By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Glad you’re here! I’m video game music composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m the author of the book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. Recently my publisher The MIT Press requested that I host a question and answer session on Reddit’s famous Ask Me Anything forum, to share my knowledge about game music and spread the word about my book on that topic. I’d be answering questions from a community consisting of thousands of gamers, developers and aspiring composers. It sounded like fun, so last Thursday and Friday I logged onto Reddit and answered as many questions as I possibly could. It was an awesome experience! Over the course of those two days, my Reddit AMA went viral. It ascended to the Reddit front page, receiving 14.8 thousand upvotes and garnering Reddit’s gold and platinum awards. My AMA has now become one of the most engaged and popular Reddit gaming AMAs ever hosted on the Ask-Me-Anything subreddit. I’m so grateful to the Reddit community for their amazing support and enthusiasm!! During the course of those two days, the community posed some wonderful questions, and I thought it would be great to gather together some of those questions and answers that might interest us here. Below you’ll find a discussion focused on the art and craft of game music composition. The discussion covered the gamut of subjects, from elementary to expert, and I’ve arranged the discussion below under topic headings for the sake of convenience. I hope you enjoy this excerpted Q&A from my Reddit Ask-Me-Anything! If you’d like to read the entire AMA (which also includes lots of discussion of my past video game music projects), you’ll find the whole Reddit AMA here.
The Game Developers Conference is always an awesome opportunity for game audio experts to learn and share experiences. I’ve given presentations at GDC for a few years now, and I’m always excited to hear about what’s new and notable in game audio. This year, the hot topic was virtual reality. In fact, the subject received its own dedicated sub-conference that took place concurrently with the main GDC show. The VRDC (Virtual Reality Developers Conference) didn’t focus particularly on the audio and music side of VR, but there were a couple of notable talks on that subject. In this article, let’s take a look at some of the more intriguing VR game music takeaways from those two talks. Along the way, I’ll also share some of my related experience as the composer of the music of the Dragon Front VR game for the Oculus Rift (pictured above).
Where should video game music be in a VR game? Should it feel like it exists inside the VR world, weaving itself into the immersive 3D atmosphere surrounding the player? Or should it feel like it’s somehow outside of the VR environment and is instead coasting on top of the experience, being conveyed directly to the player? The former approach suggests a spacious and expansive musical soundscape, and the latter would feel much closer and more personal. Is one of these approaches more effective in VR than the other? Which choice is best?
In psychology, the term ‘affect’ refers to emotion, particularly in terms of the way in which such emotional content is displayed. Whether by visual or aural means, an emotion can not be shared without some kind of ‘affect’ that serves as its mode of communication from one person to another. When we’re happy, we smile. When we’re angry, we frown.
