Same Game, Different Sound

[Music] everyone we're gonna begin and welcome to same game and different sound if your phone is not muted please mute it and this panels idea is basically it's a composer panel with an interesting switch we were all given a gameplay video that we found and we each composed the video in different style so we're gonna show what we did I talked about the differences and and how different music and sound can impact the game said a bit of a sad news announcer couldn't make it he had the surgery and he is fine everything is fine but his doctors ordered him to stay home but he sent this video and and we'll see him talking about it in a video so why don't you go

ahead and introduce yourself and say your favorite game audio moment yeah something you remember from Becky Alan I am audio director at PopCap Games and my favorite moment is in pickle the pickle moment where you know everything goes that's my favorite moment it still is my favorite moment sorry does it really do that because that was really yeah yeah really does nice professional singers hey everybody my name is Jason graves I am a composer independent composer so my

favorite so the most memorable moment for me with music and games was before I started getting into writing music for games at all I played the very very very very very very very very very very first Medal of Honor that had Michael Giacchino scoring it and the reason it's so memorable is that's the first time I'd heard like a live orchestra playing music in a game and I am NOT a gamer I'll admit that so I have very very few game experiences but that one really stuck with me and I thought me and I want to do something like that with it was very emotional and even though it wasn't that interactive like just the way the music would play even if I wasn't doing anything the music would start getting more tense and I'd start feeling myself like tensing up even if I was just walking on a beach or something I really loved the relationship of the music to the players mood and that's always kind of stuck with me from the very beginning you know were you a musician at the time like were you already doing music yeah I was I think I

had done like maybe one or two really really really small independent games but it was all with MIDI and the fact that they used live orchestra I mean Steven Spielberg obviously had a lot to do with that but that they had live orchestra and that could be accomplished within a game was sort of a meaningful moment for me right I'm our little missus I've been composing for games for about seven years and two years ago I started my own company and we're turning music albums to video games it's like a very interactive video click button which is as interactive as a game right so the idea of the panel as I said before we chose a pretty random clip on YouTube from an an indie game which is called the bright memory I think none of us knows anything about it myself so we came to this with fresh eyes and

we just got the video as it is I'm gonna show what we got and can everybody turn off their cell phones please [Music] so this is the version that we saw and from from the little I know about this game it's it looks amazing as far as I can tell it is being developed by one guy it's indie yeah totally are you here like the YouTube description actually says like a bright memory in the FPS and I think it's it's pretty awesome mute

the cow please it feels so much longer when you watch it without sound yeah yeah I was surprised how quickly it was over when it had the music yeah right and once we had that we basically the the original clip had music and sound we took it out and we rebuilt everything from scratch so the sound design was done by two great guys Joe Marchak and the Oscar coin they are well Joe describes himself as a technical sound designer made of real human meat and and Oscar describes himself as a sound designer who enjoys making laser guns out of beer cans they're both students in Berklee College of Music and they were kind enough to

volunteer and do the sound and this is how the video looked after we had this out then

and then we step 10 and started doing the music so we're just going to show the different versions and discuss them before we show them as I said in on couldn't make it so he goes first as a punishment but he didn't send a video of himself talking about it and his considerations and asked us to show it hi everybody I'm here in my studio and not with you and that's quite an unfortunate turns up event but I had to go through a surgery nothing really serious but my doctors totally ordered me to stay and to rest for about two

weeks after that hopefully I'll get back and play basketball meanwhile I'm here in my studio and welcome you to the amazing panel that these great composers put together and now to talk a little bit about my music for this cue basically the way I was looking at it I had to create something that is frantic on one hand but on the other hand I had to create something that will be basically going over all the sound effects and what I found out that actually sometimes slow melodies they do the job much better than vast melodies I also found out that lower drum beats sometimes work a little bit better than all the higher

drumbeats and the sounds because all the sound effects and the shots are sort of like in a more high rent so basically I have chosen this kind of palette there are basically the same palette that is giving us sort of like the bottom and the frantic so this is basically going underneath then there are some effects orchestral effects that I found extremely powerful when it comes to this scene because they are frantic but also they stayed out stand out pretty good [Music]

and this is basically both instruments that are playing in a non-traditional way and then I definitely put together some sort of like assortment of percussions but again these are written too low and not very basically busy so basically they're giving just the bottom and the rhythm but they're not occupying too much space and lastly there is a

melody and the melody is being played by low brass and the reason why I did it was because again all the sound effects are sort of like on the higher range show this low melody and slow melody definitely standing out pretty good with all the sound effect without getting in the way and you can hear the melody here [Music] very basic ominous but that's the job we know that we are in sort of like a you know a very stress situation so we would like actually to give the ominous part to the melodic and this is also something melody is always good to bring from time to time because then you could just hang on to something you could

remember something and here is all together so you could hear the bottom part and here's the brass [Applause] strings are playing the triplets up there but they're not playing all the time so they're giving us sort of like the excitement but they're not playing all the time so they're not occupying all the area and this is pretty much it I wish everybody else lots of luck and hopefully I could see all of you next time on both of my feets and running and jumping like always see you later yeah I forgot to talk about in entre at the

beginning but you know he's actually I'm pretty sure everyone knows him is one of the top composer in the industry he did things like fall out and in Dragon Age and and he's awesome and he's an Israeli brother so yeah right so this is how he's final version [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] alright Jason I have to follow anon so walk us through the process what did you think about the video well first of all I thought it was genius that literally none of us knew anything about the game what it was called there was no direction for music whatsoever and we were really allowed to sort of do our own thing so how many how many composers

are in the audience with a show of hands oh wow alright and then how many non composers with a show of hands all right what about audio directors yeah in that all right there's there's some audio directors out there you know what really struck me about anons points is he talked a lot about the mix and when it comes down to it when you're dealing with a shooter which so many of these games have wall-to-wall music with them it is a big point of contention between the music and the sound effects and the easiest way to fix that and the hardest way to fix it is to know what the sound effects are going to be before you do the music a lot of times the musics running concurrently with gameplay and the sound effects might be done after the music I've worked with some audio directors that will actually figure out what key the music is going to be in because I'll have it in the description of the file and they'll purposely pitch the sound effects to be in the same key

as the music so that it's sort of a more harmonious balance but if you don't have a choice a lot of times what I end up doing is just know or expect that there's going to be gunfire and explosions and swords so you've got these sort of two lower mid-range and an upper mid-range kind of telephone frequencies that you know is going to be occupying space before the music even comes in so I basically approach this like every other project I've gotten then probably the last five or seven years which is a developer comes to me and says and it really is this every time we want a completely original score that doesn't sound like anything anyone else has ever done before and we want to be able to hear like five or ten seconds of the main theme or of action cue and for people to recognize immediately that that's a cue from our game okay you know thinks something really really identifiable like Raiders of the Lost Ark make it unique I mean it's sort of

it's a really it's a really tall order but what I love about that is they're already thinking outside the box in terms of instruments and sounds so with this one I pretended like they did that as well and not knowing what anybody else was doing I thought well probably what the you know sort of and this is nothing against what anyone else is done for their music I mean I heard it you know I've heard each other's work yeah we don't have I I'm the only one we have so I mean what would be expected from a track like this would be you'd have like maybe some big drums and like the big low brass and maybe a choir in the background or something and kind of lots of you know energy in the track so I thought okay I'm not going to do any of that for this I'm gonna do like what could be farthest from Orchestra and choir and big drums so I basically

scored it with electric guitars and drum machines with the idea that I saw with the enemies they sort of looked kind of native and and low-tech and you've got all this cool whatever with your samurai sword and your guns and you can fly so I thought maybe the that would be a nice contrast kind of you're highlighting the technology with the music that you're using as a player and then that way I've sort of already the pallet of sounds if I'm just doing electric guitar and drum machines is gonna be fairly different from maybe what another composer might work on so then the developer is kind of getting their wish so how many how many minutes do I have because I've got a couple of things and I might we have time video twice why don't we play the version with the sound effects and then I'll talk a little bit

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

so one of the things that I was really thinking of when I scored it was I was pretending like we'll watch it again and you can clap them if you want to um I was treating it like I was also doing the implementation for the music and that's what I've done for the last couple of titles that I'm still working on I've been doing the implementation as well I kind of took my own advice cuz a lot of people say when I'm starting out in games what should I do if I want to write music I was like what you need to learn how to implement it then you're sort of creating your own job in a way if someone needs sound effects implemented that's a different talk but it really made me think about this video differently because when I first watched it I never listened to the sound effects until I emailed you and said like I don't think I have the sound effects and then I just I just saw and you already had the music then yeah yeah I didn't listen to the sound effects before I did the music because normally I don't get to hear him and it's just I was trying to keep it real man so what I thought

was I would do something maybe with a kick drum and it would give it a little bit of momentum and I'd put it in seven cuz that would kind of make it feel like a little a little hiccup B but still sort of empowering I didn't want to do anything that sounded scary or was too ominous or anything like that I like the idea of the music making you feel more powerful as a player and kind of urging you on but I broke it up into sixty Seconds I sort of pretended like this was more like twenty minutes of gameplay and I broke it up into like eight different sections which go by super fast but it's more for the point of illustration than anything else so the guitars are really what is maintaining the energy and there's a little hi-hat in the background just going to that's really it everything else is electric guitars so from a interactive standpoint I pretended like we were still in an explore state before the video started and we're gonna do another example once I finished talking about this that just has the music so you can hear it a

little bit better but there's a like reversed drone guitar thing that kind of sounds like a pad so that was kind of in your explore state and then two seconds in the camera kind of pans to right and you see some of the enemies and that's sort of like an enemy spotted trigger and that would add in another layer of music that kind of made it getting ready for combat that's when the hi-hat comes in that's all that comes in it's just the hi-hat so if you walk away from them or if you don't engage them maybe for 20 seconds it's just sort of ticking along and it can you know it can loop or bring in different layers and act on its own and then eight seconds I think maybe you'd jump first or no you do your force push things on the enemies so I kind of considered that like engaging the enemy and that's when the the other guitarists came in so the piece of music action music kind of starts in earnest there and you can feel it step up but it's still the same number of layers and the same piece that

has that ambient music bed underneath it so this stuff is systematically stacking up kind of like a sandwich and at thirty Seconds there's a slow-motion thing that happens and I don't know what the gameplay reason is for that but it seemed like an important sort of moment maybe you're using a cool effect or something but also it limited the enemies back down to maybe two there were only like two enemies left so I consider that what did I put only two enemies left thin out music but keep persistent pulse so the drum machine and the hi-hat and everything that was sort of defining the combat music I like to use air quotes defining the combat music that goes away and I had a little um like ticketing depicting to continue to kind of a fuzzy wah-wah chord sort of guitar sound that came in and kind of picked up the momentum from the drum machines but it didn't really sound as combat II and the music you'll be able to tell it just gets really clear all the low end drops out and it's I was

thinking of focus focus like you've got two people left it's not as stressful you know just get these two guys down and then you're you're free and clear and then once all the enemies are gone it's like the next stage in the gameplay I've always been a huge fan of forward motion with music so if you're in combat for 30 seconds or for five minutes and then it's a defining point where combats over and you're moving on and want the music to change or I want you to have that reward I did this I did this one game based on a film a long time ago called flushed away it was about rats scurrying around but I was so excited it was one of the first games that I'd worked on and I got to talk to like Harry gregson-williams and he was doing the film score and I was really really pumped and I'm only talking about this because it does have reference but we've got a little more time since um so I'm making up for enon I'll just you know so I did this music

but they only had maybe 20 or 25 minutes in the music budget it was very very low budget and I think I wrote probably double that because I always write more music than is needed but even then I felt like maybe it wasn't enough and it was one of the first games I was able to play and hear my music in it so I played for maybe the five minutes on level 1 walking around the kitchen and you get all these unlockable things and you collect some stuff and then you there's an obvious point where you move on to the next room and I was like sweet I had no idea where the music was gonna go it was very much like you know we need five exploration cues and five cues based on this none of it was based on gameplay so I was experiencing the music for the first time after five minutes I get into the next room and the same piece of music starts playing again and it was such I just kind of like melted in my chair I was like really I mean oh and so I went through and I played it and then the next room the same piece of music and it's like a 60 second loop and it just just played and played and played in play so I've sort of been obsessive

about not having that happen again no matter what we're forward forward movement so that's why I did a key change it's about 40 seconds in when all the enemies are gone I did a very obvious key change like down a minor third or something so it feels completely fresh and in my head that's sort of like you're you're back to explore mode but there's danger so it's not going back to the just quiet pad with you know ambient sounds it's still got pulse going on and it's still in seven so it's automatically sort of give knew that momentum still in combat mode energy hi oh and then the second the second big slow motion thing was the dragon flying by which was so awesome I figured if the video slowed down right therefore the gameplay that maybe that would be a good place to emphasize something as well so there's like a stinger there basically that just kind of the music slows down briefly while the Dragons flying by and then at the very end I mean it just sort of stops

but I pretended like maybe you had just finished that chapter or that point and something came up it said like great job we're moving on and I'd put a stinger on it so one two three four five six seven I've got seven seven things in there that really I can't help it now because I've been composing knowing that I'm implementing this music myself in these other games so I couldn't help but put the music for this demo together that same sort of way and I you know really did it that way there's not a lot going on it's maybe three guitar tracks and and the drum machine track and then some of the stingers are like some swooshes or hits or something but I love the idea of lean and mean and having the music be really nimble like a musical ninja kind of jumping around and you're not committing yourself to these big long 30 or 60 second loops where if you want to kind of come back around to the beginning it sort of feels like you're starting over again it was more about

keeping it changing as much as possible and I thought the reverse guitar thing at the end was kind of a cool alien you know kind of sounded a little foreign sounded a little familiar but different yeah so you if the developer would approach you and say like hey this is my game what what do I do with music you would tell them to go after right um well if it's a if it's a game like that I would say yes this game this is a short video what should I do absolutely yeah and a lot of times even I will write let's say that this was going to be normally I do maybe a five-minute piece of music that would be you know combat track 1 or something like that it would have the ambient layers and kind of the middle-of-the-road layers and the key changes in a probably every 30 seconds because I'm just I like to have a very short attention span every 30 seconds something's changing and the I've been doing this a lot lately I'll write a five or eight minutes sweet and then I

end up implementing that as adaptive music but there are all these kind of 30 to 45 second points whether it's definite changes and they're kind of built in loop points and within those 30 or 45 seconds loop points I'll have doubled up on certain things like if it's this track I would probably have three drum machine tracks maybe one's got the kick drum one's got the hi-hat maybe another sort of mid-level thing and then I'll do that again times three but none of them would ever play at the same time they'd be kind of taking one and then this one and then that one goes in and they randomly go in and out when the loop occurs so it doesn't really sound like a loop it just sounds like you're going to the next section and that's that's all very kind of heady and abstract sort of ways to explain it but it is cool I mean F mod and wise are free to download and there's tutorials online and there's videos and it's one of those things if you start working with it especially earlier in your career I did it very late in mind but I

just realized you start learning how to do it and it kind of becomes engrained in your psyche and when you're right and you can't help but think about how it's going to be implemented and I think that I mean it can't be a bad thing maybe it would but before we continue look would you agree with the adaptive absolutely and I think that once you're implementing which I highly suggest to all composers it helps you you write differently because you're thinking you're thinking about the game you're thinking about gameplay you're thinking about different emotional states and no matter where you started or how you're educated it will affect how you write your cues so I think everyone here should go home and learn wise RF mod if you don't know it already even if you're a freelance or you think that's your your path it's something that I think we need to move forward with in the industry as composers in particular because I know that there are a lot of composers that that don't do that but I

think it does change how you compose it betters the game and the audio experience so yes I agree it's not just about interactivity either it's about avoiding repetition because let's face it repetition is like the death of game music that's the worst thing in the world so you can have one piece of music maybe it's looped for five minutes and it's only 37 maybe not 30 seconds long but it's it's played like five or six times in the loop but if you know how to implement and then you're thinking about that from a composition standpoint I've just hit play and walked away and I've let something go for 20 minutes and I never felt like oh yeah here we go again constantly recycling there's all this randomness and effects and things you can have like more enemies I'm going to increase the distortion in wise on my drum track because there's more enemies and that's actually happening outside of anything that you've written that's happening in real time in the engine and those kind of choices that you make within the int within wise or F mod are compositional choices those are creative choices so if you're just handing off

your tracks you're missing out on all this creativity and I think personally I find that a very exciting place to work so if you need to describe the feeling you were trying to support in the video in one word or two words what would it be that the main empowerment yeah with the airport with the airport alright awesome cool so oh we didn't write music only yeah music music only and just think about these these key points like the six or seven points that I was talking about you'll hear the music change [Music] [Music]

[Music] right now I need to follow that right so

for me this was a bit of a weird video because it kind of went against every instinct I usually have so the first the first panel I ever did as a composers panel we were talking about adaptive music and and I was the first one to answer the question so the guy was moderating asked like what are your thoughts about adaptive and I said like it's kind of it's like a rush to the gold you know where a lot of the peripherals want to go that way but not all games need it and I was kinda and then it turned out that the other guy on the panel had his own like adaptive software company so so it became like a whole argument about the deficit and usually I'm uh I wouldn't say that I'm not a big fan but I I'm very careful with that if like I asked myself and the developer a lot of times before I go with app does this game really need it because like I don't know a story-driven telltale game usually can do without and

there is a downside to adaptive at least the way I feel is that there is much less control the music you know what I mean it's like it creates an a whole new way of composing and a whole new way of listening to music and creating music which doesn't exist anywhere outside of video games but you don't always even know how it's gonna sound right you don't you're not sure how when the motives gonna come in you're not sure like you're kind of releasing it out there and it's always a really scary moment for me where you go like this is the adaptive music please be good playing the bill for the first time and usually it's cool but it's a very scary moment for me but at the same time that I was working with this I also teach a composing person in Israel and and we were talking about adaptive and then I saw this video and I felt like this this is the one moment I would definitely go adaptive this is

exactly the game where where this needs to happen and the second thing is that usually I kind of I'm on the side of you know supporting the story first of all in the feeling and like asking always asking the developer what what should like what do you want or the game designer probably the more correct person like what do you want the player to feel at the same time right because and here I was like all right so there is like guns and swords and zombies or whatever they are and the dragon and it kinda felt like this whole salad of things that someone mostly wanted it to look cool like it's done really really well but I feel it's like a bit over the limit you know what I mean like it's it's like let's take every cool element that has ever been tried in a videogame and pull them all together and make a whole thing out of it so I kind of went with the extreme for my version so I was

kind of thinking okay I should take like not the most expected genres here and they should have to be cool and they have to be like you said that they need like you wanted the guitar idea to feel different so I was kind of thinking maybe something oriental or you know not totally western sound and adaptive so yeah and I was kind of thinking what Elias can do we talked about F more than w eyes but at my course what we're talking at Elias at the same time so I was thinking like I'm gonna look what allies can do and and try to build something that will work to show the students as well and yeah so I'm warning this went a bit extreme but [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

so yeah this is also like you said pretty much the same like sync points you have the exploration at the beginning where you're working and not much happens and then you see the enemies or the music become more intense the dragon obviously is the same point that I think all of us like used and also there was this moment where everything becomes pink that I kind of felt it's the power up or something so I thought of that as as a bit of a different layer and yeah right so I'll just confess I wasn't paying attention when we chose to clip and so it's interesting what I'm like I looked at the clip I'm like oh it's action okay awesome it's Tom's photo original choice

and then he really insisted on thinking this video and just went away [Laughter] hi guys so when I fight when I paid attention and I looked at the video I'm like oh my god I've never written in this genre but I'm game I'm gonna do this sure and then I'm like okay well I guess I'll do something weird and non-action II although it ended up a little actually I have to say but then I you know I come from CalArts background so highly experimental but in the last few years I've been doing really cute music over at PopCap and that's been really fun but I kind of harken back to I really like shapes I like sound masses like I like Pender Eskie I like Leggett II and those kinds of things so I was like I want sound shapes so I'm just gonna start thinking about that so

I got out I thought I need like those kind of extended technique types sounds and yet at the same time I'm gonna work with what I have so I had Spitfire string quartet I had some other sample libraries I have a prophet 12 I'm like I'm gonna use those things so so then I like I started like listening through the sounds to be like I'm gonna also not only think of shape but I'm gonna come from the sound up so listen to the sounds see what they might inspire because remember this is not in my wheelhouse so I don't have like any any kind of not that anybody here has a formula but I'm like don't know so listening to the sounds choosing the sounds and thinking about sound shapes so I found some really cool articulations in the strings and then I

would like put it on a track I was I was using Pro Tools I put it on track and I would make this just giant blob of black that stuff and oh my god that's cool okay I like insects so I'm like oh yeah I like that okay and so then I was looking for that kind of stuff and I put these like blobs in different spots that I thought blobs should go go no I I really do come from a formal training so it's right at the moment but but I thought you know it's good I'm coming from a place of shape then start thinking about the shape of the video and the different points like you were talking about and you were talking about as well like where are the the markers of change right because we all do adaptive music of some kind like where are those moments where I want to change in the melody or the feel or something like that so I chose those bull and blast type moments you know as the shape shifters and I also emphasize them with

some other weird sounds that I found you know added to the sounds that the sound designers made um sorry sound designers and then I had all that going and I'm like okay but this is action so I'm gonna throw in a taiko drum did it and I did use low brass so in the middle section I'm like it has shape but I also want it to but I'm gonna I'm gonna play it pay homage to the action cue and I'd want it to have a big payoff okay big payoff so I chose my like peak of the cue I'm like the 3/4 mark and the traditional sense and then it drifts by drifts back so it's kind of like an a/b a again to the shape so conceptually coming from ideas of shape and sound and structure and

then also working with the actual sounds that I had and then I built this thing [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Applause] the dragon is an interesting point because two of us made like you know the music Oh even higher on the dragon like Jason and Dean on in the two of us just yeah drop the music because I wanted to get like I did because I wanted to get this effect of you know like and it's like a trick that actually a lot of like is being used really often and it's really works well like in Lord of the Rings when Rohan attacked like there is like the whole main theme and then the moment the two armies collide they go like nothing right it's like when do you use silence

or when do you back off to let something else happen like I'm feeling you know yeah all right it's cool so what was the original like oh yeah that'll be interesting oh there's a music score to the original yeah I don't know I've been looking yeah I actually I wanted to apologize about it like I I think it's awesome and I have no idea who is she yeah the developers name I think is zhang jian cheng i pretty sure I'm not pronouncing it correctly but I'm not sure where the music it from can be stock music or I I tried to find out but I didn't [Music]

[Music] [Music] the music out with the dragon but yeah it's interesting because I don't know to

me it's kind of the the original felt like a lot of elements that each of us kind of emphasized and there it's like you know a lot of the things together alright cool so let's talk a little I have two things I prepared questions but I don't think we have enough time we're just gonna ask questions but one question I thought was interesting in this case is so obviously like it's very different right it's I've seeing the same thing with different music makes you feel really different and each time I'm doing this panel I'm really surprised by like how many options there are you know what I mean like I I always come in thinking like ah with this video it's gonna sound exactly the same everyone are gonna do exactly the same thing and then I keep getting surprised so the question is do you think there is

a right answer do you think the how would like if you would be the developer let's say it like that how based on what would you choose which is the best not not like which person you know what which let's say you're a developer you're seeing four different videos with different music your yourself is not a musician do it just go with your instinct do you well that's the blessing and curse of music isn't it all comes from a personal standpoint each person hears something if it's like heavy metal with Orchestra that's gonna elicit one emotional response from one person and a completely different emotional response from another person just based on their own musical experience so I mean it's completely different from the person so you think it should be chosen by the game designers personal favorite at the end of the day or should he go like you know go to a composer and say like I don't know you you need to

decide who makes the music here no I think it depends I mean if you're talking about an an audio director usually they'll be with the ones probably making the decision or no I'm more speaking about audio directors are musicians eventually right like they usually at least they know music really well no I'm thinking if you're not a musician at all you're just an indie developer or you know a company without an audio director and because this happens they are getting contacting musicians right they see a few versions of things and they need to decide which one they're going with well in that case if they're deciding probably without knowing themselves they're probably gonna look to references within you know the industry of games that are like that genre they're gonna be like oh I listen to this I listen to this I really like this soundtrack I like how this music works here probably they'll do their research and they'll do it based on

probably experiences they've already had the shortfall of that is that they don't get to have that new experience like Jason was talking about like what make it something that we've never heard before they don't get that piece if they're doing it based on something they already know unless they're quite adventurous or they already have a relationship with a composer if they have a relationship with the composer they probably will trust that composer to come up with something unique and that's a great situation I have to say yeah that would be the best of both worlds for everybody but of course it requires either a previous relationship between the audio director and the composer or maybe the audio director and those of other titles that the composer has worked on and don't necessarily want the composer to do that title again but they appreciated the aesthetic that the composer brought to that title and it said hey like could you do something like that for our game I mean as the composer and you're the poseur and audio director but I've never been able to hire myself but I do appreciate oh I appreciate being able to

have a big level of trust because that's really what it comes down to what really opened my eyes when I was working on Tomb Raider with Alex Wilmer he said that biggest compliment I've ever gotten as he said that I made him look like he knew what he was talking about when they had meetings and he was talking about the music because it is like I mean the audio director is like putting a lot of trust in the composer to basically make them look good and make them yeah like hey guys look I know what I'm doing I hired the right person and they're doing everything that we talked about and they're doing it really well because if it if it doesn't work out for whatever reason if it's you know the music direction changes the game changes it kind of all comes back and falls onto the audio directors shoulders like how come the music isn't working and then you fall back to well maybe we should use some temp tracks and figure out something and like get you know this is like a Bioshock game and Garry Schyman did Gaea Bioshock let's hire Garry and it falls - that would that would be an amazing choice but it falls to like a

safe creative choice because it's something that they've already done as opposed to Gary is an amazing composer he does all these different things let's hire Gary and see what he can come up with yeah as opposed to trying to find someone to fit a mold that you've already predetermined like get of someone that you appreciate as an artist and let them help you build the mold trust the artist yeah alright let's take questions from people here there's a microphone right that's a very lonely microphone do you mind stepping up to it don't be shy don't be shy hey this is really fascinating thank you I would love some more general tips on adaptive music I've been dabbling in it myself lately and I find I don't know if it's because I can't I am too close to it it never feels right to me I mean obviously if you're writing music that's very bad bass then it works better than if you're

writing music that has some melodic elements or harmonic changes so I guess like you know orders are there's some general guidelines like do you always try to have transitions locked to a beat or to a bar do you always yeah does that and this is our work even if there are interruptions to melodic material like stuff like that I can do a quick so like if I'm doing a five-minute piece of music that's gonna be all these different layers and stuff most of the time I'll keep it all in the same key so the whole thing is in D minor which might sound amazingly boring but that has already limited me to sort of the a thousand different versions of things I could do in my head everything's tempo locked everything's in the same key maybe there's some meter changes but I've got a program that all into wise when I'm putting it in but the idea is like simplicity less is more and lots of randomization at least for me and I mess with the meter and I also do the walk away test where I just hit play and I'll go and you know like grab a bite to eat I'll let it play and kind of hear it in the background as I'm walking around and kind of try to distance myself a little bit because you get sick of it I mean

you work on the same two minutes for a day you hate it and you have to be objective and try to then implement it as well it's definitely tough with the lock lock in a key key or related keys yeah to different sections so that when you move from one thing to the next it makes sense and then I sometimes use custom cues but they're at very specific points and I also lock in tempo early because those types of things when you do simplify as Jason just sent to certain things do not change then you're gonna make other things more easy in terms of transitions are the hardest part with adaptive music right you're branching off to something new you don't know when it's going to happen that's really interesting to think about right and compositionally interesting too I think quick follow-up just what's the shortest loop you've ever composed as a section because I think if anything I go too long so what's like the show yeah well I could say in mobile you don't they don't let you go long because it's all about

space right so I don't know I I don't do anything on music wise yeah like if it's an adaptive context if your exploration to battle what's the shortest just as like I did music for a game called mark of Cree which was one of the first sort of MIDI based adaptive music things it was all a lot of percussion so I had loops that were literally like a tenth of a second because it was just a and I have a going to go out cool it's that little tiny thing was Luna I had 15 seconds but I very much agree with what you said like at least one when I'm working with adaptive I spent I don't know if most of the time but a lot of time you know perfecting the transitions this is for me kind of the place where it's like yes thing in the same key and and the tempo that's usually the case in adaptive I think but when stuff change I want them to feel as natural as I can so I usually spend a lot of time on that so you know going with stingers and things

like that and cool thank you so much thank you you were talking earlier about how the feeling of the music was trying to be condensed down into one word and I noticed that all of your takes had very different ideas of what that seemed scene seemed like some of them were empowering others tense and dramatic others chaotic do you think that if the audio director or the narrative game designer came up and said hey we want this scene to be empowering or chaotic or they had one of these ideas would that have made your music more similar to each other or could it still have just been as varied so I think a it's the one question I always ask a developer like this is no matter you know how long we've been working together no matter anything I always say that like give me the one or two words that you know to dance it down to it I think it really helps musically and yeah personally I think it would make it a lot closer like the music right because

you know being like epic right it's if that's the feeling that you you want to do then we will probably go in the general same direction like it wouldn't be as different as as it is now the core difference for mostly for I think good composers is when the base is interpreted in a different way you know what I mean like when you think like this this needs to be sad or I don't know lonely which which are two different things hi thank you all I was just curious if these videos would be available for download or educational kind of use yeah they're supposed to be in the GDC Bowl in the vault yeah I think so then I hope I'm the last answer ever yeah hey thank you guys very much um I have a question that's more about the collaborative process so I know Jason you talked about

like being the mix you sometimes make them makes this sound it can be tempting to make a mix that sounds full on its own without really knowing how the sound effects are gonna play and if it turns out that they don't they actually kind of clash at the end of the day how do you usually go about you know remix it or iterating with the sound designer if it's a different person usually by the time everything's kind of being implemented and kind of finished it's too late so it's more the the either the music mixer or the audio directors shoulders to kind of carve things out with EQ normally yeah just to kind of make things sit better and again it's probably pretty dramatic EQ or if you listen to the music by itself it's like we're all the lower mids like how come there's no bottom end well that's for explosions and footsteps or whatever it's better when it's a back and forth thing but it's not always the case sometimes it's just impossible there's multiple composers multiple people doing sound effects multiple levels going on

at the same time depending on the scope of the game thank you I think we're out of time so yeah one more one more we're getting yeah you're good whoo whoo so I was I was just curious it seemed like you scored these like and I think contextually because of the dragon it's probably implicit there's something important happening there but how might you do how might you have scored this video differently if it was if it was definitely just like one of those emergent moments where you're like in an open world and you just sort of run across these things and it's entirely possible the player might go through almost exactly the same fight like five minutes from now how am i cause cuz these these seemed like you know a big moment how might you keep that intensity up with the full knowledge that that exact same music might play again or something very similar to it might play again I've done a lot of stuff like that we're using a stinger to highlight the moment and then when you're programming the music into the engine you can you know

duck the duck the rest of the music or you could even have if it was something that may happen at least more than once like it's gonna happen four or five times I would have four or five different stingers that would randomly and not repeatedly play and maybe duck the other music out or also trigger a second layer that had like a pad or like a little choir or something that kind of emphasized the moment but it would only do it that one time and then it would trigger a different one a different time just make sure it automatically varies right and I mean the game plays a repeating element that you know would be significant each time then you can you know use that as a compositional element and a way to change your music [Applause] you