AMA: Composer Q&A with Winifred Phillips

[Music] good morning everyone um before we or good afternoon i suppose depending on your time zone um before we get things started here just a quick reminder to pay attention to gdc's code of conduct with all of your chat exchanges this morning um just be nice be thoughtful not too difficult um easy stuff so our speaker today is the prolific game composer winifred phillips um you might recognize her work from franchises like assassin's creed god of war little big planet total war and the sims um we'll get started here just in a second so as we do please feel free to drop any questions you may have about the creative or technical challenges of game music composition or one of his own past work you may have questioned you may have in that questions tab in your chat window there and we'll ask however many we have time for and get into talking about those so with that winner friend you ready to get started here i'm looking forward to it hello gdc summer this is going to be fun yeah it's it's a cool experience so far

and i like the i don't know the nice little one-on-one amas are really sweet um so i guess we'll just jump into it here and then we'll pull some questions from chat um how does a game composition differ from like other areas of music composition oh gosh great question um game composition is kind of like a really different philosophy just at the core of it i mean when you're composing for a film it's uh it's a linear experience it's all pre-planned it's it's got a beginning a middle and end you're sort of composing to the dramatic beats on the screen but it's a very preordained kind of thing when you're composing for a game it's a fluid experience everything depends upon the actions of the player so you really don't know what's going to happen at any given time and with that you have to construct the music in kind of a modular way it has to be put together in components that can be sort of assembled and disassembled based on what's going on

what the player is doing and what activities they're involved in the game engine has to essentially be able to take the music apart and then put it back together in different ways and that's just really interesting because as a composer it means i'm not thinking about beginnings and middles and ends i'm thinking about states of being of activity of thought um of action of ways to feel in any particular moment and and you express that musically and then you create a whole uh assortment a kind of a hodgepodge of of those kinds of statements those kind of musical statements that can be then sort of assembled into its own vocabulary some kind of peculiar grammar it's really interesting work a whole complicated beast because like i guess with most um i don't know narrative you have that beginning in the middle in your end and that's like your safety blanket but not quite having that in music seems a little intimidating it's true when i first started it was really hard to get your head around

the idea of creating music that that seems interesting and involved and has a lot to say and yet doesn't seem to be going anywhere very aggressively it isn't giving you signposts that are kind of pointing towards the direction that you're heading um because when you do that when you create big like set piece moments within a musical composition and then it really draws attention to itself especially if the music was designed to loop and then you can really feel the repetition happening and that's a big issue to deal with just in just structurally in terms of music composition for games you want to make sure that the music feels um natural and as if it were being created specifically for the gamers experience for what they're doing you don't really want to give away the magic trick that's going on underneath all the mechanics that are happening so it it you have to keep in mind the unique

nature of game music when you're creating it so that it it functions really well within the the construct of gaming itself um so we're going to kind of segue that into a question from chat here from sophia in chat um they say hello and would like to know um when you're analyzing or researching a genre for a project uh what exactly do you kind of note down and analyze against how do you transfer that research to your music great question hello sophia um the research process is one of my favorite parts of the work that i do in games and it's great with the video game industry and the kind of projects you work on because they're so varied and some of them are really larger than life or in the speculative genres so you get to create epic and expansive stuff that really intense emotional undercurrents and that's a lot of fun and also a lot of it can be influenced by period pieces some of it's historical like the work i did on assassin's creed

liberation was set in 18th century new orleans so you had a lot of cultural influences there and with that kind of project i would first thing i would do is delve into research for understanding the story i mean i am a part as a part of the team creating the game i need to understand the emotional content and the context of how the characters are feeling if i'm going to express that just just as a baseline even apart from what i'm going to do musically i need to understand how everybody's feeling and and what's going on so i tried to do that kind of research and also makes me feel more a part of the team and the project when i'm on the same page as everybody about what we're all trying to say with the with the project uh but then apart from that um i start looking at are is there any instrumentation that would be specific to the era the location is there uh are there tech musical techniques that would have been favored by composers at the time that kind of thing it

that that's really interesting i did a lot of research on french baroque musical forms for my work on assassin's creed liberation because that was the music that would have been popular at the time that um the main character was having her adventures so it was important for me to do that um and of course since she was of african-american ancestry i also tried very much to understand that cultural influence in her experience you know those wonderful strong primary harmonic colors and the really fantastic rhythms and instrumentation that i had to work with there so just as an example of the kind of rich source material that you can can kind of dive into assassin's creed liberation was really fantastic for me that'd be like a really interesting exercise and kind of stretching those research and like your different um aspects of composition skills for games like that um to kind of merge a question from chat

with something i'm curious about um we have a question um have you ever had to make music for a game without seeing what it looks like if so what is that process like yeah yeah that actually happens quite a lot more than you think and i think it has a lot to do with uh the way in which game development happens if you're creating music for a film you tend to be brought in when the film is somewhere near its final cut you're not really creating music for the film while it's being shot or while it's in preliminary edits you the the composer needs to know what the final beats are how the shots are going to go from one thing to another but for games uh the game tends to be very fluid and in development when i'm brought in and there sometimes there really isn't even anything playable yet or if there is it's uh really early character designs with the arms jutting straight out and just sort of floating over some sort of really abstract looking geometrical

grid and it gives me no idea of what the game's going to look like or feel like and you have to be able to sort of cope with that and kind of plumb the depths of your own imagination to kind of fill in those gaps so that's why research really does help a lot there because we have to kind of bring our own inner life to the the envisioning of what it is we're scoring when we don't have those kinds of visual helpers to guide us along so like kind of in the same vein of that um christian and chat wants to know uh how do you ensure that sound effects and music really mesh together really well and form a consistent experience as opposed to just kind of like a random mix that doesn't jar quite well yeah that's a great question christian um and i think the best way to go about that is to have a really nice working relationship between the composer and the sound designer the sound team the audio director we're all kind of on the same page and we're working together and sometimes it's trial and error the

sound design team may not actually know what the sound effects are going to be doing when they ask me to compose the music i might be ahead of them in terms of the workflow and i deliver music for them and then they experiment with the sound design and they come back to me and ask me to kind of tweak things if they're not sort of fitting together properly with the sort of sound design decisions that they're making for the game or on the other hand sometimes they've just gone ahead and changed what they were doing to fit the music that i was delivering it i think it depends on priorities on on what people are happy with and it's such a collaborative process it's just so very um fluid and it's about personalities and artistic ambitions and and everybody's trying very hard to make sure all the elements come together it's so a conglomeration of so many different creative strategies and so i think that's part of what makes game development so exciting so many different uh viewpoints coming together

um just kind of to expand on that uh how long is your typical involvement in a project from like your very first kind of like plucking out strings to the final composition delivered to them how long are you working alongside those developers oh great that that is a great question because it's hard to answer uh it really depends on the project i mean i've been on indie teams that are really a short development schedule and i'm kind of in there hitting the ground running just cranking out the tracks and it's just maybe a month or so where i've completed all the work for it and on the other end of the spectrum i've been in projects that have had me working on and off for years uh while they're developing and they'll come to me and ask me to deliver kind of a cache of tracks for them to incorporate based on where the game is at that time and then they'll go off and they'll develop and they'll work on the project and it'll be very fluid they'll come back to me and say things like oh the game's completely different now so we need you to revise the music in this way or that

way or we're thinking about a different style or this level it has now has been removed and we're now doing something different so we're repurposing music in a different way and we need you to deliver music in a different feeling or structured in a different way and the interactive implementation scheme may have changed so that's uh that's very challenging and very interesting work you know there are a lot of different uh pitfalls to it but also some really great things can come out of it you know it it stretches you as a composer makes you grow and um look to yourself too to think of different kinds of solutions to problems so that can be a lot of fun um another question from chad here from brian um on themes and thematic development any suggestions on incorporating recognizable themes into content without getting samey or redundant through overuse good question yeah um themes are tricky in video games particularly with um

looping content content that or content that's going to be repeated a lot i mean you can be hundreds of hours playing a game and there are only a few games that are actually requisitioning hundreds of hours of music so uh so there's going to be repetition happening there and it's a good point that you have to be very aware of that as an aspect of what you're doing i kind of like to break themes down i mean you state them in a very recognizable and dynamic way when it's important at a set piece moment in the game or maybe it's a part of the main theme or it's a part of a main menu and you really want to use it as a way in which you're creating a musical signature for the project but then you can break it down into fragments like motives uh small uh segments just a few notes something that might not even be consciously recognized as a part of that theme and then you can sprinkle it elsewhere and it just communicates in a subconscious way to the player and

it asserts the game's musical identity without really being overt about it and you can also use them as as figures ostinatos you can restructure a theme to be more of a of an underlying pattern that other original material might be on top of and that's a way to also assert the theme without it being a foreground element it's not something that is going to be front of consciousness but it's still going to be there it's going to be asserting an identity and i think that's always a great thing to try to strive for to to sprinkle a sense of identity into everything you're doing that kind of builds into a question from nikki in chat uh do you have a favorite leaf motif if so what is it kind of what's the formula for that oh gosh um in terms of uh well the assassin's creed liberation score was a really uh strongly driven by light motifs i had them for um nearly every character every one of the important characters

because there are so many but all of the main characters had um light motifs that returned and um i couldn't tell you if there was a favorite life motif that i've used for a project although i do have to say that i had a lot of fun with the light mode this the core light motif for spore hero for electronic arts uh because that was an opportunity to express it in so many different ways spore hero was a score that was very influenced by world music it's after all it's a game about um monsters wandering around a primitive world and so i really wanted you to feel this sort of friendly world music atmosphere and i was delving into all different kinds of world music for it so taking the the core theme the light motif that's first expressed in the main theme and then just re-expressing it and all of these different cultural musical styles and influences was tremendous fun all kinds of different instruments all kinds of different rhythmic constructs and it just it made it a

a really fun puzzle for me to see how many different ways you can kind of turn a theme inside out and and rediscover it as a composer and see what it can do uh building that into a question from tim um who says hello and thank you for answering our questions um what is your process to avoid over composing a section or scene in game can you share examples of how you've done that in the past hmm good point yeah you don't it's like a fine line you don't want to do too little you don't want to do too much uh if the music is too aggressive it can really start to feel aggressively dominant in the experience you're having in the game and you certainly don't want that uh for assassin's creed liberation i had a four chord of essentially it's a theme but it's also just a four chord pattern very subtle but it was uh something that was incorporated as essentially the the central building block of the main theme of the game this this four

chord pattern that repeated over and over and over again and i was able to use that a lot in the game and one of the virtues of it was that it was very subtle very low keyed um almost subliminal in the sense that you could recognize it when it came back but it wasn't really anything that would really arrest your attention and so it was this uh stealth music in just functionally speaking a first stealth game but first functionally speaking it was a stealthy uh construct that i could use to create a sense of identity without having to overwrite the piece in order to use a lot of really dynamic theme thematic ideas that would arrest the player's attention more aggressively um so you've talked a little bit already about how you um kind of do your research to get into like the period and spirit of the game but what about genres in that sense um when you're researching

for uh scores that you're not already deeply knowledgeable in the genre what's your immersion approach and when do you know you're ready to dive into creating something unique with your new material and that's a question from brian i don't want to steal credit for that one brian nice question and that is definitely something that we have to face a lot i mean if you're doing pretty well as a game composer you're probably going to be scoring projects from a lot of different kind of game genres and that can be pretty challenging i remember when i was first hired to do the music for speed racer um i had to really look into what the musical scores are like for racing games it's a very techno driven music and that wasn't something i had done up to that point so i got a chance to learn something really new and to kind of dive into the electronic sound palette and those really driving uh rhythms and and that that really dominant beat that just really just helps to accentuate the sense of speed in a racing game so that was something i got to learn along the way

along the state on the other hand it was also tied into the speed racer intellectual property and the watkowski's film that had just come out at the time so um it was it had to have this very eccentric and almost retro feel and i i so i had to sort of juggle and and and merge together two ideas that were really opposite a very retro inspired orchestral score with this very techno driving genre that we that really needed to be to be enhanced i had to be true to it it is a racing game and you don't want to disappoint fans of racing games i mean they there's an expectation there and if if the musical score is so different that it doesn't seem to have the spirit of the genre uh running through it then you it can start to feel like the music sitting on top of the game and not really woven into it i didn't want that to happen with speed razor so i ended up with this really eccentric

amalgamation of of styles and influences and it was a lot of fun i had a really good time working on that one um to branch into some more like uh day-to-day operations we've got a couple questions here i'm gonna fuse together um the first one well i guess it's just from uh dan cooper in chat uh wants to know if you have any recommendations for effective time management strategies when you're composing or preparing to compose for a game nice yeah that is a really good thing to be thinking about how to make sure that you're meeting deadlines i the first thing i do is make sure that i'm really well aware of when the deadlines are and how much material i'm going to need to prepare in order to meet them fortunately i work with a music producer who helps me to with the logistics so just reminding me of when things need to be delivered and and kind of general quality assurance so that i do a good job on um on meeting those deadlines and

staying on schedule um i think the the deadlines are going to help the most for staying on schedule and delivering in a productive way you can look at your own speed in terms of how many minutes of music you create a day and then figure out what your working schedule and your workflow should be like in order to meet those deadlines i mean everybody's going to have a different workflow a different comfortable output per day and that is going to be an important consideration when you figure out how you're going to schedule yourself how much time you'll need to devote to different tasks each day and i think it's going to be a really personal choice too because we're all very different in the way we approach music compositions so i wouldn't want to say there's one way of going about it that's going to be a one-size-fit-all solution but as long as you're taking those deadlines really seriously and kind of looking at yourself and asking yourself what do i personally

need to do to get those deadlines handled and to be on track and i think you'll be okay then um so for people looking to get into composing music we have a question here from mallory who wants to know how does an aspiring composer work their way up do you start as a composer's assistant or maybe a transcriptionist and then we also had another question asking about um networking as a composer and kind of the same kind of trajectory okay all right two two-part questions let's see sorry okay hey it's fine okay this is the hey here we go gdc summer so um so the the first part of it was um is it good to start as a transcriptionist or a composer's assistant in order to to make your way into the industry and unfortunately i don't actually know a lot about that one because that's not the way i started i started in a really weird way um i kind of had the bolt of lightning story and that makes me a bad person to ask when

it comes to how to get into the industry i um i happened to contact the god of war team right when they were looking for somebody to join the composer team on that project and my timing just happened to be really really good so that was how i got my first gig but you can't say well just you know send up a prayer and hope the timing is great i you know that that isn't uh something that i could phone calls don't work quite as well now as they used to i don't think okay well it you i think it's still important to try to network as the second part of the question networking i think is still important and uh doing something like this being involved in a in conferences i mean of course in-person conferences were really helpful for doing meetings and things but this can still i think help to uh to get a new composer out there in the industry if you can set up even online meetings that that could be helpful and just get involved in the community even writing articles about what you've

learned from past projects and offering them up to the game audio community can can increase your presence because it really does matter if people know you're there and if you have had experiences even working with student teams and or small indie projects and you feel like you can share and experience with other people about what you've learned that can be really invaluable in order to make people aware of who you are and what your skills are i think that can be very helpful and if you're a student and you can get involved with student teams that's that's amazing because you can meet people who then can be a network of contacts as you move forward into the industry and you can keep in touch with each other and eventually you could work together again in a more professional capacity so that's really fantastic all right uh next question here from nicholas in chat wants to know can you speak to the public acceptance of video game music

and the library of congress gay music event you participated in yeah well that was really exciting um i was asked to give a speech at the library of congress about game music and it was the first event of its kind held at the library of congress focusing specifically on game music it was a great event they had um this whole arcade section where they had all of these uh retro games being played in the these wonderful mahogany paneled rooms in the um in it was ju in the library of congress it was just an amazing thing to watch people really excited about that in such a hallowed setting uh but it i think it's important for just in terms of this library of congress event in which i was fortunate to be able to give a speech and at other uh sorts of events like that like uh symphony tours are another good example i think they're great in elevating the awareness of game music

within a larger community getting people who might not be familiar with game music more acquainted with it and to understand that it really isn't the bleeps and bloops of yesteryear that it is something that has grown as games have grown and it is now a serious art form that people who even aren't gamers could still appreciate so uh symphony tours like the assassin's creed symphony world tour in which i'm fortunate to have a composition feature that is a a great opportunity to elevate music from a game franchise to make more people aware of both the music itself and the franchise that it comes from so it's it's a great of vehicle for visibility so i think more like that is fantastic and things like the library of congress event are a great way to elevate the authenticity of what we're doing to so that people realize that there's a lot of of artistry and heart that goes into

this music and uh there's a skill level there that can be appreciated by people who are looking for um for music just to be fans of so i i think that all of that kind of stuff is really important and i'm very grateful that more of it's happening now running out of time here so i'm trying to sneak a few more quick questions in um jeremy wants to know uh with who or what functional roles do you most frequently and closely interact with as a game composer and i'm going to add on to that uh do you have any tips for kind of communication between yourself and the teams you're working with good one yeah um well it's been my experience that that can vary wide really wildly depending upon the type of team you're working with if you're working with an indie team you may be working with the grand poobah you know the uh the game director uh the game designer some some uh someone with that title producer you might be working with sometimes if you're working with one of the larger publishers you'll also be working with a producer because the

music is being requisitioned by the publisher and not by the development team so the publisher has a producer who's specifically assigned to oversee your work and make sure everything's on track on the other hand if you're working with the development studio itself sometimes it's an audio director if you have a a well thought out team for audio within that developer it might be the audio director it might be a sound designer if it's a smaller development team and they don't really have a lot of audio folks it just might be the sole audio person on that team you're talking to and uh there have been projects i've worked on have who they've had nobody on audio at all and i've been talking to um maybe a programmer or something like that um so it really does depend upon the structure of the the development team itself as to who you're going to be talking to in terms of communication i think you have to be sensitive to the way in which the team wants to communicate

because that's key everybody's different and you don't want to try to assert your own preferences onto a team some teams are really comfortable with emails there's an audio director i've worked with quite a lot who writes very long complex and really helpful emails with lots of detail and that's fantastic because then i can have them in front of me and have everything very solidly stated and it's wonderful so i love that but there are other teams that really don't like to work that way it's it's more freewheeling and everything is about in the moment expression so there's a lot of skype conversation going on or phone conversation if skype isn't your thing or zoom since that's where we are or zoom isn't your thing uh so there's a lot of that kind of conversation happening and if that's where the creativity is happening that's where we need to be we need to be comfortable with what with whatever communication form is at the heart of the way the team works whether that's bulletin boards and slack groups or

discord or onto a zoom skype or through long emails any way they want to do it we need to be ready to do it that way and we need to be very happy to do it that way usually when i talk to it to a development team and they're starting to just get a sense of how we want to communicate i'll say i want to talk with you guys in the way you normally do it so how do you normally have these conversations and then i'll work around that and uh i feel like there's always a kind of a little sigh of relief on the part of the team oh we don't have to change the way we do things and that means a lot so that i want to make sure that that's the way everything goes a lot of flexibility is important it sounds like i want to squeeze on one more question it'll be a quick answer i promise uh jennifer wants to know if there's any music composition book in general you've read during your career that's had an impact on you or just in your resources you want to offer people looking to learn more about this okay well in terms of a book i've read

quite a lot i'm always going back to the techniques of orchestration just because i find that dipping back into just the nuts and bolts of what we do is a is a really nice way to sort of touch base with the core of it and if there is a like a core tome that is your favorite book for just touching base with what it is to compose it doesn't have to be any particular book but something that's just at the the ground floor i think it's something it's nice to have a book like that to come back to and to remind yourself of the things that were the most important just starting off we can get really obsessed with some you know highfalutin complicated techniques and and um very ambitious and we we kind of go off on these tangents and i it's important i think to kind of step back periodically and just remember what

music is at its heart so uh that's the kind of stuff i like to revisit over and over again um so i'm hoping i answered that question i know uh not to i write i'm a news editor at gamma sutra not to promote my stuff too much or my site but you do have a gamasutra blog where you talk a lot about all your like music background and library of congress he did a great blog on that so that would be a great place to check out and find more information oh yeah oh and i'm just gonna have to say it my book a composer's guide to gay music that can be helpful from the mit all right uh that's all the time we have thank you everyone for so many wonderful questions i'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them um i hope you all have a wonderful gtc summer there's plenty of other programming throughout today the rest of today we're just getting started today uh and tomorrow um i know particularly there's some gdc podcast live episodes tonight and tomorrow that i'll be on that we have some great guests lined up but there's tons of great other programming so have a great day and enjoy your show

thank you