Hi there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips – my most recent game release is the music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord: the smash-hit 3D remake of the classic 1981 dungeon-crawler (listen and download my award-winning soundtrack for free). Welcome to part three of my article series presenting the content of my talk from the Game Developers Conference 2024! My presentation, “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” discussed the ways in which game composers can repurpose the tools and assets normally within the province of sound design experts. In order to best make my GDC discussions as widely accessible as possible, I’m now sharing the content of my GDC lectures every year in an article series that includes the full lectures, supplemented by most of the videos and many illustrations from my GDC talks.
In case you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you can find them here:
In part two of my GDC 2024 article series, I discussed how using appropriate animal vocalizations can provide game composers with awesome sonic tools for adding evocative character to game music.
As an example, we discussed how adding seagulls to the music of an ocean-themed gameplay level can help the environment blend more seamlessly with the music supporting it. So let’s now check out another example of an animal sound that’s used less literally than seagulls at the ocean – and more in a figurative way.
This is part two of my article series that presents the content of my lecture from the Game Developers Conference 2024. This year, my presentation, “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” explored how composers can employ sound design assets and techniques in their game music. Since not all of us can attend GDC, I make sure to post the content of my GDC lectures every year in a series of articles that present the full discussions, along with many of the videos and illustrations that were a part of my lecture. Last month I posted part one of this article series, in which we considered a list of categories wherein sound design assets may be sorted:
We began with a discussion of environmental diegetics, first exploring how short environmental sound design assets supports diegesis, and the ways in which we can make these sound design assets work in our musical compositions. So now, let’s explore that idea further.
Hey everybody! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. Welcome to part two of my three-part article series based on my interview with Meena Shamaly, host of the popular Game Show program on ABC Classic (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Meena is a prolific performance artist, composer and producer, in addition to his role as the host of the Game Show, and I was delighted to be interviewed for his awesome series! An audio recording of the uncut interview is hosted right now on the ABC Classic web site. These articles include the full written transcript of that interview, along with some great supporting links and media files that help to expand on the topics discussed. In part one of this series, Meena and I reflected on the journey a new composer takes to break into the video game industry, along with the “always say yes” philosophy that can help new composers as they pursue their first break. In part two, we’ll talk about composing in unorthodox ways to help us stay at the top of our game as composers, and we’ll also discuss the unique role that music plays in video games. Here is part two of my interview with Meena Shamaly of ABC Classic’sGame Show, beginning with a discussion of how two very different projects from my early career shaped everything that came later… Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and God of War.
Winifred: So now my career has two very divergent paths. People who know me from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and things like that – they approach me for projects like Shrek the Third, or The LittleBigPlanet games, or SimAnimals, Spore Hero, things like that. And on the other side, people who know me from God of War are coming to me for things like the Assassin’s Creed Liberation game, or Homefront, or Jurassic World Primal Ops, or The Da Vinci Code. And that has allowed me to swing back and forth and do very divergent things. It’s made my career very fulfilling for me, because I get to stretch and change. I don’t ever feel like I’m in a box, because I get to express myself in such different ways. It’s rare! It’s a rare thing to be able to do that, so I’m quite grateful that my career started that way.
Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and last November I was delighted to be featured on the popular Game Show program broadcast on ABC Classic (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The show that was broadcast on ABC Classic featured lots of my music from my video game repertoire, along with clips from a longer interview we recorded shortly before the broadcast. Game Show is hosted by Meena Shamaly, who is an accomplished performance poet, composer, and producer of arts workshops and poetry slams. With this in-depth background in music and the arts, he brings a unique sensitivity and insight to the conversation, posing fascinating questions right from the top of the interview, and responding deftly to help the conversation evolve in revealing ways. While the broadcast from ABC Classic is no longer available, an audio recording of our full, uncut interview is hosted right now on the ABC Classic web site. I thought that readers of this blog might appreciate the transcript of the full interview, so I’m including that transcript here. In addition to the transcript, I’ve also included music examples to illustrate topics discussed during the interview, and links that expand on various topics that are touched upon in the transcript. This interview for The Game Show web site was quite long, so I’ll be dividing it into three articles. In addition to this transcript, you can also visit The Game Show web site, or visit the official ABC Classic site (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). So now, without further ado, here is part one of my interview with Meena Shamaly of ABC Classic’s Game Show!
Hello everyone! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m delighted to share that I’ll be delivering a lecture this March in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference — one of the top industry conferences of the year. My lecture is entitled “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” and I was honored that GDC included it as a featured audio selection in the GDC 2024 Session Guide, and highlighted my participation as a GDC speaker this year by including me in the GDC 2024 Speaker Spotlight. My lecture takes place on Thursday, March 21st in Room 3002 West Hall at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and I’m really looking forward to this one! We’ll be taking a detailed look at various ways that music and sound-design can cross fertilize each other. Specifically, my presentation will focus on how environmental and incidental sound effects can be directed towards musical applications. These audio assets, typically used by sound design experts, can serve to introduce quirky novelty into a game’s musical score. They can also deepen player immersion in the environment of the game.
While I don’t want to spoil the content of my presentation, I thought I’d take this opportunity to break down an example of this technique from one of my projects. This particular example was regrettably cut from my presentation due to time constraints, which affords me the opportunity to share it here instead! While my lecture will have a much wider scope on the topic of musical diegetics, this article will drill down on one specific case-study. So let’s start with some basic definitions.
Hey everyone! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and this is the third article in my series based on my Game Developers Conference 2023 lecture, “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops.” In my GDC presentation, I examined the challenges of composing unpredictable and chaotic music for a high-intensity action game. This series of articles shares the substance of that GDC 2023 presentation, along with the illustrations, videos, and audio examples I included in my presentation at the conference last March.
In the first two articles of this series, we discussed the worldwide success of the popular Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise. We reviewed the gameplay structure of Jurassic World Primal Ops: the top-down action game released in concert with the blockbuster theatrical run of the Jurassic World Dominion movie. I shared my experience as the composer of this Jurassic World game, and what it was like composing music for such an awesome franchise.
During our discussion in the previous two articles, we took a look at some of the best music composition techniques that can introduce tension and uncertainty into our musical structure, enhancing the experience of combat in an action-heavy game. These ideas are discussed in detail in these previous two articles:
In the preceding two articles, we considered how subverting traditional cadences with surprising tonic pivots can introduce unpredictability into our musical structure, and how both quartal chords and chromatics can create ambiguity in regards to key signature and tonic center. But there are other ways for us to obscure that tonic and make our music feel more tumultuous.
As we all know, anyone who casually listens to music is well aware of the Ionian and the Aeolian modes:
The traditional major:
The traditional minor:
These modes are everywhere, with all those famous and well-worn intervals, chords, and progressions, so we’ve come to expect them. That’s why avoiding these modes is a great way to subvert expectations and create disconcerting music.
In the score for Jurassic World Primal Ops, when I wasn’t pushing atonality into my compositions, I was leaning heavily into the Octatonic and Whole Tone scales. So let’s take a look at how that worked, starting with the Octatonic.
The Octatonic, or diminished scale, is an eight-tone scale that alternates whole and half tones:
It has the advantage of working really well with diminished triads:
Diminished triads are nicely unsteady and menacing in the right context. The Octatonic became one of my go-to tools for the Jurassic World Primal Ops score. Here’s one of the most straightforward examples from a combat track: notice how the bass line runs through the entire Octatonic scale in order:
Now here’s a more complex example of the Octatonic scale in an action track. While I never ran through the scale in order, you’ll notice that the bass line is overtly Octatonic in nature, with diminished chords in the brass section – and I’ve arranged the strings in a conventional minor-mode, so this makes the whole thing feel more unstable and perilous:
While I used the Octatonic pretty frequently in this project, I also alternated it with the Whole Tone scale. This scale consists entirely of whole steps:
This means it naturally feels disconnected to a key signature – because it’s just hard to determine where the tonic is.
First, let’s check out a combat example:
As you can see, if we’re looking for an unbalanced scale with no tonal center, the Whole Tone scale is just what we need. Also, it features augmented triads:
Augmented triads are also harmonically ambiguous. All this is great for creating uneasy-sounding music.
So let’s check out another example – this is music I composed for one of the tense ‘tracking’ sequences in which the player (as an expert dinosaur hunter) is attempting to locate these huge prehistoric beasts in the wild. Notice how apprehensive this Whole Tone structure feels:
Octatonic and Whole Tone scales are fantastic for when we’re pushing our music away from a classic harmonic structure and towards atonality.
In the next article of this series, we’ll be stepping away from atonality altogether and considering its close cousin, polytonality. In the meantime, you can read more about game music composition in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. Thanks for reading!
Winifred Phillips is a BAFTA-nominated video game composer. The music she composed for her latest video game project Jurassic World Primal Ops won both the Global Music Award and the NYX Award, and was nominated for a Society of Composers & Lyricists Award for Outstanding Score for Interactive Media, and a Game Audio Network Guild Award in the category of Music of the Year. Other recent releases include the hit PlayStation 5 launch title Sackboy: A Big Adventure (soundtrack album now available). Popular music from Phillips’ award-winning Assassin’s Creed Liberation score was featured in the performance repertoire of the Assassin’s Creed Symphony World Tour, which made its Paris debut with an 80-piece orchestra and choir. As an accomplished video game composer, Phillips is best known for composing music for games in many of the most famous and popular franchises in gaming: the list includes Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, and Sackboy / LittleBigPlanet. Phillips’ has received numerous awards, including an Interactive Achievement Award / D.I.C.E. Award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, 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. As one of the foremost authorities on music for interactive entertainment, Winifred Phillips has given lectures at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the Society of Composers and Lyricists, the Game Developers Conference, the Audio Engineering Society, and many more. Phillips’ enthusiastic fans showered her with questions during a Reddit Ask-Me-Anything session that went viral, hit the Reddit front page, received 14.9 thousand upvotes, and became one of the most popular gaming AMAs ever hosted on Reddit. 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, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Delighted you’re here! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and welcome to another article exploring the art and craft of game music composition! If you’re a reader of my previous articles, you’ll know that they usually include discussions of large-scale music systems and best game-wide composition strategies. Lately, it occurred to me that we might benefit from stepping away from this holistic approach, allowing us to focus on the creation of a single piece of game music. With that in mind, in this article we’ll be examining the structure and composition of a single track that I composed for the Skyweaver video game.
Skyweaver is a popular strategy trading-card video game in the tradition of such famous games as Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, and Magic the Gathering Arena. The game released in 2022, and currently boasts over a quarter of a million players. Investors in the Skyweaver game include both Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft. The game is currently available for PC, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. The track we’ll be discussing is entitled “Ready,” and it’s heard frequently during Skyweaver matches. Before we begin examining the structure of this track, let’s take a moment to discuss the nature of a strategy trading-card game.
Welcome! I’m game music composer Winifred Phillips, and just before the holidays I was ecstatic to learn that my music for the Jurassic World Primal Ops video game was nominated for a Society of Composers & Lyricists Award! In all the excitement following the announcement of the SCL Awards nominees, many budding game composers reached out to me for advice regarding their own career trajectories. I found myself referring many of them to articles I’ve written in this space over the years – articles covering the widely diverse topics that interest us as game composers.
Since 2014, this series of articles has explored the evolving state of our industry and the tools and techniques that can help us make great game music. Over time, these articles have become a fairly deep repository of information. After referring so many budding composers to articles in this lengthy series, it has occurred to me that this sizable collection has become quite difficult to navigate – partially due to the many topics that have been explored over the years.
Discussions have included many of the creative challenges that make our profession unique. Through an examination of the structure of interactive music systems, numerous dynamic composition techniques have been investigated. Along the way, we’ve pondered how game music composition has been accomplished in the past, and where it might be going in the future. A profusion of resources have been collated in these articles – including the best methods to find gigs, and awesome networking opportunities that can benefit a game composer’s career. There have also been examinations of resources that can keep us inspired and creatively energized.
Together, these articles constitute a living document about game music composition. However, they definitely need an index at this point. With that in mind, I’m offering this ‘big index’ of articles I’ve shared over the years, organized by subject matter. We can navigate around this index using the following menu:
