San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Composing for the infinite time frame of games
For as long as video games have existed, they have needed music to go along with them. Even if it was just a chirpy eightbit earworm coming out of a first-generation console, there had to be something to accompany all that jumping and digging and marching around.
As video games have become more sophisticated and ambitious over the decades, blossoming into a unique and distinctive art form, music has grown along with it. Today’s releases often have hundreds of hours’ worth of music packed into them, from slender pop-tinged ditties to extravagant spreads involving a full orchestra and chorus recorded in state-of-the-art facilities.
“If we think about video games in general in 2023,” said musician Taurin Barrera, “they’re probably the biggest vehicle for the delivery of orchestral music to the world.”
Barrera is in a position to witness this firsthand, as the executive director of the technology and applied composition program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It’s a broad-based department that includes training in recording technology, sound design, film and television scoring and more.
But a major part of the curriculum involves training young composers to create the music that gets loaded into all those games that keep coming onto the market. It’s an undertaking that calls for a very particular set of skills — part dramatic, part technological, part collaborative.
“Game audio is a blend of what I call horizontal and vertical music systems,” said composer Lennie Moore, who teaches in the department and whose credits include “Outcast” and several installments of the “Halo” franchise.
A horizontal system, Moore said, is like a jukebox or a playlist, which plays one selection after another in a fixed sequence. A vertical system, by contrast, consists of different layers that can be changed and rebalanced in real time.
“You can have an ambient layer of sound as a kind of baseline for a very spooky kind of situation, let’s say. And then when the zombies come out there’s a more intense layer that kicks in.”
Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of game music is the lack of clear temporal boundaries. Unlike any other type of musical composition, including concert scores or film sound tracks, game music exists on an infinite timeline — because as long as the player keeps playing, the music has to keep pace.
Oakland composer Andrew Levin, who works for Ubisoft, is an alumnus of the TAC program and a member of its faculty. He explains the difference as one between linear and nonlinear composition.
“In a linear composition, you have the start of the song, the middle of the song, the end of the song. Song starts, five minutes go by, song ends. But a nonlinear composition could theoretically go on forever, and would hopefully be changing quite a bit.
“A lot of game music is nonlinear, because a player might be on a level for three minutes or 15 minutes, but you still have one song that has to be able to cover both of those time frames.”
Working out that paradox in all its unpredictability is a challenging puzzle, Moore said, and one of the chief rewards of writing music for video games.
“You have to think about what the game experience is going to be for the player, and all the different permutations that might happen. And then you think, ‘OK, how can I create music that can function with all those variations of choices and situations?’
“And I love that it’s still sort of an open field. There are any number of ways to solve these creative puzzles. There is not an established best practice.”
One key component is what Moore calls “composing in a circle,” writing musical selections that can be repeated with variations for as long as necessary. The trick, he said, is to craft selections that can segue smoothly from the end of one iteration to the beginning of the next, without the player noticing and having their attention pulled away from the game itself.
Stylistically, the content of the music can range broadly, depending on the composer’s background and interest, and on the genre or narrative demands of the game.
Levin’s roots, for example, are in jazz and hip-hop, but he said he welcomes the challenge of adapting his own creative sensibilities to the assignment.
“Working on game music is a collaborative project,” he said. “It’s really not about me. I could write the coolest thing ever — my masterpiece — but if my masterpiece is a jazz fusion electronic thing, and they want Gregorian chants, then that’s probably not going to work.”
Whatever the individual constraints, a game composer’s task is ultimately analogous to that of a film or TV composer. The idea is to use music to underline the narrative turns on the screen, and to subtly (or even not so subtly) evoke an emotional response in the viewer or player.
The differences can be crucial, Barrera said.
“Composing for a video game is different than composing for the stage because the music can change at any point depending on the interactions with the game player and the game play. So it’s a different way of thinking about composing,” Barrera said. “But at the end of the day, we’re still composing, still using orchestral players and recording them in the studio.”
Editor’s Note: Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman teaches a seminar on music criticism at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.