Are you ready to play?
Music for video games is an essential part of all our musical futures
Video games have become the most sophisticated of modern entertainments, and demand complex and rich soundtracks to match, suggests Tom Service
In which medium can you find the greatest creativity in contemporary composition? Of course, it’s there in concert halls and on festival programmes, but if you really want to know where the frontiers of the art-form are, I think you need to get playing.
And I mean really playing, immersing yourself in an environment in which music is a continually evolving, selfgenerating Pandora’s Box of wonders that are never the same over countless hours. I’m talking, of course, about video games.
It’s no accident that we use the same verb about participating in music and gaming: we play games, just as we are do instruments or pieces of music. The di erence is that conventional repertoire is usually made from pieces that remain relatively static, with the right notes in (hopefully) the right order, whether that’s music by Bach or Amy Beach,
John Williams or Hans Zimmer. But in gaming, no single player’s experience of the living musical environments of games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be the same.
That’s because your journey through the seemingly infinite virtual landscapes and puzzles of Breath of the Wild means that the sound and music cues you hear will be melded together in a sequence unique to your playthrough, your particular performance of the game. In Jessica Curry’s music for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – one of the most stunning pieces of video-game art in recent years, as you plunge into the mystery of what happened to cause the disappearance of everyone from an English village – the process is even more subtle. Curry’s score composes itself in front of your ears, generating a bespoke algorithmic soundtrack that outstrips anything avant-garde composers like Cage or Stockhausen could do with modular composition.
These games are among the current highpoints of an art-form that has its roots in the chiptune soundtracks made during the technological constraints of the 1970s and ’80s, for games like Space Invaders and Pac-man. And the 40-year history of video game music is full of stone-cold classics: melodies and themes and suites of tunes that now sell out orchestral concerts all over the world. Nobuo Uematsu’s music for the long-running Final Fantasy series, the scores from the Zelda games, for the Pokémon, Dragon Quest, or Uncharted series: orchestras know there are huge audiences for these repertoires.
Music for video games is an essential part of all of our musical futures. Here are my predictions: in concert halls, game music will rival and outstrip concerts of film music in popularity and importance, and in terms of innovation, composition for video games will take music into new dimensions more completely than anywhere else on the creative spectrum. You heard it here first: get out there, and get playing.