaku named one of the Best RPGs of the Year!
In the meantime, let’s now turn our attention to my continuing series of articles presenting the lecture I delivered at last year’s Game Developer’s Conference. In my 2024 GDC presentation,“Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” I discussed how game composers can adopt the tools and strategies of expert sound designers when composing evocative music for games. Since not all of us would be able to travel to San Francisco to attend the Game Developers Conference, I’ve gone ahead now and included the entire content of my GDC presentation in this article series. This article series also includes all of the videos, audio files and images that I used during my talk. In case you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you can find them here:
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Sounds of Nature
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: The Animal Kingdom
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Science and Technology
In these articles, we’ve been working our way through this bullet list from top to bottom, organizing types of sound design assets into categories that might best serve our purposes as game composers:
In part four of this series, we began exploring the sonic possibilities of machines and mechanical devices. Starting with the simple utility of a ticking clock, we pondered the psychological impact of making time perceptible within our music. While this approach can greatly enhance the sensation of suspense, it can be used in more whimsical ways. So let’s explore the subject of time a bit further.
The sounds of time
Developed by Tarser Studios for Sony Europe, LittleBigPlanet PS Vita was the fourth game in the franchise. While attempting to save the awesome world of Carnivalia from the evil Puppeteer, our hero Sackboy ventures into the Land of Odd – a weird realm littered with clocks. Composing music for the Land of Odd, I focused on the clocks as my most important inspiration. Since they were pictured as oddball grandfather-style contraptions with bent hands and exposed gears, I gathered lots of eccentric wooden mechanical sounds and cuckoo birds for my sound design palette:
To prep for music composition, I took the cuckoo bird voice and spread it across my MIDI keyboard so that I could write melodies with it, and I incorporated the wooden gear sounds into my syncopated rhythmic structure. Here’s how that all pulled together:
Using these clock and gear sounds helped to bring the timepieces to life, and bound the music and the environment more closely together.
Let’s now move from small machines to larger ones.
Big industry, large machines
As we discussed, in the Fail Factory VR game you’re constantly dealing with electronics run amok in the robot assembly line. But on top of this, you’re also operating large bulky machines that grind, clang, and shoot steam all over the place. I used these big industrial machines as the inspiration for an assortment of clunky metallic noises that I used in the music for this game:
As you could hear, I leaned heavily into the comedic side of these sounds. Here’s how they worked as incorporated into the ‘Results’ music, heard when factory workers receive their scores after their work shift ends:
At this point, let’s shift our focus from stationary machines to moving ones – namely, race cars.
Machines on the move
We’ve already discussed the Speed Racer video game from Sidhe Interactive. The central mechanical sound at the heart of Speed Racer was, of course, the car and all of the sounds it made while it ripped around the track. Since my musical score was going to be a pretty high-octane affair, I made sure to use sounds that were either derived from high-speed cars, or very reminiscent of them:
As you could hear, lots of these sounds evoke squealing tires, doppler effects, roaring engines, and all the most popular sounds of the racetrack. I made sure to incorporate them in transitional moments, to punch up the drama in the music:
So now that we’ve looked at one type of vehicle, let’s shift our focus to a much larger moving machine: a train. In one point during the Shattered State VR political thriller, the national intelligence agency learns that a bomb has been planted on a train, and the agents must decide where to divert the train before it explodes. In composing the music for this sequence, I felt it was important to build an awareness of the inexorable approach of this train of death, so I thought about using an actual train sound:
However, having this literal train effect was going to be distracting, and I needed the sound to also feel a bit surreal, so I designed a chugging mechanical sound asset that felt very train-like, and also worked well from within the rest of the musical arrangement:
Let’s hear how that worked during the game, as the bomb train was approaching the city:
In the sixth and final installment of this article series, we’ll be looking at how the sounds generated by human beings can become useful tools in our musical compositions. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about composing music for games, you’ll find additional guidance in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (The MIT Press).
Winifred Phillips is a video game composer whose latest project is her Grammy® Award-Winning original musical score for the video game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (listen to the official soundtrack on Spotify). Her Wizardry soundtrack has also won a Society of Composers & Lyricists Award. Phillips is known for composing music for games in many of the most famous and popular franchises in gaming: Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, LittleBigPlanet, Lineage, Jurassic World, and Wizardry. Her music for Sackboy: A Big Adventure garnered a BAFTA Award nomination. Phillips’ other awards include the D.I.C.E. Award, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards (including Music of the Year), and four Hollywood Music in Media Awards. She is the author of the award-winning bestseller A COMPOSER’S GUIDE TO GAME MUSIC, published by the MIT Press. An interview with her has been published as a part of the Routledge text, Women’s Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound, which collects the viewpoints of the most esteemed female composers in film, television, and games. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.