Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. Welcome to the fourth article in my series based on my GDC 2023 lecture, “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops.” Before we continue with the article series, I’d like to share some related news – the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts just awarded my music for Jurassic World Primal Ops with a 2023 Gold in the W3 Awards! This is the 18th year that the AIVA has recognized “heroes of digital creativity,” and I’m thrilled that my music for this project was recognized by the AIVA!
So happy to be discussing my Jurassic World Primal Ops music in this ongoing article series! In these articles, I’ve included the substance of my GDC lecture, augmented with the videos, audio files, and some of the illustrations from the visual presentation that accompanied my lecture.
During the first three articles, we considered the world-famous Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise, and the release of the Jurassic World Primal Ops video game in concert with the theatrical run of the latest movie, Jurassic World Dominion. I shared what it was like composing new music for a game in this famous and immensely popular franchise. By creating a musical score that emphasized unpredictability and chaos, I was able to enhance the tension and anxiety of playing an action-driven game featuring bloodthirsty dinosaurs on the loose in the modern world.
You’ll find all these ideas discussed in detail in these three articles:
We’d just finished discussing the fantastic utility of both the Octatonic and Whole Tone scales, which are particularly useful when we’re pushing our music away from a classic harmonic structure and towards atonality. But now let’s take a moment to step away from atonality altogether, and consider its close cousin – polytonality.
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.
Glad you’re here! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and this is the second article in my series based on my Game Developers Conference 2023 presentation, “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops.” In the lecture I gave last March at GDC, I shared my creative process composing music for a project in the famous Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise. During this article series, I’ll be sharing the substance of that GDC 2023 presentation, supplemented by the audio and video examples I used, along with some of the best illustrations I included during my conference lecture.
In the first article of this series, we took a look at the Jurassic World Primal Ops video game, in which players capture and train awesome dinosaurs to fight alongside them against evil poachers and mercenaries. Jurassic World Primal Ops was released in concert with the theatrical run of Jurassic World Dominion, the latest movie in the popular Jurassic franchise. As a top-down action game featuring an assortment of history’s most famous and dangerous dinosaur predators, Jurassic World Primal Ops needed a musical score that would emphasize the power and danger of these enormous prehistoric lizards.
Turning to an examination of music theory as it relates to such an intense and chaotic musical score, we discussed how traditional cadences could be subverted into unpredictable progressions that we dubbed Tonic Pivot. You’ll find all these ideas discussed in detail in part one of this article series.
Continuing our discussion of harmonic devices, let’s move to the second chaotic technique on our list.
Hi! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. In March, I gave a presentation at the Game Developers Conference 2023 – a top industry event with lectures and panels from lots of different experts in all the varied disciplines within the field of game development. My lecture was entitled “Chaos Theory in Game Music.” It focused on my musical score for the Jurassic World Primal Ops video game, and it was rated by GDC attendees as one of the best sessions of GDC 2023! So awesome to participate once again in one of the best game audio conferences of the year!
Each year after I present at the Game Developers Conference, I include most of the content of my lecture in a series of articles. So with this article, I’m kicking off a six-part series based on my highly-rated GDC 2023 presentation! I’ll be including all of the discussion from my GDC lecture, along with lots of the illustrations and videos that were a part of my GDC talk. So let’s get started!
During the course of this article series, I’ll be sharing my process composing the musical score for Jurassic World Primal Ops – it’s the video game from Universal Games and Behaviour Interactive. Jurassic World Primal Ops came out last summer, right alongside the theatrical run of Jurassic World Dominion (the latest film from the popular Jurassic World franchise).
So happy you’ve joined us! Each year, the Library of Congress adds a list of top recordings to its National Recording Registry, and The Sounds Of America radio series devotes an episode to each of the recordings selected for preservation that year. Recently I was interviewed for an episode of The Sounds Of America radio series on National Public Radio, in order to provide some background and musical context to one of the latest additions to the National Recording Registry – the famous theme to the Super Mario Bros. video game! This is awesome news for game composers and game music fans. The Super Mario Bros. theme music is now the first game music composition preserved for posterity in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Each year, the National Recording Registry selects twenty five recordings that represent “the richness of the nation’s audio legacy.” The expert preservationists at the National Recording Registry works to ensure “the long-term preservation of that legacy for future generations.”
As the author of the book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, I was able to discuss the historical significance of the Super Mario Bros. theme music as a seminal work in the field of game music composition. I had previously given a lecture at the Library of Congress about the nature of video game music (that lecture is recorded and preserved in the Library’s Films & Videos Collection) and this experience gave me further insight to the importance of the preservation efforts undertaken by the Library of Congress. I could also discuss the Super Mario Bros. theme music from the perspective of a musician who had recorded one of the many cover versions of this world-famous tune. I recorded my version for the tribute album, “Best of the Best: A Tribute to Game Music.” All of this gave me a unique perspective on this historically-significant musical composition, and I was honored to discuss it during the interview with The Sounds Of America radio show. In addition to my own interview, the show includes interviews with author Jeff Ryan (How Nintendo Conquered America), Super Mario Bros. actor Charles Martinet, and the Super Mario Bros. composer himself, Koji Kondo! You can listen to the entire show here:
I thought it might be useful to include the transcript of my entire interview in this article. The transcript also includes my own cover version of the track (which you’ll find in the section discussing the popularity of cover versions). But first, let’s listen to the original Super Mario Bros. Theme, and then dive into the transcript!
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.
So happy you’ve joined us! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my latest projects is the musical score for the video game Jurassic World Primal Ops (listen to the score here). Over the past few months, I’ve been tremendously honored that my score for this game has garnered several award nominations, including Outstanding Original Score for Interactive Media from the Society of Composers & Lyricists, and Music of the Year from the Game Audio Network Guild. As a result, I’ve been asked numerous questions about how this score was created. With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to write a brief article that includes a few of the guiding principles that shaped my work on this project.
I’ll be giving a lecture during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco about my creative process, and I’ll be including some fine detail about how I planned and constructed this music. In this article, I’ll be focusing on a couple of broader concepts related to the role that music played in this project. But first, let’s briefly discuss the game itself.
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:
Hey, everybody! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m happy to welcome you back to the last installment of our four-part discussion of “scoring-to-picture” techniques within video games. In these articles we’ve considered how cutscenes, trailers, and cinematics can benefit from specific musical strategies. As game composers, our jobs involve lots of complex music systems requiring expert knowledge of dynamic composition techniques. However, we can still benefit from an examination of the goals that music can achieve during linear presentations within a game. Such goals may include:
Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m glad you could join us for the continuation of our four-part discussion of traditional “scoring-to-picture” techniques within a video game project. We’ve been examining the music needs of cinematics, cutscenes, and trailers, with an eye towards pinpointing specific goals that music can achieve. Those goals include:
