By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
So happy you’ve joined us! I’m game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my latest projects is the music of the bestselling game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord: the 3d remake of the classic 1981 dungeon-crawler! (listen and download the award-winning soundtrack for free). I’d like to welcome you to the sixth and final installment of my article series based on the lecture I gave at the Game Developers Conference 2024! In my lecture, “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” I explored how the audio assets and techniques of expert sound designers can be applied to our work as game composers. Considering that not all of us would be able to attend GDC that year, I arranged the content of my 2024 GDC lecture into this six-part article series. These articles have shared the entire substance of my lecture, along with all the audio and video examples and a large assortment of the images I used during my GDC 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
- GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Industry and Mechanics
In part five of this series, we examined the sounds of machines and technology, exploring some of the best ways these sound design assets can be put to use within our music. So now let’s return to the top of our full list of audio assets that we’ve been considering over the course of this article series:
We’ve looked at Environmental soundscapes, the Animal Kingdom, Science and Technology, Industry and Mechanics – all awesome inspirations for sound design elements that we can incorporate into our musical compositions. So now let’s consider the last item on our list – and maybe the most potent tool we have:
The human soundscape
This is where we find human voices, along with all those omnipresent and ever-popular noises that we humans make while going about our tasks – in short, pretty familiar audio assets.
Yet, because these sounds rise out of our shared human experience, these can be some of the most powerfully evocative audio assets we have at our disposal. Let’s go through some examples, starting with the simplest use of human sounds in a musical composition.
In the final boss battle of the Shrek the Third video game from Activision, Shrek’s young friend Arthur interrupts a theater performance while fighting off swarms of guards on the stage. The audience reacts to the fight like it’s part of the show, so I wanted to integrate their reaction into my music – including their applause, rhythmic clapping, and cheers:
Using these tools, I wove the audience response into the structure of my music for this fight – here’s what that sounded like:
The cheering and clapping crowd really helped to integrate the music into the theatrical setting. Let’s check out another situation in which hearing a crowd elevates the experience.
Developed by Armature Studio, the Sports Scramble VR game lets gamers play a variety of traditional sports using bizarre equipment and wacky rules. Spectators are a crucial element in sports, so I wanted to include that sonic texture in my music for this game. Also, since Sports Scramble mixes up elements from lots of famous sporting events, it was important to reflect that approach in the music:
So let’s now see how all this came together – here’s a bowling match that uses all these incongruous audio assets to emphasize the scrambled nature of the game:
From sports sounds, let’s move to something ordinary – kitchen clatter! In LittleBigPlanet 3 from Sumo Digital, our knitted hero Sackboy must save the world of Bunkum from three all-powerful Titans. As is usual in LittleBigPlanet games, the quest involves visiting whimsical places made of common household items. The Stitchem Manor level finds Sackboy navigating a landscape built of forks and spoons, with platforms that look like oven racks scattered with temperature gages and knobs, glowing broilers, and bubbling pots.
Just like the visual aspect of this level, I wanted my music to be stuffed full of kitchen elements, so I assembled a deep library of kitchen noises, ranging from pots and pans to margarine lids, knife slicing and scraping, matches and lighters igniting, baking sheets rattling, and all sorts of steam effects:
Now let’s watch Sackboy navigate this culinary environment in the Stitchem Manor level of LittleBigPlanet 3:
Finally, let’s return to The Maw to see one of my most ambitious applications of human sound design.
Alien monster, human sounds
As we know, the alien monster known as the Maw is essentially a walking mouth. With that in mind, I needed my music to evoke… mouthiness. How does one accomplish mouthy music? After some experimentation, I settled on the sound of mouthwash.
This gave me that squishy-mouth feeling, but I wanted things to be even more overt, so I assembled some more mouth-generated noises.
Now that I had those sounds, I looked for anything else that would feel weird and also complement those squishy frog croaks that I’d been using throughout the Maw musical score. Turns out, most of those additional sounds were common household items – elastic bands, chair scrapes, pepper grinders, whatever I could find:
Here’s how all that sounded in the first level of The Maw:
By filling the musical score of The Maw with weird and unconventional sound design, I was able to emphasize the bizarre nature of this alien world.
Conclusion
So now we’ve discussed the concept of Diegetics – and how sound design enhances the realism and immediacy of a game environment. We’ve considered how sound design assets can be useful to us from within our game music compositions. We’ve thought about how sounds from our natural environment can be integrated into our music. We’ve explored the way animal voices can be used in our work, adding character and life to our tracks. We’ve looked at the musical potential of scientific and technological sounds, with all their evocative futuristic possibilities. We’ve checked out the sounds of machines and industrial equipment, and we’ve contemplated the myriad sounds that humans make in their daily lives, and how those audio assets can be put to good use by game composers.
For the most part, our game music doesn’t tend to be Diegetic – it doesn’t usually exist inside the game world – but it can incorporate sounds that feel intrinsically connected to the Diegetic building blocks of the game. When we fold sound design assets into our compositions, we inject them with a distinct character and flavor that feels at one with the sonic texture of the game as a whole. This allows our music to more effectively support the game. For me, these techniques greatly enhance the creative fulfillment I derive from my work as a game composer – and I hope you’ll give them a try! Thanks for reading!
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.