By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
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:
- Characterization
- Information
- Identity
- Narrative
Earlier in this series of articles, we’ve discussed the ways in which music can support believable and moving characterization. We considered the ability of a musical score to emphasize details and enhance comprehension of information. We’ve also considered how a game’s intrinsic identity can be reinforced using thoughtful choices of musical style, particularly in the case of custom music for game trailers. So now let’s move on to the last item on our list, and the one most closely associated with linear music composition:
As we know, tone clusters are collections of notes packed together to produce unnerving dissonant effects. While it might seem like any cat can walk across a piano and produce unpleasant clusters, well-executed dissonance is actually one of the trickiest techniques we can employ. It’s tremendously potent when used with expert precision.
A successful career as a video game composer involves much more than our day-to-day challenges in our music studios. In addition to our role as music experts, we need to be well-rounded business people and great members of a creative team. As a speaker in the audio track of the