Tag Archives: game music

GameSoundCon Industry Survey Results

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

GameSoundCon

As the GameSoundCon conference draws closer, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the Game Audio Industry Survey that was designed by GameSoundCon Executive Producer Brian Schmidt.  The survey was prepared in response to the broader “Annual Game Developer Salary Survey” offered by industry site Gamasutra.  Since the Gamasutra survey suffered from skewed results for game audio compared to other game industry sectors (owing to lower participation from the game audio community), Schmidt set out to obtain more reliable results by adopting a different approach.

Instead of focusing on the yearly salaries/earnings of audio professionals, the survey concentrated on the money generated by the music/sound of individual projects. Each respondent could fill out the survey repeatedly, entering data for each game project that the respondent had completed during the previous year.  The final results of the survey are meant to reflect how game audio is treated within different types of projects, and the results are quite enlightening, and at times surprising.

GSC-SurveyThe financial results include both small-budget indie games from tiny teams and huge-budget games from behemoth publishers, so there is a broad range in those results.  Since this is the first year that the GameSoundCon Game Audio Industry Survey has been conducted, we don’t yet have data from a previous year with which to compare these results, and it might be very exciting to see how the data shifts if the survey is conducted again in 2015.

Some very intriguing data comes from the section of the survey that provides a picture of who game composers are and how they work.  According to the survey, the majority of game composers are freelancers, and 70% of game music is performed by the freelance composer alone.  56% of composers are also acting as one-stop-shops for music and sound effects, likely providing a good audio solution for indie teams with little or no audio personnel of their own.

A surprising and valuable aspect of the survey is to be found in the audio middleware results, which show that the majority of games use either no audio middleware at all, or opt for custom audio tools designed by the game developer.  This information is quite new, and could be tremendously useful to composers working in the field.  While we should all make efforts to gain experience with audio middleware such as FMOD and Wwise, we might keep in mind that there may not be as many opportunities to practice those skills as had been previously anticipated.  Again, this data might be rendered even more meaningful by the results of the survey next year (if it is repeated), to see if commercial middleware is making inroads and becoming more popular over time.

Expanding upon this subject, the survey reveals that only 22% of composers are ever asked to do any kind of music integration (in which the composer assists the team in implementing music files into their game). It seems that for the time being, this task is still falling firmly within the domain of the programmers on most game development teams.

The survey was quite expansive and fascinating, and I’m very pleased that it included questions about both middleware and integration.  If GameSoundCon runs the survey again next year, I’d love to see the addition of some questions about what type of interactivity composers may be asked to introduce into their musical scores, how much of their music is composed in a traditionally linear fashion, and what the ratio of interactive/adaptive to linear music might be per project.  I wrote rather extensively on this subject in my book, and since I’ll also be giving my talk at GameSoundCon this year about composing music for adaptive systems, I’d be very interested in such survey results!

The GameSoundCon Game Audio Industry Survey is an invaluable resource, and is well worth reading in its entirety.  You’ll find it here.  I’ll be giving my talk on “Advanced Composition Techniques for Adaptive Systems” at GameSoundCon at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 8th.

Many thanks to Brian Schmidt / GameSoundCon for preparing this excellent survey!

Game Music Documentary at GameSoundCon

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

beep_kickstarter

The kickstarter campaign for the documentary “Beep: A History of Video Game Sound” is entering its final six days.  I’m pleased that the producers approached me to be interviewed for their film; I’ll be talking about my career as a game composer and my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music.  The “Beep” documentary looks like it will be a fascinating project, and all indications are that the resulting documentary will be a wide-ranging discussion of the audio aspects of video game design and production.  Two days ago, the kickstarter announced that its plans include coverage of GameSoundCon, the video game music and sound design conference founded and executive produced by the president of the Game Audio Network Guild, Brian Schmidt.

GameSoundCon

The conference is less than a couple of weeks away now, and I’m looking forward to giving my presentation, “Advanced Composition Techniques for Adaptive Systems.”  The GameSoundCon crowd is one of the most enthusiastic and creatively-charged groups of people I’ve come across, and it will be great fun to meet new people and talk about the current state of adaptive music in games.

When I heard that “Beep: A History of Video Game Sound” would be covering GameSoundCon, I started thinking about the nature of Brian Schmidt’s conference, not only as a great gathering place for creative audio folks, but as a historically-significant event.  After all, one of the slogans of the “Beep” documentary is “Be a part of game sound history!”

Beep_history_kickstarter

The GameSoundCon conference will take place at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on October 7 – 8.  GameSoundCon will be celebrating its 10th conference this year.  Since its first event in 2009, GameSoundCon has been steadily growing as a resource to the game audio community.  GameSoundCon concentrates its sessions solely on game audio, which separates it from other industry events that encompass the entire discipline of game development.  Further, the GameSoundCon conference embraces both the music composition and sound design disciplines, differentiating it from other music-centric gatherings such as Game Music Connect, the Ludomusicology Conference and the North American Conference on Video Game Music.  This particular combination of priorities seems to make GameSoundCon an ideal event for the “Beep” documentary team, and I wonder how their historical perspective will inform their coverage of the conference.

In my own speech at GameSoundCon, I’ll be approaching the topic of interactive music in games from both a modern and historical standpoint, and I imagine that other presentations will do likewise in regards to their topics.  It’s nice that the GameSoundCon event will be documented with the intent to understand its historical significance, and I’m looking forward to meeting the documentary team of “Beep: A History of Video Game Sound.”  There are still 6 more days to go before the kickstarter ends, so if you want to get involved, you can go here.

Breathing Music: The Role of Silence

Posted by Winifred Phillips on
Image by GagDonkey.com

 

The Designing Sound blog recently devoted a series of articles to the topic of silence, including an elaborately philosophical article on the nature of silence as a Zen state of altered consciousness (Silence is the Sound of Listening, by Miguel Isaza).

My main impression from the article was an emphasis on sound as the state of calm in which we (as listeners) become receptive to the world of aural phenomena constantly surrounding us.

 

The article brought to mind a few ideas that I thought I would share about the role of silence in the creative output of a game composer.

Sometimes when we as game composers receive creative guidance in regards to the musical style of a project, we’ll be instructed to do the following:

Let the music breathe.

The idea of “breathing music” can be interpreted in several ways.  It can mean that the music should dwindle intermittently into absolute silence so that the game’s soundscape can essentially “take over” for a few moments, before the music resumes.  It can also mean that the music should be written with sparse instrumentation and lots of unoccupied space in the frequency spectrum, resulting in the impression of lots of brief silent pauses that allow the sound design environment to filter through the lattice of musical elements.  Finally, it can mean that the music is composed of a series of crescendos and diminuendos, whereby the musical score swells dramatically and then recedes into a near-silent state on a regular basis.

All of these approaches share one aspect in common: the music is structured to allow the sound design to move regularly into the foreground, pushing the music further into the background of the player’s conscious awareness.  With this in mind, should we interpret this instruction to “let the music breathe” as a desire to deemphasize the music in favor of other aspects of the game’s aural design?

On page 52 of my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, I discuss an interesting study conducted by Stanford University, which casts a very different light on the effect of silence on the experience of listening to music.  The study revealed that when listening to a piece of music, our minds become most attentive and filled with the most anticipatory focus when the music becomes silent for a moment.  For instance, in the short pauses between the movements of a symphony, the listener’s attention to the music peaks.

So, when we’re asked to let the music “breathe,” perhaps we can interpret this to mean that we should include those brief pauses that cause the player to pay more attention to our music than they had before.  As Miguel Isaza wrote in his article for Designing Sound, the act of becoming silent awakens our consciousness to the world of sound around us.  Perhaps by using silence as a tool in our game music, we can awaken gamers to the world of music we have created.

 

A Composer’s Guide to Game Music – Vertical Layering, Part 2

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

CCGM-VES-1

Here’s part two of a four-part series of videos I produced as a supplement to my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. This video demonstrates concepts that are explored in depth in my book, beginning on page 200.  Expanding on Part One’s discussion of the Vertical Layering employed in The Maw video game, this video provides some visual illustration for the interactive music composition techniques that were implemented in the video game LittleBigPlanet 2: Toy Story.

Harry Gregson-Williams Talks Video Games

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

Celebrated Hollywood film composer Harry Gregson-Williams spoke with the New American Filmmakers program in a fascinating YouTube interview that included a fairly lengthy discussion of video game music.  I thought I’d share this interview, because it’s particularly interesting to those of us who create game music.

At the 2012 premiere of one of his most recent projects, Total Recall, Harry Gregson-Williams was photographed with Bryan Cranston, the actor best known for his role on Breaking Bad, who played the villain in the Total Recall movie.

At the 2012 premiere of one of his most recent projects, Total Recall, Harry Gregson-Williams was photographed with Bryan Cranston, the actor best known for his role on Breaking Bad, who played the villain in the Total Recall movie.

As the composer of music for numerous blockbuster films, including the Shrek and Narnia movies, Harry Gregson-Williams has a unique perspective on the process of creating game music (having composed for multiple entries in the Metal Gear Solid series).

I’ve embedded the YouTube video at the end of this blog entry – and I’ve also transcribed the portion about game music below.  Harry Gregson-Williams’ perspective allows us to see what the game composition process is like for a Hollywood composer, including the fundamental differences in the mediums and how this alters the composer’s creative process:

“I’ve composed the music for a couple of video games, mainly a series called the Metal Gear Solid series – which probably sounds very weird if you don’t know anything about the gaming world, which (by the way) I don’t really.  However, I was asked to do this series.  Over the course of about eight years I’ve done three of these games and to begin with, it was quite a primitive process.  I think I was one of the first Hollywood film composers to do the music for a game – and that was what the director of the game really wanted – his game to sound like it was a Hollywood movie, an action movie.  And that’s why he came to me, but to begin with it was quite primitive.  Because it’s not a film, he wasn’t able to send me the film, and that’s my normal working process, would be to start with… hello!… the film.  So, if ever I’m stuck with my work, I go to look up at the screen and learn something, and bounce off that.

“But with a video game, they weren’t able to give me footage, per se.  So, more than that, when I first started doing video games, I would be sent little descriptions – adjectives – by the director.  You know.  Sneaky.  (laughs)  Thrilling.  Nerve-wracking.  Something like that.  And I’d have to write 30 seconds or a minute of music in that vein, but without any guidance from pictures, so it was kind of difficult for me, and different.  But I liked it.  And actually, as things have progressed, more and more film composers have become involved in making music for games, I think the game makers themselves have developed better methods of getting the best out of us.  So they’ll send us, for instance, what’s known as Cut Scenes.  So the actual scenes that, however you play the game, do happen.  They know they’re going to happen like that.  Doesn’t matter whether you’re very good at playing the game or very bad, there are various cut scenes that are going to happen. So they’re like a scene in a movie, so that they’re presented as that.  And those can be sent to the composer, and he can compose the music very much like he would to a film in that case.  But, at the end of the day, one’s just making music, so it’s pretty much the same thing.”

Here’s the YouTube video of that interview with Harry Gregson-Williams, conducted by the New American Filmmakers program and the Vilcek Foundation.  The portion about video game music begins at the 6 minute 30 second mark:

Classic Game Music for Halloween – Vintage Video Game Scares

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

The holiday season is encroaching, and you may have already been jarred by TV commercials for holiday layaway, but before we give our thanks and jingle our bells, there’s one very special day that we get to celebrate. Yes, it’s the time to practice our sinister laughter, friends – Halloween is coming!

For gamers, Halloween may seem like a natural extension of our passion. Gothic and grim elements are often plentiful in our favorite pastime. Plus, some of the more die-hard gamers already enjoy donning colorful costumes at conventions, so these folks need only open their closets to find a stylish Trick-or-Treat fashion statement. Games have provided plenty of macabre experiences, accompanied by suitably spooky music. So, to celebrate the approach of Halloween, I’ve decided to dedicate the month of October to creepy and classic game music. Every week I’ll post a handful of Halloween-appropriate tracks from some venerable video games. This week, I’ll be starting with music from the lo-fi era of game scores. The sound in these games was designed to be generated by the sound cards of early personal computers and the limited audio resources of game consoles such as the Nintendo 64.

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Alone in the Dark (1992)

Inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, this survival horror game trapped players inside a haunted mansion. Some of the music is surprisingly atmospheric, considering the limitations of the personal computers that were expected to render the chilling soundscapes of this nightmarish adventure.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors (1993)

The music of this tongue-in-cheek horror game clearly shows its age, having been created for the Super NES and the Sega Genesis. Amusingly, though, this bleep-and-bloop game score has its moment of reverential horror symbolism in the form of the Gregorian chant melody that appears during the track “Curse of the Tongue.”  The Dies Irae, translating as “The Day of Wrath,” has been woven into many movies, from The Shining to Sleeping with the Enemy. Here, the melody does its best to sound gloomy, using the cutesy sound palette it has available:

Super Mario 64 (1996)

Here’s a mind-bendingly creepy moment from, of all places, Super Mario 64. In this part of the game, Mario climbs a staircase that never ends, no matter how hard he tries to reach the top. The music for this gameplay sequence creates the impression of an ascending musical pattern that continues on its upward course forever. The technique is a musical illusion known as the Shepard Scale, in which the ascending notes progress in simultaneous octaves – the upper notes imperceptibly fade away, while the lower notes subtly fade up and take over. This process happens repeatedly, creating the illusion.

Donkey Kong 64 (1999)

A very creepy track from Donkey Kong 64, this music emulates the sound of the traditionally Halloween-associated xylophone and theremin, making for an early game music ditty that fulfills our Trick-or-Treat expectations.

Game Music For Singing

Posted by Winifred Phillips on

gamesongs

The vast repertoire of video game music offers countless delights for the ears, but sometimes we feel the need to do more than just listen. Sometimes we want to sing along. Fortunately, there are lots of recent games that offer enjoyment for those of use who want to flex our vocal muscles, but I’d like to point out a few rather unique ditties from classic games. One is as timeless as an (oddly disturbing) children’s song, but the rest are explosions of retro nostalgia. Whether you like your music cheesy, funky, or just plain creepy, you’ll find something to enjoy in these four blasts-from-the-past:

“Little Bonus Room” – Skullmonkeys

This track is pure genius. In the game Skullmonkeys from 1998, this song plays when you stumble upon a hidden room, where you are safe to explore and find prizes hidden there. The song introduces you to a tenderly sympathetic invisible fellow who may (or may not) be your friend. He’s companionably creepy.

“We are Burning Rangers” – Burning Rangers

As I write this, popular music is enjoying a disco renaissance, best exemplified by the album Random Access Memories by Daft Punk. With this in mind, perhaps the time has come to revisit “We are Burning Rangers.” From the 1998 third-person-shooter game developed for the Sega Saturn, this song is a disco-rap hybrid that will make you happy if you ever wanted to go to “Funky Town,” if you ever partook of “Rapper’s Delight,” if you ever spent some time “Gettin’ Jiggy With It,” or if you’ve ever gotten your groove on to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.”

“Girl In The Tower” – King’s Quest VI

If you love a classic rock power ballad, you’ll enjoy this song from the 1992 adventure game King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow. If you’ve ever found yourself singing along to “Oh Sherrie” or “I Want to Know What Love Is,” you may get a kick out of this.

“Got to Move!!” – Um Jammer Lammy

From the 1999 game for the original PlayStation comes this exceedingly cheerful guitar-driven track that’s good for those people who have a secret love for bubblegum pop and want to put on their high-top sneakers and dance.