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Music Media Entertainment Games

Game Music Benefits From Interactivity, Budgets 52

Posted by simoniker from the go-go-eastern-european-symphonia dept.
Thanks to the New York Times for their article discussing the rising reputation of game music in the mainstream media (free reg. req.) Bigger budgets are discussed ("the game industry's success has made developers willing to pay for live orchestra recordings"), as well as interactive music ("...akin to writing music for a Broadway show in which audience members could determine the order of the scenes... Game-music composers don't know which path a player will choose or when, so they must be prepared for unpredictability.") Elsewhere, veteran former LucasArts composer Clint Bajakian tries to describe steps to interactive musical bridging: "You conceive of the elbow joints you're going to need", but Richard Kessler of the American Music Center is still skeptical of game soundtracks in general, saying: "On an artistic level, it's not in the film music league."
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Game Music Benefits From Interactivity, Budgets More

Game Music Benefits From Interactivity, Budgets

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  • "On an artistic level, it's not in the film music league."? I think it's safe to say that Richard Kessler has never played Final Fantasy VI
    • I'll second that - Final Fantasy games (that I've played, at least) have had consistently awesome soundtracks. Especially FF6 / FF3 (same game).

      On that note, I'll chip in for Halo, too. The game kicks ass, and its music amplifies its ass-kicking awesomeness by an obscenely large factor. It just wouldn't be the same without the music.
    • Oh, and binary gods forgive me for neglecting to mention Arcanum. While Final Fantasy VI had amazing compositions, they were held back by the medium, being limited to MIDI. Arcanum, on the other hand, had excellent composition and execution.
    • Or Hitman 2 with it's superb and very filmic music by Jesper Kyd.
      Also, the one that impressed me most for having incredibly filmic music was Mafia. I forget the name of it's composer, but it was wonderful.
      Yes you still have games like UT which don't go in for filmic music in any way, but there are many now which are really trying to bridge the gap and are seeing how integral a great score is to an atmospheric gameplay experience.
      I'd also cite Grim Fandango as another example.
    • No, I see what you're saying, but I think he's still right.

      Final Fantasy is pretty widely acknowledged to have some of the best music out there, even if you don't consider it the absolute best. While it's not bad, it's certainly not on par with the Star Wars music, some particularly good movie music.

      I like video game music a bit, but it really isn't on par with film music. It has some nostalgia value to fans of the game, but currently there isn't as much money going into a big-name video game than a big
      • Final Fantasy is pretty widely acknowledged to have some of the best music out there, even if you don't consider it the absolute best. While it's not bad, it's certainly not on par with the Star Wars music, some particularly good movie music.

        Yeah, but even a lot of movies don't have a score on par with Star Wars. The best game music might not be on par with the best film scores, but it's better than the average ones. And with experienced film composers working on the likes of Medal of Honor and Metal Gea
      • I disagree with your regarding the inferiority of the Final Fantasy soundtracks (FF6 for SNES had the best music, imho). However, the Star Wars games have the exact same music as their silver screen counterparts, so please explain how an identical score is inferior.
    • artistic level is a joke anyways. i think the guy means 'classical professional', and even on that it's obvious he hasn't seen/heard some games.

      i still consider the best game musics to be in ultima series(especially when pc's got soundcards..) and STAR CONTROL 2, i mean, fuck, that game has so good techno soundtrack that i listen to the musics at least weekly and it's decade old too. and as musics i rate those over 99% of crap that's on films or on tv's, in which the music most of the time is just there s
    • Or seen 8 mile or crossroads.
    • If you're willing to rate FF6 as a musical artistic high, then you earn yourself the ranking of fanboy.

      Sure, Nobuo (sp?) may have done a decent job with the technology available at the time, but it was more an impressive technical achievement than an artistic one.

      As an _avid_ collector of all lo-fi electronic music from personal computers and game systems, (http://kmods.dyndns.org ..) I understand the temptation to declare nostalgic favourites as artistically brilliant. However, Final Fantasy Six had som
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • And let's not forget Yasunori Mitsuda either, the composer for the Chrono series, Xenogears, and Xenosaga. I swear, you listen to the tracks in Chrono Cross and you'd be hard-pressed to believe it's MIDI-based.
  • My speakers are little and sound tinny. The music quality is barely perceptible because the onboard audio chip isn't any good.

    Am I the only one who would rather see more spent on building a better gaming experience rather than on hiring the Berlin Philharmonic to make some *background* music?

    • My concert hall is small and tinny. The music quality is barely perceptible because the onboard engineers aren't any good.

      Am I the only one who would rather see more spent on building a better concert-going experience rather than on hiring actual musicians to make some *live* music?

    • You have a valid point. yes, you bought the game to play the game.

      But, the gaming companies are trying to creat an all-immersive experiance, and music is part of that. The story lines are now getting as complex as novels. Just like we have seen massive improvements in graphic cards in recent years, audio is starting to follow suit. Gone are the days of MIDI synthesizers and 30 cent speakers. I do hope that people will at least bother to hook up some decent speakers to listen too.

      I also wonder why the LoTR
      • I'm all for good music in games. I was exaggerating about the quality of my speakers. However when I read quotes like the one in the summary about programmers taking pay cuts to improve the music quality, I begin to wonder what the priorities of the game maker are.

        Figuring out the budget for a project is hard work and a delicate balancing act. All the more so for game projects where a graphical design team and audio design team are thrown into the mix with the programming team. However, when it all boi
      • for the last time MIDI = a protocol for transmitting musical data. YAMAHA OPL3 = the FM synthesizer you hate. OPL3 != MIDI
    • Purchase good headphones. They're much less expensive than good speakers, and you can definitely appreciate music.

      If you're spending upwards of $70 on a pair of headphones, you're probably going to get an enjoyable experience, from what I've seen (well, heard). :-)
    • Do all gamers have huge rigs?

      Probably not, but it hardly matters.

      Those gamers are so busy playing EverCrack or whatever, that no girl ever gets near their rigs, big or small.

      And after they've been playing for three days straight, what girl would want to?

      Face it, those gamers only get action when their hands are on their joysticks.
  • One of the problems with good game music is that it forces developers to have a limited number of options when developing a game. The more choices a player can make, the more music is needed to fulfill those choices. If you look at all the great non-linear RPGs (Fallout, Balder's Gate, etc), almost none of them had music for particular situations, at most a town or "mood" theme. Linear games however, can develop tracks for specific characters, and even specific conversations or events with characters (ho
  • I am a fan of many games that George "The Fat Man" Sanger has scored over the years, and I'm a huge fan of him and his team [fatman.com]'s music.

    He wrote a book [amazon.com] on game audio. I bought it, and read it. It really opened my eyes. His basic premise was that making music for games is impossible. He then gave a fairly detailed description of how he and his team goes about creating music for games. Crazy shit.
  • Interactive music is something that has been underutilized, IMHO. I first noticed it in 1080 Snowboarding for N64 (in the halfpipe mode, the music changed whenever you were in the air), and it worked really well. Has it been used in many major games since then? It seems like everything I hear is prerecorded these days.
    • Both Banjo-Kazooie and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain utilize it extensively, although B-K does a better job, imho.
    • When fighting phantom ganon in the most recent of zelda's incarnations the music reacts to the swinging of your sword against ganon's projectile. He fires a ball of magic at you and you both proceed to fire it back and forth at each other, the ball getting faster until one of you can't react quick enough (classic Zelda). The music rises and rises with each hit until you succeed or fail where it bursts into an appropriate tune of congratulation of consolation.

      Absolutely loved it :)
    • Although not truly interactive, my fav was Jet Set/Grind Radio. The game had about 20 continuous looping tracks, and the game would do a little dj scratch transition in between tracks. I was quite impressed with effect. And a little sidenote, I'm wondering which games were the first to use "real" music tracks (meaning mainstream popish music). The first ones I recall are Wipeout and (i think) the first FIFA for PS1.
  • In the past, I've actually considered buying Quake I for its soundtrack. The game wasn't really interesting to me (lots of shades of black, wowie!), but the music kicked some major uhm.. behind. It's good to know that Trent Reznor will be making the music for Doom III. :-)

    der Joachim
    • I heard Reznor dropped the gig, and some other ex-member of NIN picked it up.

      I'll have to go hunt down that link.
      • Indeed, he has left to go on with his next album. There is unconfirmed talk that Chris Vrenna (ex drummer - PHM-TDS era) is taking over. He also worked on American McGee's Alice, and is now doing Area 51 as well as his second album (Tweaker.net).
  • It's great hardware, has the 'big brother' factor for being made by MS, doesn't have much in the way of titles (so far)...

    But one thing that XBox games can do is let you listen to your own music.

    I have become addicted to the freestyle snowboarding game Amped in the last year (while taking a few co-workers with me ;-). It's a great game that I'd probably play for a couple weeks under normal circumstances.

    But because I can listen to a customizable soundtrack of either Amped-supplied music or my very own c
    • You always have the play/stop button on your stereo to help, of course that requires the game to have the best option in game music -, to stop the music. Now this feature is lacking in most games, and that is a shame -, but I can't say that being able to put your own music in a game is a great big feature - unless you lack a CD player or a computer with audio out ports...
  • MS came up with DirectMusic as a way of creating dynamically changing background music for games and multimedia apps.
    The idea is that the piece can change key, tempo, interweave a different theme in a response to changing situations in a game. They introduced the MS software synth and DLS sound libaries at the same time, so the end result would not be dependant on the user inbuilt midi synthesiser. Higher end soundcard provide hardware support for DLS sythesised music.

    Has anyone seen this being used eff

    • We used DirectMusic in our last title... As a technology it is pretty powerful and helps keep both costs and file sizes down. On the other hand, we had a very tense two-week period where the software was crashing for reasons unknown to us, and nobody could figure out what that little DirectMusic black box was doing. The cost savings over writing something ourselves was offset by what we paid consultants to figure out what was going wrong.

      DirectMusic is a good idea, but like early Direct X the developer
    • I've heard that learning DirectMusic is like wrestling with a 800 pound dead cow. I mean, that it's hard to learn.
      • I never looked into the details. I'd imagine it would require someone who was both an experianced composer and developer. There was a directmusic studio application that was part of the SDK, I imagine it was much like a MIDI sequencing program with additional support for responding to events and such. Perhaps the triggering of events from within the game was complicated.

        It sounded like it had some really interesting potential which never came to fruition.
  • "On an artistic level, it's not in the film music league."

    You know, this is just so true. Someone like Harry Gregson-Williams, who did the Metal Gear Solid 2 score, is no match on artistic terms with the composer of films like Shrek and Phone Booth, Harry Gregson-Williams.
  • With everyone commenting on the great works of music in the Final Fantasy series, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the name of the man behind that music, Nobuo Uesmatsu. Many people believe FF6 to be his best work. Look for Tina's Theme or Aria Di Mezzo Carattere and compare to the movie of your choice.

    With video games pulling in similar amounts of money to movies these days, and having similar budgets, it's only right for composers to work with performaing talent that can match their vision.
    • I can't believe I missed the typo in my own post, I actually misspelled his name! I'm going to crawl into a corner and cry...

      At least the title is spelled correctly. Go ahead and make fun of me now.
    • Exactly. That guy is a damn genius. I think the article has a good point, but the Final Fantasy games are in a league of their own.

      As personal taste, I much prefer the soundtrack to FF7 to FF6. Especially Aeris's Theme (Death) and One-Winged Angel.
  • The first time an in-game soundtrack really caught my attention was in the Medal of Honor games...great stuff there.
  • Plus, there's Jeremy Soule, a composer of Howard Shore's caliber whose best work has appeared in games such as Icewind Dale and Morrowind. (In fact, the Morrowind music CD that came with the collector's edition is one of my favorites for car listening.)

    Nobuo Uematsu was mentioned earlier, and perhaps it's because so many people hated FF8 that they didn't bother to play through to the end, but the music during the closing credits was absolutely thrilling, especially as it wove its way into the FF theme at
  • Don't get me started...too late.

    I have to agree with the article about Nobuo Uematsu's sophistication. Most of his work was done under constraints much greater then that of current composers. As Mr. Mirapaul points out; gaming music is getting better in part due to the properties arising from DVDs. Some of Mr. Uematsu's scores were done in 8 bits! Like a great sonnet writer Nobuo Uematsu used those constraints to their fullest extent.

    Of his oeuvre I think "One Winged Angel" [everything2.com] is the most highly lauded. I reme

  • I love the music in Europa Universalis 2. As the game progresses through the centuries, the game plays music from that period.

    The soundtrack is professionally done and I really enjoy listening to it (even though it can be a bit repetitive at times).

  • If you are really interested in music and audio for games I suggest you check out www.audiogang.org. It's a non-profit organization of game audio pros, programmers, producers and students. It's a great place to learn the ins and outs of game audio.
  • "Game music benefited by interactivity"

    This is exactly my thought. After playing FF games with music I loved it. People who haven't played it hate it all. I rest my case.

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