To close out his panel on video game composition for the debut edition of the London Soundtrack Festival, Steve Schnur, President of Music for Electronic Arts, asked the composers on stage the following question:
“What composers have influenced you?”
Sitting on the panel were lauded game composers such as Ludvig Forssell (Death Stranding) and Stephen Barton (Star Wars Jedi: Survivor), the latter of whom organised the video game programming for the festival.
READ MORE: Behind the sound of Star Wars Outlaws: a polarising game with a Grammy-nominated soundtrack
After everyone had their turn, naming musical greats from Jerry Goldsmith to Tim Hecker to Ryuichi Sakamoto, Schnur closed by saying:
“The people who are about to study composition, their answers will be the people on this stage.”
Today, video game music is held in the same esteem as film scores. It’s unsurprising, then, that the London Soundtrack Festival hosted masterclasses with composers such as Gordy Haab, plus performances of music from Baldur’s Gate 3, Battlefield 2042, and Metal Gear Solid, among others.
“[The festival] was in memory of a composer called Christopher Gunning,” Barton says of the programming. “He did TV, he wrote symphonies, he did concert music, he did film — he did everything. He would have undoubtedly done video games if they’d been a thing sooner. Honouring games seemed like a natural thing to do.”
From AAA titles within an iconic franchise such as Star Wars to auteur-driven indie games such as Death Stranding, the music is evolving with the format. But one thing remains true: game music is more grounded in technology than music for any other form of visual media.
“On a film, you deliver your stems, and it goes into Pro Tools at some point to be mixed. It’s no different from our music mix process. Just an extension with dialogue and effects. With games, we’re dealing with a technical architecture and sometimes writing for that architecture,” Barton says.
Within that technical architecture, the central processing unit of the game system or personal computer delivers the music in real time along with the sound effects, graphics, dialogue, enemies, environments, and everything else seen and heard.
The music is woven throughout that library of coding that’s like a Jenga tower; if something is out of place when the audio team implements the music into the game engine, the entire tower could topple over.
“Most of the time, the doesn’t want the composer anywhere near the build because we’re pretty good at breaking it,” Barton says with a laugh, going on to mention that certain game companies require 16-bit audio for every piece of music he writes.
“Game engines are so fragile. I’m in 24-bit, 48 kHz all the time, as is everybody. But that game engine is coded in such a way that it always only puts in 16-bit audio files. If they accidentally drag a 24-bit file into the structure, it will just crash the game, and it’s a major AAA game.”
Composers are also constantly working around sound design in the games. Barton composed for EA’s Titanfall series, in which the player pilots a titan, a giant robot. At these moments, the titan’s massive weapons and mechanical motions swallow the bulk of the low and mid-range.
“Everything [Titanfall] does is loud, so quite quickly I realised tons and tons of bass isn’t going to work here. You’ve only got so much headroom. The sound effects are certainly going to be the thing that takes over. One thing is going to have to win,” Barton says, adding that the HDR mixing function in games will lower the volume on everything else when these big sounds are running. “I found it was better to use higher frequency stuff and find my moments to use low bass-end sounds and then get out of the way, because I’m not being turned down.”
When Ludvig Forssell served as composer and audio director for Death Stranding, the open-world action game from Hideo Kojima’s Kojima Productions, he made those moments himself because he directed both the sound design and music.
“Having the power to influence in that way as a composer is very unusual and very privileged,” Forssell says. From this privileged position, he spent years “throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks,” as he developed the game’s overall sonic aesthetic.
Games have far more room for ideas to stick because players can spend hundreds or even thousands of hours on one game. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has six hours of music. The composer and the technical team work together on how that music exists within the gameplay.
“That’s often the challenge. Balancing musicality versus something that’s actually going to make sense,” Barton says. “A lot of it is trying to think about why we want to start music or stop music; the way the transitions work and how you go from one musical state to another.”
The in-game music in Death Stranding mostly starts and stops depending on combat. As with Kojima’s famous franchise, Metal Gear Solid, the combat is at the player’s discretion. They can choose to be stealthy, face the enemy head-on, or avoid combat altogether.
To allow the music to naturally shift between these states, Forssell focused a great deal on layering three primary modes: caution, evasion, and alert. Caution means the enemy is suspicious that you are there. Evasion means they saw you, but you’ve escaped their immediate sight. Alert means they see you and they are engaging with you.
Then, each of these states has multiple layers dependent on factors like the number of enemies and the physical distance from enemies. As the danger increases and decreases, more layers fade in and out. This is especially crucial for stealth when players need to hear enemies to avoid being seen.
“I provide the music editors and [implementors] with as much material as I can,” Forssell says. “So I write very, very densely. If we put stuff in that’s supposed to be for the mid-caution tension layer, and it doesn’t feel like it’s intense enough, or it’s too intense, there are always small layers that we can add or take away to mitigate that. We do a lot of balancing after production on the music is done and it’s been implemented to make sure that those different layers of tension are adequately presented to the player.”
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor also allows the player to explore the various planets they visit as the protagonist, Cal Kestis. Barton and his co-composer Gordy Haab wrote exploratory music, but they also use music to serve the narrative by creating suspenseful loops as a boss fight approaches or inserting melodies to inform the player they’re going the right way towards their current objective.
By LucasFilm’s directive, the score captures a similar aesthetic that John Williams immortalised in Star Wars. Barton recorded the score at Abbey Road as well, which is where Williams recorded every Star Wars score from The Empire Strikes Back moving forward. But Barton wanted to capture that spirit without biting those iconic melodies. In fact, he only wrote with “Binary Sunset,” also commonly known as the “Force Theme,” twice in the whole game.
“We don’t need the music to perpetually remind you you’re playing a Star Wars game,” Barton says. “Let’s not make the music the wallpaper in a kid’s bedroom.”
Kids have been playing video games in their bedrooms for decades, but only the most recent generation has been exposed to music on par with classic films. Today, one young gamer might just grow up to be one of the most prolific composers of their time.
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The post “Don’t turn the music into the wallpaper in a kid’s bedroom”: Two video game soundtrackers on crafting music that players actually hear appeared first on MusicTech.
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