Awhile back, a contest was posted that called for composers to write variations on a theme, and one (or maybe a few? I don’t remember) would be chosen for a job writing music for a stock music library loosely associated with a prominent film composer. Several friends sent the contest my way, and while I was very grateful that they thought of me and my interests, I pretty immediately decided against partaking in the competition.
Why would I cut myself off from a potentially lucrative career option by choice?
The short answer is, I’m just not interested in making generic music.
For those of you not familiar with libraries of stock music, composers write pieces of music that convey a particular emotion, mood, genre, or energy; sad, action, drama, horror, upbeat, funky, epic… you get the idea. Filmmakers, marketing agencies, television shows, and whoever else can then pay a flat rate to use these pieces of music to use in their TV shows, commercials, movies, games, or other purposes. It can cut production costs significantly, as there’s one less skilled crew-member to pay. They also know exactly what they’re going to get… but it comes at a bit of creative cost.
By definition, this stock library music is generic. That’s why people purchase it. Clients want music that they can choose from a long list of tracks that will convey the atmosphere they’re looking for (or at least get close enough). These libraries tend to reflect popular music and soundtrack trends; dubstep and Hans Zimmer knock-offs are probably the two most common tracks one would find. While there are near-infinite variations on these tropes and others, this method of “scoring” takes away any potential distinctive character that a video or what-have-you might have were it to be given a totally original score. The composer’s agency is nearly completely denied and replaced with a prerogative pre-determined by set genres and moods. Composers hired for specific projects often have to follow directions of clients rather than follow their creative whims, but in most cases they still are given the opportunity to use more of their own voice than is often allowed in stock music libraries; it’s why their client hired them rather than buying stock music!
This isn’t to say that all stock music or the composers that write it are inherently bad, or that the filmmakers who utilize it are cheap or lazy. Stock tracks can be very effective (see the popular indie game Braid, which utilized only stock library music), and the practice is inherently similar to the use of licensed tracks by established artists used on soundtracks (see Guardians of the Galaxy for an obvious, recent example), and many composers for these libraries are extremely talented. Still, I see it as more of a personal decision than a judgment on those that partake; it’s just not something I can see myself doing effectively or happily.
Now, I say “probably” up there in the heading because I like to be in the habit of never saying never. I might very well change my mind at some point as my values and the industry change. But at this point at least, I’d rather work at a(nother) day job and make the music I truly want to make for the projects I really believe in than make cookie-cutter music made to fit into whatever narrow little genre-box clients are looking to fill.
I recently presented a paper at the 2014 Ludomusicology Conference, which this year was held at Chichester University in Chichester, UK. I’m presenting it here on this blog for all to read who couldn’t make it or otherwise are interested in reading it.
After finishing the conference, I now realize that I attempted to tie together a lot of topics and ideas, somewhat less successfully than I initially thought, and definitely barely touched upon some points. Still, I’m happy with the ideas and arguments that I brought to the table here. Please comment if you’d like any clarification or have any questions or comments.
For further reading, I highly recommend reading Denis Smalley’s seminal paper “Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes”.
In a time when the video game community still struggles to convince a significant portion of the population of the lasting artistic importance and vitality of video games, video game music also often struggles to be taken seriously in academic circles. While video game music has come a long way since its inception in arcade machines and simple 8-bit chiptunes, composers and sound designers tend to underutilize certain technologies and techniques; were they to be incorporated more comprehensively, the results could mean a new chapter in game music and sound.
One concept of particular interest involves blending the interactive diegetic sound world of games with non-diegetic background music in ways that blur the lines between these two often-discrete ideas in a way that only interactive media can accomplish. Take the Silent Hill series, for example. The radio in the first few Silent Hill games acts as a sort of sonar, amplifying in volume and intensity, warning the player as monsters approach (while also occasionally serving some narrative purposes, especially in Silent Hill 2). Whereas some games (FTL and Mass Effect to name two) will transition to an alternate battle version of an area’s music (and Silent Hill does this at times), Silent Hill uses the diegetic sound of the radio to serve this purpose and raise the tension while also combining with, and contributing to, the surreal industrial electronic aesthetic and atmosphere of the music proper.
(see: 4:27)
To consider a more specific example, at one point early on in Silent Hill 2 the player enters an apartment building and has to solve a puzzle involving unlocking the face of a grandfather clock. As the player enters a separate room in the apartment, after having heard virtually no sounds other than the character’s footsteps, the occasional dialog, run-ins with monsters, and the associated radio, a strange, regularly-pulsed, mechanical sound (even somewhat clock-like…) begins to fade into the texture, hitting its peak as the character reaches into a mysterious hole in the wall to retrieve the key to the clock, during which the sound ceases. As soon as the sequence ends, the sound resumes, before fading away when the player leaves the room.
Moments like this serve to disorient the player subtly. The sounds are not actually emanating from any in-game objects, so they are not diegetic sounds per se, yet they do correspond to a specific location in the game that has a clear narrative connection to what may be considered a sort of source of those sounds. Especially since the player initially doesn’t know what they’ll find in this gross and rather frightening hole in the wall, they may not even be consciously aware of the connection between the disturbing sounds they’ve begun hearing, the location they’ve arrived at, and the puzzle item they’re about to uncover.
Similarly to Silent Hill, Rich Vreeland’s game January puts forth an interesting thesis on diegetic sounds and music, but through a markedly different aesthetic and with the accompanying notion of composing through coding. January is a simple game in which the player controls a man walking outside in the snow, catching snowflakes in his mouth. Each snowflake triggers a note or chord, with certain snowflakes of varying shapes shifting the chord, scale, or tonal structure. The result is peaceful, eloquent, and serenely surreal. As a composer, Vreeland supplies the overarching structure through which the player performs and, to an extent, composes; the player can choose to avoid snowflakes that might change the tonality if they are appreciating the current scale, or seek out one of the scale-changing snowflakes if they want some variety. Whereas most musical performance requires a level of skill on the part of the player, in January, even non-musical players can be part of the musical performance.
January’s blurring of the diegetic boundary is rather similar to that of Silent Hill, despite the markedly different tone of the games. Whereas Silent Hill builds a horrific and frightening tension through its use of disorienting, ambiguous sound sources, January creates a decidedly more peaceful, surreal, almost childlike environment through its use of pleasant, simple waveforms organized in a rather simple tonal structure. Still, January, too, uses sounds that clearly do not literally emanate from the world objects with which they are associated and by which they are triggered (snowflakes do not make synthy diatonic tones when they hit one’s tongue).
As Vreeland stated in a blog post about January, “Using code in games to actually create music, note by note, on the fly, is an underutilized idea that has potential to add huge value to games that aren’t even focused on music, by offering an extra sense of authorship to the player’s experience.” Live generated and/or processed sounds are already widely utilized in sound art installations and concert pieces using software like Cycling ’74’s Max, with varying degrees of interactivity. The potential to do this with games is certainly there now and, as Rich Vreeland mentioned, underutilized at this time.
Obviously, not all composers can or should be expected to have the requisite knowledge of computer programming languages, middleware, and other general audio implementation expertise required to make a soundscape of music and sound design that is so tightly intertwined through direct coding. However, even just fostering a basic understanding of the systems being used to implement sound and working closely with developers, programmers, sound designers, and/or audio implementers to work out ways to implement sounds in unique and effective ways can have a drastic effect on the quality and vitality of a game’s sound world. Having an ongoing dialogue between team members can foster a back-and-forth creativity and inspire new creative solutions that might never have occurred to either party on their own. Composer Austin Wintory has commented on his work with sound designer Steve Johnson in the game Journey, in which the musical tones used by players to communicate with each other and trigger certain mechanics were created through close collaboration between team members to ensure a unified soundscape across the game’s world.
When the composer acts as the creator of both the music and the entire game world’s sound design, even more of this enormous potential can be seen, as the composer becomes the creator of the entire sound art composition that accompanies and integrates with the game. Take Playdead’s Limbo as an example. Martin Stig Andersen’s score and sound design in Limbo demonstrates what an awareness of different levels of diegetic sound can make.
(see: 4:19)
Although the sound in Limbo consists largely of ambient background noise and environmental elements, its subtle music enters at key moments in the narrative and puzzles. One such moment occurs early on, when a group of hostile figures begin chasing the player character in the direction from which he had just come, through the traps he had painstakingly avoided. When the player approaches the beings, a subtly dissonant droning tone enters the soundscape, and further sounds enter as the chase intensifies. As his adversaries succumb to the traps, the music is accented by a resolution of the drone and the emergence of a new prolongation of the resolving chord, which continues as the player proceeds to the next puzzle and eventually fades away into the diegetic mechanical sounds of said puzzle.
Even the sounds themselves, the levels of individual sounds, and the ways they blend together into the whole of the world suggest a unity that would be exceedingly more difficult to accomplish were it not the work of a single person. The more musical sounds, quite often single droning notes or simple chords, often seem to be emerging from and coalescing in the environment of the game itself rather than outside of it as most game music does. The blurring of the diegetic line is again effective in fostering an interesting, dynamic world that subtly frames the narrative in a way that doesn’t manipulate the emotions of the player so brazenly.
An awareness of spectromorphology can add even more interest to a game’s overall sound world. Spectromorphology is a method and set of vocabulary put forth by Denis Smalley for hearing, analyzing, and understanding music that is not limited to traditional Western common-practice musical ideas of tonality, rhythm, and instrumentation. It is primarily focused on, but not strictly limited to, electroacoustic music and sound art. The word spectromorphology itself is rather self-explanatory: spectro-, referring to frequency spectrum, and -morphology, referring to the way this spectrum changes (or does not change) over time. So put quite simply, it is the way sounds change over time. As just one example of the extensive language Smalley develops, he describes the three structural functions of sound events: onsets, continuants, and terminations.
The language that Smalley uses is very visual and spatial by necessity, applying physical descriptors to abstract aural concepts. “Emergence,” “passage,” “arrival,” “disappearance,” “streaming,” “flocking,” “motion and growth processes,” “spectral space”… even at a most basic level, this language of visualization and spatialization makes it a perfect candidate to be applied to multimedia, and hence to video games.
As Smalley has pointed out and Manuella Blackburn has elaborated on, although the language was developed from a listener’s perspective to aid in a multi-layered understanding of what is being heard, knowledge of this language can inform composition, playing into or against expectations and common tropes. Martin Stig Andersen’s sounds in Limbo often tend to follow this pattern of spectromorphological attention to detail. The previous example from the game, even without the context of its game, can stand alone when the various elements of sound design and musical elements come together. Within the context of the game, they create something new entirely. In interviews, Andersen has expressed an awareness of what he calls the “seamless transitions between realism and abstraction.” He states further:
“What I found interesting in relation to audiovisual media was that soundscape and acousmatic music together embraces the entire continuum between representational and abstract sound, in this way dismissing the traditional dividing line between sound design and music.”
Similarly, in Denis Smalley’s paper on spectromorphology, he discusses intrinsic-extrinsic relations in sounds, referring to what he calls source identification in the context of extrinsic qualities; i.e., what Andersen calls representational sound. Spectromorphology encapsulates these ideas and more to create an all-encompassing methodology for hearing and analyzing music that doesn’t fit into the traditional molds of Western music theory and notation. This theory has not traditionally been applied to music and sound for video games, but it can be used quite effectively.
Furthermore, the player’s role in this adds another interesting layer. An analogy could be made to music for the concert hall. In the same way that most musical performances in the concert hall require performers to bring the music to life, games require the player for them to be experienced. Concert hall music is performed primarily for the enjoyment of the audience, while games are to be enjoyed by the player. In games, the player, therefore, serves the role of both the performer and the audience.
In this way, games as a medium (together with their sound and music) have something in common with interactive sound art installations, although they do differ in a few ways. For one, video games, especially narrative ones, generally take place across a linear path. In this way, video games are more similar to traditional music than installations. Vreeland’s January is an obvious exception to this rule; it truly is an installation of a game, an eloquent set piece that serves a singular artistic function.
Interactivity provides both a challenge and an opportunity to create a unique work of art from a musical and general developmental perspective. To not take advantage of the tools, techniques, and opportunities at hand is to miss out on a significant path of artistic potential. Games with more traditional static background music separated from a distinct layer of diegetic sound effects certainly have their place and will continue to well into the future. Not every game has to tread onto this newer path. However, the potential road that games can take goes far beyond the restraints of genre tropes and questions of artistic value.
Blurring the line of diegetic sound, creating music through direct coding and/or close collaboration with programmers implementing sound, and application of spectromorphological thought processes can all be taken to even higher levels than have been demonstrated here and used to create games and game music that push through current trends of the medium that treat music as a separate entity from the game and its sound world. When more abstract options are considered, the possibilities are expanded even further. Games like the recent Polyfauna, from Radiohead and developer Universal Everything, begin to go down this path of purer abstraction, but again, it can be much further explored and expanded. As Igor Stravinsky has said, “music, by its very nature, is essentially powerless to express anything at all.”
Contemporary art music is at a crossroads. Although the idea of the relevance and livelihood of art music being on the line is certainly nothing new, that doesn’t make the idea any less relevant today. Video games don’t suffer from this problem; games, especially experimental indie games, are doing better than ever commercially and popularly. Game audiences, especially in the budding independent game community, are open to new and exciting experiences that contemporary art and music so often present. If more composers from the world of contemporary art music, especially those with experience in the (to some) alien world of electroacoustic music and the technical know-how and coding that often goes along with that, were to join game development teams, challenging contemporary art music would benefit from a greater audience, and games and game music would benefit from taking a step closer to achieving their artistic potential and perhaps begin to be taken more seriously by a greater section of both the scholarly and general communities.
I’ll be honest: I kind of hate tooting my own horn. I’m always, always, always wary of becoming “that guy” (ie, an arrogant bastard) who’s always self-promoting and overly proud of himself. However, I’m just honestly so excited and humbled by all the crazy stuff that’s happened to me this year, and I can’t help but think that it’s mostly dumb luck and being surrounded by awesome people. I’d like to recap this year mostly as a record for my future self, but also to show to any potential employers looking for a composer to give money to (HINT HINT directors, developers, everyone).
I started this year out not sure of myself, just trying to graduate from college and stay afloat. I end it with a more confident stride and looking towards the future brightly, to use a handful of cliches. I’m really proud of everything I’ve accomplished this year, and I’m excited to try to make next year even half as exciting as this one. Thanks to the countless people who made this trip around the sun as awesome as it was.
Welp, I’ve been off the ball! I did take one week off a while back just because of all the stuff going on in my life (gee, I never would have imagined grad school + long distance marriage would be difficult!), but I’ve been slacking on updating this. Out of curiosity, I checked the stats on this blog, and… look at that, basically no one is reading it. Looks like I need to either stop updating it or work a little harder at getting people to read it.
In any case, here’s the past two little pieces of music I’ve posted. The first is just a little thing I did in Ableton Live (finally) mostly to get a feel for the program a little better. Quite simple, but I played around with some non-traditional harmonies and such. I really like the atmosphere I achieved; it reminds me a little bit of 90s JRPGs and strategy games for some reason.
The second is a short credits track I did this past weekend for Seattle’s 48 Hour Horror Film Project. It was a ton of fun, and I’ve come to learn that sometimes improvising and pushing myself to just get something good that works can produce some pretty sweet results. I was rather satisfied with what I got given the 6 hours I had to write music (I didn’t get a rough cut until the last morning, and they needed enough time to edit the music and sound design in and submit it). You can check out the full film here. I was super stoked about how well the music and sound design worked together despite the sound designers and I never really interacting with each other’s work.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the stuff I’ve been posting has been pretty dark. I think this is partially just the kind of stuff I aesthetically prefer, but I definitely want to work on creating more upbeat stuff that I enjoy, so I hope I can come up with some more cheerful music in the future.
It’s also worth noting that I just finished my first project with the team at Hand Crank Films. They’re a great and talented team of filmmakers that have been producing some of the finest videos in the state for the past several years, and I’m so honored to be working with them. Hopefully I can share this first video with you all soon, and it sounds like I’ll probably be working with them more in the future, which I’m very excited for!
The title of this week’s little piece* is a reference to this classic xkcd (which itself references Joss Whedon’s Serenity and Firefly).
But basically it was an excuse to play with Stormdrum.
I kind of wish I would have recorded a video of myself writing this one, because a lot of it was just me pounding away on my MIDI keyboard like a child. It’s a good thing my roommate wasn’t home because it probably sounded like I was just throwing a tantrum or something. I hope this is how people do it in Hollywood.
Anyways, there’s really not much else to it. Subtle as a brick.
*sidenote: Before I entered the composition program at WWU, I wrote a few short pieces of music as a “portfolio.” I had no idea what I was doing, but one of them was a percussion quartet with this same title. It might still be on my computer somewhere, but honestly, it was pretty bad. But hey, it got me into the program, so whatever!
I managed to make something new this week! Huzzah!
This piece was almost entirely made in Max 6 using a random beat generator I’ve been building. It takes a folder of samples and randomly chooses one of them 16 times (or any other number of times you might choose), assigning random volumes, panning, and pitch to them. You can then adjust a delay unit, comb filter, and other filter to apply universally and adjust on the fly. There’s a bunch more intricacies, but it might be more worthwhile for you to just see a couple of pictures of it.
Here’s the “presentation mode” version…
…and here’s some of the messy innards.
Very fun to make! I’m still trying to consider what other parameters and/or effects I can add to it. Some way to save patterns would be cool. Also Rewire integration. And/or Soundflower. The possibilities are endless! (as is often the case in Max)
Anyways, I took a bunch of loops I generated and played with and layered them and arranged them in Logic. The only other thing I did in Logic was adjust some volumes and fades and apply some light compression. Enjoy the results!
Yes, I’m double-dipping again. Next week I won’t, and that’s a promise (that I now have to keep since I committed to it in public…)!
This is menu music from a game I’ve been working on with some very talented folks in Seattle. I’ve been really stoked on all of it since I started working on it, so I wanted to share a little tidbit since the game is still in some pretty early stages of development. Once it’s released I’ll probably compiled the tracks into a soundtrack.
This particular track prominently features a melody that will act as a leitmotif of sorts throughout the soundtrack, symbolizing the protagonist’s rebellious struggle against the oppressive regime in his dystopian sci-fi world. It also serves to set the tone and pallette of the game’s musical landscape with its retro style synthesizers and sequences, although most of the in-game music will be much faster, intense, and upbeat.
As another little potentially interesting tidbit… We’re going to try doing a little bit of dual-track level-music crossfading ala FTL, where in one part of the level, one version of the music will play, but when you transition to a different section of the level, it will crossfade into an alternate version of the music (like with FTL’s explore vs. battle versions of music).
Here’s an extra sneak peak of some of the other music in the game, as well!
Another week, another little piece of music. With this one I used a number of sounds I collected on my honeymoon, including some wind chimes, the ferry dock on the way to Orcas Island, shaking a box of matches… can’t remember what else. I also experimented a bit more learning some of Logic’s synths, which was pretty fun. Hope it’s at least mildly enjoyable!
I ordered an East West collection of orchestral sample libraries, so pretty soon here you might start hearing some of that in these weekly pieces! They’ll also come in handy on some of the film projects I’m going to be involved with in the coming months…!
The second entry in the not-very-long-running series has arrived. This one is quite different, I think, from the last one.
This one was forged in Reason 7. Whenever I talk to people about Reason, they seem to tend to see it as a ‘fun toy’ or ‘good for getting ideas down’ or ‘a great synth rack.’ While it still needs quite a bit of audio editing features to be worthy of standing with the great DAWs of Logic Pro and even Reaper, it’s become rather capable as a composition, recording, and mixing tool. I’ve actually been using it almost exclusively to make the music for the game I’m working on right now, and for what I’m doing I haven’t run into any snags so far. Obviously it has some major limitations, but for certain styles it’s honestly perfect for me.
This track started as some experimentation with the Dr. OctoRex instrument, which seems to be primarily for hip-hop-tinged drum sampling/looping and the like, so I really haven’t made much use of it since I much prefer to compose my own drum beats. But I decided to take a sample from outside of Reason and stick it in there and compose some beats from the automatically transient-chopped loop taken from the intro of “Leyendecker” by Battles.
From there I basically went nuts. Some 3:2, some automation improv freakout, sidechaining and parallel processing, modulating chords… all sorts of fun. Considering the separate “scenes” depicted, it’s a little more difficult to imagine this working in a game setting, but I think the title depicts some of the general mood it conveys. Hope you enjoy it!
*(As a possibly interesting sidenote, I recently decided to give a trial of Ableton Suite a shot again… and for some reason I just cannot get into. I really want to like it, and I love some of the little things about it. But for some reason making music on it is just extremely difficult for me. I was actually planning on composing Mlog #3 in it, but I just hit a compositional wall. So it’s back to Logic Pro for next week, I think!)
So I’ve started a weekly series where I’m going to write a short piece of music and post it up here every week. Er, that’s about it. Most of the time I’ll probably be imagining it as for a video game, since part of the purpose of this is to have a portfolio of music to play for people that I want to write music for.
The first entry in the series is an ambient track I made with Logic Pro X. I started by playing one chord on my guitar and putting a bunch of effects on it, then transposing that chord a bunch. Then I awkwardly played a software shaker and hi-hat on my keyboard to make for a weird, soft percussion pattern to give a semblance of the slow tempo, adding some pads and going from there. I regret to say that the keyboard sounds were slightly-tweaked presets. I wanted to tweak them a little more, but man, Sculpture (a Logic instrument) is a beast to try to figure out. Going to need to watch some tutorials on that one of these days.
In any case, the end result is something slow and atmospheric that I imagined being good background music for a dark, misty forest or a cave or some other archetypical RPG setting. I hope you enjoy.
Jon Bash | Composer, Musician 