Chaos Theory in Game Music

[Music] hey everybody thanks so much for coming to my GDC talk Chaos Theory the music of Jurassic world Primal Ops I'm winfer Phillips and I'm a game composer I've composed music for titles in six big franchises Assassin's Creed God of War War lineage The Sims Total War and Little Big Planet I've also composed music for projects in massive IPS like Shrek DC Comics Toy Story Speed Racer and The Da Vinci Code my book is called a composer's guide to game music it's published by the MIT press I also write monthly feature articles for gamed developer.com in this talk I'm I'm going to be sharing

my process composing the musical score for the video game Jurassic world Primal Ops it's the game from Universal and behavior interactive Jurassic world Primal Ops came out last summer right alongside the theatrical run of Jurassic world Dominion does anybody remember that scene from the original Jurassic Park that explains what chaos theory is now Jeff Goldblum is talking about the T-Rex and he calls it the essence of chaos and then to explain the concept of chaos theory he talks about the movement of water droplets to make the point that it's nearly impossible to predict where the water's going to go because it takes a different path every time chaos theory is a recurring theme in the Jurassic Park Jurassic world franchise it's the idea that unpredictability is everywhere you're constantly off balance because you have

no idea what's coming next you never went know when some big pointy teethed huge monster is just going to jump out of the shadows and well that's terrifying after the team at Behavior interactive hired me to compose the m music for Jurassic world Primal Ops we kicked things off with meetings to discuss musical style we were well familiar with the music of Don Davis Michael Chino and the other composers in the film and TV franchise such as John Williams Don Davis Michael jaino so we knew that when the dinosaurs showed up the music was always very intense the action didn't last long though if the humans didn't get away quickly enough they were essentially going to end up as dinosaur lunch so the action in the movies and the TV shows had to be fast moving and

succinct in contrast the game is essentially one long action sequence so the music would have to be very different nevertheless it was vital that the music allow players to feel as though they're having their own gripping Adventure in the Jurassic world the development team and I knew that we really had to get the musical style just right in Jurassic world Prim Ops you are an elite dinosaur Handler working for the Department of Fish and Wildlife and dinosaurs have escaped from their captivity and they've spread across North America and it's your job to capture them and bring them back to the reserve now while you're doing that you're also engaging in firefights with poachers and mercenaries so you're constantly in danger the dinosaurs can eat you the humans can murder you now to make the things even more interesting

once you capture the dinosaurs you can train them to fight for you and there's nothing like having one of these two ton three horned monsters to well bring on the Carnage with all this in mind I decided to explore the spirit of Chaos Theory by pushing the music of Jurassic world Primal Ops as far as possible towards an unstable dangerous and chaotic musical style and that brings us to the subject of our talk today what does it mean to compose chaotic music how can we create a musical score that can Propel and sustain emotional unbalance over extended periods of time in this presentation we'll be taking a dive into the nuts and bolts of composing extremely unpredictable music we'll be looking at some important techniques from music theory and I'll be including frequent audiovisual examples that'll help make things clear in order to feel unstable and chaotic music needs to accomplish certain objectives it needs to violate our expectations first

of all so what would we be expecting to hear for that let's check out the game's user interface including several menus that allow players to prepare for their missions and the game's world map this is one of the few instances of classically traditional harmonically dionic music that I composed for Jurassic world Primal Ops [Music] now as we could all hear this menu music is in very traditional major and minor modes with the dionic chords and their

Associated tonal relationships this kind of music feels very reassuring because it's full of classic determinant cadences harmonic resolutions that resolve exactly the way we'd expect no surprises here it's essentially a musical Baseline it establishes the rules so that we can start breaking them now the first chaotic technique that we're going to be discussing today is the use of unconventional modulating cadences which we're going to be calling tonic pivot this is pretty much the exact opposite of the classic determinant Cadence instead of the chords resolving in the way we expect they pivot angling us in a New Direction which includes a new tonic a new resolution tone which gives us the feeling of a new key signature the destabilization of harmonic weight is produced by essentially hijacking the expected resolution and propelling it in a New Direction

when executed successfully the tonic pivot is innately unsettling because it disobeys the rules but we can't just go ahead with this technique without considering our options we have to be careful because we can't just randomly shift into an unexpected cord and expect that to work we want to subvert the rules in order to compose unexpected music disturbing music not smash the rules and essentially end up with well noise I'm going to play an example of a combat track for you now from Jurassic world Primal Ops that uses lots of tonic pivots so that you can see what I mean you'll see that I've identified the tonic pivot cords by circling them in Red so we can follow along notice that there's a random quality to these chords and that makes the tonal Center shift in unpredictable ways

[Music] [Music] getting this right in our own compositions involves lots of trial and error and you'll have to trust both your ears and your instincts when you're trying to create these sorts of effects in my work in Jurassic world Primal Ops I experimented with lots of different musical devices to help these harmonic progressions feel a bit more natural here's another example of tonic pivot in my Jurassic world Primal op score notice that these pivots include common tones that help to tie them [Music] together

so now let's move on to the second chaotic technique on our list as we just discussed we can use tonic pivot to introduce chaos into the way cords move so let's now talk about how we can use unusual harmonies to feed chaos into the way chords are built fun fact the word chord chord was originally a shortened form of the word a chord meaning perfect agreement and that's just what a traditional chord does it perfectly agrees traditional chords are built on triadic intervals the root the third the fifth the three tones work together to reinforce the tonal Center which gives us an awareness of the key signature Triads are stable they're organized

they're reassuring and that's exactly what we don't want for jassic World Primal Ops I frequently opted to build my chord structures not with thirds but with fourths this produces cordal harmonies which is really interesting the root the fourth the seventh cordal cords obscure the tonal Center they're harmonically unbalanced cordal lack a sense of major or minor orientation and this is really useful when we're trying to maintain a level of ambiguity in the music that we're composing as an example let's listen to some music that accompanies players while they're tracking dinosaurs across the American southwest the style direction for this part of the musical score included guitars and a Southwestern Vibe so that shifted the music towards a more traditional sound

now I countered that with cordal harmonies that helped to keep things feeling a bit more uncertain so let's check that [Music] out [Music] cordal harmonies such as the ones that you just heard go a long way towards making our music feel unsettled and anxious but there is more that we can do for instance using chromaticism can be a really powerful tool at our disposal now here we're letting the music slide through all of the available half steps

without regard for either key or mode impling chromatics is great for laying waste to our tonal Center leaving behind disorder and turmoil which is precisely what we want here's an example during this action track the music moves through and a tonal chord progression and then it rushes into a purely chromatic sequence he how this technique conveys pure [Music] [Music] chaos y you'll notice that example used

Unison chromatic lines to drive the nervous excitement of the piece chromatics are really effective at reinforcing anxiety during long action sequences but there are other ways that we can obscure that tonic and make our music feel a bit more tumultuous now as we all know anyone who casually listens to music is well aware of both the ionian and the aolian modes the traditional major [Music] and the traditional minor these modes are everywhere with all of their well-worn intervals chords and progressions so we've come to expect them and that's why avoiding these modes is a great way to subvert expectations and create more disconcerting music in the score for Jurassic world Primal Ops when I wasn't pushing a tonality into my compositions I was leaning heavily into exotic scales like the holon and the

octatonic so let's take a look at how that worked starting with the octatonic now the octatonic or eight tone scale is a scale that alternates whole or half tones the octatonic has the advantage of working really well with diminished Triads they're nicely unsteady and they can be menacing in the context the octatonic became one of my go-to tools for the Jurassic world Primal op score here's a very straightforward example from a combat track notice how the Baseline in this combat track runs through the entire octatonic scale in [Music] sequence

now here's a more complex example of the octatonic scale in an action track now while I never ran through the entire scale in sequence here you'll notice that the Baseline is overtly octatonic in nature with diminished chords that are emphasized in the brass section and I arranged the strings in a conventional minor mode so that made the entire thing feel a bit more unstable and precarious [Music] [Music] while I used the octatonic pretty frequently in this project I also alternated it with the whole tone scale now this scale consists entirely of

whole steps which means it naturally feels disconnected to a key signature because it's it's just hard to determine where the tonic is first let's check out a combat [Music] [Music] example as you can see if we're looking for an unbalanced scale with no tonal Center then the whole tone scale is precisely what we need also it features augmented Triads which are also harmonically ambiguous all of this is great for creating uneasy sounding music let's check out another example this is music I composed for one of the tense exploration sequences in which the player is tracking dinosaur footprints in the wild notice how apprehensive this whole tone struct structure

[Music] [Music] feels exotic scales like these are just fantastic for when we're pushing our music away from a classic harmonic structure and towards a tonality but now let's take a moment to step away from a tonality altoe and consider its close cousin poly tonality we're all very familiar with traditional key structures and signatures in classic music theory key signatures control what chords we hear what harmonic progressions may occur what Melodies may take shape now when we go fully a tonal we distance

ourselves from all of these rules but with polytonality we keep using them albe it in a more devious sort of way instead of hiding the tonal Center we construct our music to assert more than one at a time when listening to a track that's structured in this way we can sense multiple separate and distinct key signatures happening simultaneously and this can create some really interesting harmonic complexity now best of all the music can include classically dionic Melodies and still feel conspicuously weird due to all of the unrelated cord structures that are happening beneath excuse me so excited by [Laughter] polytonality okay deep breath I want to share some musical examples of polytonality with you now with a caveat that this stuff can get pretty complicated I'm going to be going through a bunch of details here but

mostly to give you a general feel for how polytonality works so let's start by checking out this relatively straightforward example this is another piece of music that accompanies players while they're tracking wild dinosaurs I built the music around the whole tone scale though we already discussed how the whole tone scale worked in the music of Primal Ops now for this particular composition I put the initial chord into the C whole tone scale [Music] but the Baseline is assertively hitting d flat as the root tone and d flat is not at all in the C Hol tone scale plus half of the foreground Melody is written with the assertive dlat major feel oops the and the other let me back that up a little bit I want to make sure that we get this example so that works out for

everybody plus half of that foreground Melody let's actually hear it is written with the dlat major feel and then the other half follows the C hon scale now the chords support this melody by swinging back and forth between d flat major and C hone and that makes the entire thing feel H bizarrely unstable let's check that out now you'll see that I've included this notation in the following example with the D flat major and the C hone content divided into different staves so that we can track what's [Music] [Music] happening

[Music] now I want to share a more complex example of polytonality with you now in the music I composed for Jurassic world Primal Ops we're going to be listening to this music but again I'll break it down for you first the orchestra begins with repeating diminished chords in D Minor the string section gives us some nervous figures in a flat minor so now we have two simultaneous unrelated Keys D minor and a flat minor now after that we modulate into a hard tonic pivot which takes the background chords and the agitated string section into chords in G major now while that's happening the melody along with the Baseline move the music IAL construction into B flat

minor so there lots of polytonality here so we're going to get a better sense of it when we're listening to the music now as before I've divided the different key signature content into different staves so that we can follow along and you'll see that I've indicated both where the modulation and where that tonic pivot [Music] happens polytonality such as this is an uncommon harmonic device just like the tonic pivots cordal harmonies chromaticism and

exotic scales we've discussed so far during this talk all of these techniques help us to break away from harmonic conventionalism but Harmony isn't the only way we can introduce chaos into our game scores so at this point let's shift our discussion away from harmonics and talk a little bit now about kinetics energy in music is typically driven both by Tempo and meter which gives us a sense of General momentum there are lots of ways that we can experiment with unusual meter structures for instance in that polytonal piece of music that I was just playing for you there are also abrupt temporary changes in meter and these help things feel a bit more agitated and unstable now the time signature moves from triple meter to a single measure of common time and then it moves back to Triple meter again then it progresses into a single measure with five beats of a regular time before it moves back into triple meter once again so let's check out how that

[Music] worked well meter changes like the ones that we were just hearing help our music to stay on edge for longer periods of time they're not our only tool kinetics addresses not only General momentum but also the energy of sudden movement in an interview for total film magazine composer John Williams addressed the importance of kinetics in his music for the first two entries in the Jurassic Park franchise describing how he had to match the rhythmic gyration of the dinosaurs now as a composer for a Jurassic World game I knew it wasn't really going to be possible for me to match the rhythmic gyration of the dinosaur SCE nevertheless I could

simulate the same effect by employing a technique that I'll be calling kinetic fragmentation so let's discuss that idea in traditional composition bursts of movement can be achieved with classical ornamentations such as trills runs repetitions glissandi crescendos and other such of hits flourishes and gestures that inject abrupt vigorous impact into our music but those are also familiar sounds and this talk is about pushing our music towards the unfamiliar classic ornaments are well organized they're performed with discipline and in accordance with traditional harmonics chaotic ornamentation on the other hand is unruly it's performed with abandon and it often incorporates atonal or polytonal qualities I treated all of these techniques as kinetic fragments that could be injected into my compositions to cause disruptive impact these kinetic

fragments allowed the music to seem as if it had been structured specifically to conform to the movements in the game they enhanced both excitement and menac and menacing qualities during gameplay they were the musical equivalent of fireworks or even you could describe it as bolts of lightning so let's check out an example of kinetic fragmentation in a combat track that I composed for Jurassic primals now you're going to be hearing lots of big orchestral hits and tight clusters anxious brass repetitions hectic woodwind runs in multiple opposing scales forceful trills and flourishes all coming together to add chaos to the kinetics of the [Music] [Applause] game [Music]

in that lead piano that we just heard there's another useful technique that injects a bit more atonality into the music so let's briefly discuss that as you might have noticed the lead piano line in that piece was heavily inspired by the 12 tone technique let's check that out we start with all the 12 tones of the chromatic scale but then we avoid any sense of key signature or harmonic Center by sounding all of those 12 tones in an apparently scattered [Music] Arrangement is using the 12 tone inspired approach makes our lead lines

feel a lot more unpredictable so let's check out another example of that in action here's some exploration music notice the 12-tone influence in the maima [Music] part so now we've taken a look at tonic pivots cordal harmonies chromaticism exotic scales polytonality kinetic fragmentation and the 12-tone inspired approach and that's quite a lot of chaos so at this time really it's about time we ask ourselves have we reached the point at which excitement just turns into exhaustion for Primal Ops I knew that the musical score just couldn't stay chaotic indefinitely Or it would just

get to be too much our senses get numb to sensation when we're exposed to intense stimuli for too long there has to be contrast I mean periodically we just need a break so let's now talk about how we can provide a bit of order in all of this chaos at the beginning of this CH talk we checked out the music I composed for the game's user interface now this menu music features a clear and memorable theme and as a contrast to most of the game's music the menu track is written in a classically traditional style so um first let's remind ourselves what that sounded [Music] like I used this melody to insert some familiar and conventional techniques into the score for Dra iic world primals and while the melody tends to appear

fairly briefly I also used it a lot variations of this melody are included in nearly every combat track in the game regardless of its key mode or style so this means that somewhere during the High Energy Mayhem of combat a familiar Melody will suddenly appear injecting some musical Clarity into the mix before ve veering off into chaos once again so let's check that out this variation is from a combat track that adds some chromaticism into the treatment of the [Music] theme now let's listen to a version of that same theme in which the underlying structure moves through a complex chord progression now while these chords support the tumultuous nature of the combat music the recurring theme provides momentary relief from all the

[Music] chaos and finally let's check out the most overtly traditional example the reward Stinger this music is triggered whenever the player successfully complet a [Music] mission if ever there was a musically soothing classically conventional pat on the back it's that reward Stinger it's the polar opposite of the harmonically ambiguous if not fully atonal music that typifies much of the score of Jurassic

world premal Ops and much like a reward these thematic moments provide a welcome sense of balance to what would otherwise be a a fairly overbearing chaotic musical score Jurassic world Primal Ops needed action music that could maintain a high level of anxiety over an extended period of time now over the course of this session we've discussed why creating musical instability in our compositions can help keep players feeling on edge we talked about why determinate cadences fulfill our expectations and how we can essentially hijack those expectations with tonic pivots that can M move music in more unpredictable directions we looked at traditional chord structures and how cordal harmonies can make music feel more ambiguous and suspenseful we've discussed why chromatics obscures a key signature and why exotic scales like the Hol tone and

the octatonic are so useful in creating uncertainty about the tonal center of a musical composition we've taken a dive into polytonality to see why this technique and harmonic device creates such disturbing effects we've explored the importance of kinetic energy in our music and how meter changes and chaotic ornamentation can make music feel more exciting we've learned about the weird atonality of the 12-tone inspired approach and finally we've considered the importance of contrast and why traditional tonality can be important even in a chaotic musical score when Jeff Goldblum uses water droplets to talk about chaos theory in the original Jurassic Park he tells us that the chaos theory deals with predictability in complex systems by enhancing chaos over predictability we can introduce exciting complexity into our game music for me these techniques were vital in helping players to feel as if they're having a

gripping Adventure in the Jurassic world thanks very much for coming to my talk today well thank you so much um I don't I know I ran a little bit over so I don't know if any of you would like to uh ask any questions we have the room until the the hour so you can come to the microphone in the center and please remember to say your name before you ask the question please that would be really great thank you thank you Ana Fred so much I'm Brian and your talks are always a master class and presentation just your graphics in addition to your amazing music anyway thank you so much I'm always curious as a composer what was recorded live and with those alator elements did you use any particular libraries and just yeah just to kind of nerd out about that for a minute oh yeah well well this was a combination of both live and virtual uh so it was a it was a

hybrid um or hybrid score so there were uh it it there was a lot of virtual simulation in it uh but there was also there were also some like sweetening live elements that were added in later and gosh in terms of the kind of libraries I use there are just tons I I do a lot of mix and match so uh pretty much every orchestral Library you can think of I've used at least a part of it so yeah I'm sure thank you very much you're welcome hi I'm Kate Hi Kate incredible talk thank you so much thank you um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the music was actually implemented into gameplay like within all that chaos how do you then deal with horizontal and vertical remixing and looping where do you find spot to calm all that together yeah uh it was really interesting it was a fairly simple straightforward implementation uh Jurassic Pro World Primal Ops is a mobile game so there were certain considerations and limitations to that in terms of how Dynamic the music could be but we still wanted it to feel

responsive to player choice give a sense of player agency so there were a lot of different outros and intros that were created for each of the combat tracks and exploration tracks so that it could be uh randomly uh triggered depending upon uh where the characters were going and what they were doing and you wouldn't get a sense that you were hearing a lot of repetition um the the music U kind of more morphed itself into the experience that way but it wasn't a more a more dynamically complex implementation thank you so much you're welcome hi winner Fred my name is Carl um this is a question about the Jurassic Park IP to State the obvious um Jurassic Park as a franchise it's quite a quite a um it's a film music with quite a legacy and a pedigree to it just just State the obvious um so you know a lot of different composers have worked on Films and games and this franchise so how did you think about that when introducing

your unique approach to chaos and music while also being true to the expectations that both the clients and customers are going to have for a Jurassic Park kind a franchise can you talk about that a little bit that's a great question I listened to uh a ton of the music that have been created for all of the various iterations of of projects that were in this IP um mostly because I wanted to absorb it without imitating it you know it's like sometimes a style can be considered like a vocabulary and if you can if you can obsorb enough of it and become close enough with it so intuitively speaking you can begin speaking in that language without saying the same thing and that was really what I was trying to to achieve with the way I approached it I had a so much respect for what had been created before and I wanted the instrumental choices and the the weight of the arrangement to to reflect what would be expected from music in a Jurassic project but I also

wanted to bring my own sensibility to it so it was a lot of it was um essentially an instinctive way of working if if that makes sense no that's great thank you so much you're welcome hi winterred I'm Dan and thank you again for your talk and actually his comment uh goes well with mine this is just a compliment I really enjoyed hearing um how you were using dress Park motifs and idioms but without overly doing it as kind of a small subtle nod to the work that was there without really beating in the ground so that was really well done thank you thank you so much that's very kind hi s lovely talk thank you my name is Vargus I was just wondering obviously a lot of musical Theory comes into this as we've seen but when you're when you're writing things do you think you start with the basis of I want to write this tone so I will set about it with musical Theory or do you write instinctively and then think I need this

to sound more chaotic or you know sad or whatever you know well I think for this particular project a lot of the um the the basic techniques that I've discussed today are idiomatic of the Jurassic Park franchise as a whole uh with perhaps the exception of the whole tone scale because that just happened to be something I personally love and it it snuck its way in um afterwards when I was looking at what i' done I realized well that really isn't but uh but a lot of other um other elements did have common ties and so when I was uh familiarizing myself with the music from the previous iterations in the franchise I kind of instinctively absorbed a lot of these techniques and then felt my way through um expressing them with my own voice um so I I don't think at the the time I was thinking oh now I'm doing the 12 tone technique or or now I'm going to be working with

Kinetic fragmentation things like that I wasn't I I hadn't put the names on it but that was what I was doing I mean when we're here and we're discussing these sorts of musical choices we need a language to be able to communicate with each other so that we can share what we did but a lot of what we're actually doing is very um intuitive and and subconscious when we're creating music and then later we look at what we did and realize the complexity that's working underneath the surface I mean these are all techniques we're using but we may not have given them the the labels that they have now and that we use when we try to share with each other thank you you're welcome okay so I think that uh we're all wrapped up here so again thank you so much for coming to this talk and please remember to fill out the session evaluations and um thank you this was a lot of [Applause] fun [Music]