By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Glad you’re here! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. Last year, I participated in an online discussion session during a popular live-stream chat event hosted by Video Game Music Academy. The lively conversation that took place there seems worth sharing at this point. What follows is a partial transcript of the most substantive conversation from that hour-long session. I was interviewed by public school music teacher Daniel Hulsman. At the time, one of my projects had just released – the Spyder game for Apple Arcade – which had won a Global Music Award that year and was also nominated for a NAVGTR Award (pictured above). Much of the discussion focused on that project, but it also touches on my work in other games, and the topics broaden out to encompass more of the top issues pertaining to the craft of video game music composition. You’ll see that I’ve also included a few videos here and there to supplement the transcript and illustrate the discussion.
and I was able to land the gig because an example of my work landed on the desk of a music supervisor for the project at exactly the right time. What are the chances of that? It’s akin to being struck by lightning, and I certainly can’t advise young composers to depend on that kind of lightning to strike. But I don’t want to leave hopeful young composers in the lurch either.
My virtual talk will focus on the best ways to create memorable thematic material. Catchy melodies can help to enhance a game’s distinctive character and originality, which can subsequently lead to a more memorable gameplay experience. In preparing my presentation, I conducted quite a bit of research. Because of time constraints, not all of that scholarly research made it into my final presentation. I was sorry to have to cut those materials – I thought it was pretty interesting stuff! So let’s now discuss some of that extra info in this article. We won’t be delving into the actual subject matter of my lecture, since I’ll be saving that material for my actual presentation that will be included in the slate of GDC 2020 Virtual Talks. But the general relationship between music and memory is a fascinating area of study. If our music can help games to stick in the minds of players, then it should be useful for us to understand some expert scholarly viewpoints on the relationship between music and memory.