The Sounds of Year Walk and DEVICE 6

[Music] okay so sorry about the technical issues uh my name is daniel olsen i'm a freelance composer and i've been working on year walk and device 6. so that's what i'm going to talk about today first i started making music back in 1995 on the amiga commodore amiga and i that's when i also started making games with my friend so i drew pixel art on in deluxe paint i don't know if anyone ever used that and i i also started doing chiptunes in pro tracker in in 2001 i started my first real job in the game industry at massive entertainment before i moved on to a bunch of other companies and every company i worked at i tried to

pitch my music but it didn't always go that well until i ended up at south end which was a small company and they as they grew they gave me a bigger possibilities to grow as a composer and a sound designer and my my my last project there was ilo milo where i worked full time with only music and sound six years ago i moved to california and left the game industry i worked for playstation r d for a while and created sound effects libraries uh music and art for in-house projects uh but it was only for a short time before i left and started working in the tech space because that's what pays the bills but i really start started missing working with games so in 2012 i contacted simogo that i used to work with before

southend and they they actually started their work on their fourth game and they they actually talked about contacting me about making the music so that was really lucky um so i ended up working on their fourth game which was a year walk uh i don't know if anyone here played it okay a few of you it's uh for those of you who haven't played it it's a first person 2d mystery horror game based on an old swedish myth called ear walking and people run out in the middle of the night around christmas to get a glimpse into the future and then i see all these weird creatures so the whole game is based about you running around in a dark forest and

experience all these strange things the other game is device six i don't know if anyone played that here okay same people i guess uh it's quite different it's um an interactive mystery novel where your text is your map and your narrator and it's heavily influenced by 60s spy movies and general weird things it's quite lovely um so both these two games has been really um um well oh sorry uh yeah both of these two games got a lot of praise for how engaging they were and narrative and both in design and audio and and

for this to happen there was a lot of pieces that had to fit together and the audio was one of them and that's what i'm gonna try and explain what how we went about and did that so um okay next one so how do you make music engaging how do you engage the player and how do you make a scene in a game engaging i'll try to answer how we try to solve these three things um i think first of all music can if you can have a really beautiful track that's really great by itself but it won't necessarily make a scene better if you add it also if you have a track that's perfect for one scene it might make another scene really weird because it won't fit even though they're very similar so basically what it comes down to is how and when you use what track

so basically you need the right song for the right moment um so what i like to do because i'm not i'm not a school musician so i find my own ways to figure out music styles so what i like to do is kind of like an actor and get into a role before starting working on something so what i do is find a lot of references for music for device 6 and year walk i had simon and jonas helping me uh putting together a playlist and then we i would listen to that for weeks i would not listen to anything else because for me when i sit down and write music i think you make like hundreds of decisions small decisions all the time and you you will unconsciously

just pick the solutions that are closest in your memory so if you have been listening to a certain style of music you're going to make decisions based on what you've been listening on i don't know if this is true but i think it works for me at least um so um then you have to write the song and i don't think there's any right or wrong way to write music you can do orchestral um you can do yeah one more now you can do orchestral or analog you have uh like here i have some bananas hoops up through wires and uh or this crazy guy sabi lozano down here he's he can play music on anything but my point is it doesn't matter how you make the music but the music has to be emotional somehow for me music is all about emotions

and so music that makes you feel one way or another is doing something right and a track that doesn't make you feel anything is pretty useless for me so i made this pretty little chart for you and what i'm trying to say is that any emotion is good but the guy on the right you want to stay away from that because if you if you don't feel anything when you're writing the music chances are that no one else is going to feel anything when they listen to it so i can't go back one step yeah yeah it's not enough to just have a perfect track when you're trying to create an emotional scene in a game you also need to consider some other factors and that's the pace of the game

character camera movement what's going on and are there other sounds like ambient noises people talking or whatever it could be and the goal for me is to try and draw the player in and make them feel connected to the experience and if the music doesn't fit well with the game the player will feel disconnected so what you want is to um create a unified coherent experience where this the result is much larger than the individual pieces and that's not just the music and the sounds working together that's everything the entire narrative oh sorry so it doesn't matter

how brilliant your music is by itself you can create magic if your music doesn't work together with the other elements so how do you do that this is by far the hardest thing i mean at least for me when i work on music because i usually just start writing and then after a while i realized oh i'm writing this kind of music i so i have an example here for your walk where i wrote a piece that we all really liked and i think i intended for it to be in the menu but it was even too intense for the menu um so i'm gonna play this in three versions and this is the original version

so foreign okay yeah so that the game the game is really really slow and it actually worked really well without any music at all but it was extremely scary um and but adding this muted music just made it really weird because all of a sudden it didn't feel connected to it so what i tried to do was um uh make it slower and try and consider more the pace of the game and how delicate it was

so we're gonna play the next so [Music] so this still didn't work it was too intense for the game like every little footstep mattered in the audio experience so what i finally tried to do was record this piece without any metronome at all just to try and get a more natural flow to it more like a wind or maybe someone breathing or something and it turned out like this

[Music] [Music] [Music] okay so that finally worked and it we really felt like that enhanced the entire experience and we're quite happy about it but it it could be quite a process and kind of uh hard because you tend to get attached to music that you write you have to remove all the stuff that you like but then in the end it makes everything

better so it's better for everyone um so and then there's another thing that i've been thinking about in most successful audio projects i've been working on i noticed i've been doing this or we have been doing this and in most um uh after realizing this i also noticed that most games that i admire that they also do this so what it is is that a way to connect the player to the music so my idea is this that if you if you are at a restaurant with a friend and you're talking to each other you're having a good time and your favorite song starts playing you might not notice because you're so into the conversation and the drinks and everything but then if your friend would say oh i love this song then you would

notice and then you would you would probably pay more attention to the music um and this is something that we did in both ear walk and device six i don't know if we did it consciously or subconsciously we did it anyway on the title screen our ear walk um you have to tap for the logo to appear and every tap you do plays one note in the theme song and we have parts where uh there's this woman singing in the forest and you have to find her by listening to your voice and in device 6 [Music] the entire game starts with mentioning a radio and you will hear the music taken from the radio and uh anna is talking about how she hates that music and i think these things make the player aware that oh it's music and even if you don't do this again throughout the whole game

i think subconsciously people notice and feel a little bit more attached to to the music and uh zelda is a really good example of this every game there's something with music and i think nintendo in general is really good at doing this uh so here's one more thing um we did this in both your walk and the y6 and we try to blur the line between sound effects and music so the player shouldn't necessarily know if it's music player playing or if it's a a sound effect and we did this by uh

i mean simon fletcher from simogo he he handled all the sound effects but i he asked me to compose some sound effects with the music for the instruments that i write the music with and then i hadn't handed them on off to him and he would maybe change them or just use them as they were here's one example from device six if you notice if you listen after the analog sounds in the background [Music]

so [Music] okay so i took those sounds and i stripped them out and handed them over to simon and he took these and he tweaked them and used them for transitions and like other effects and mixed them with with his own sounds it was quite quite effectful and also here's some example of leaps and loops that i made i think you can hear most of these in the game actually so yeah that's one way we try to bridge sound effects and music and bring them together to get

more of a coherent audio experience another thing i i notice i've been doing in almost every project is audio collages so pretty early on when you have some music and you have some sound effects just put it together like edit it together and try and get a feel for how the audio will sound like and you will notice pretty quickly if if it sounds like a game you want to play or not and then you can make some decisions from that here's an early collage from ear walk before we had any sound effects in it [Music] this is an early version of the music [Music] too [Music]

so [Music] so from this what stayed was the footsteps although simon spent i don't know how many hours tweaking those footsteps to perfection but their breath didn't make it on the screen didn't make it either here's another one from device 6 that simon put together for every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded yet in holding scientific research and discovery and respect as we

should we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captain so this one is more of a conceptual piece but when we heard it i think we think all of us got the goosebumps actually because it really encapsulated what we wanted to achieve with the audio and i mean it doesn't take a lot of time either so it's really worth doing so is there anything else you can do to make your music fit better something i always do is that i try to make a lot of contrast between the songs um even though all the music are in the same universe and the same world doesn't mean that it has to sound all the same and um i mean these are my personal opinions of course but i i try to make as a wide range of motions as possible and i think it's more important that the music fits well with the scenes in the game

than on a separate soundtrack so that's something i used to usually think about and it's also really important to let go of your ego and listen to what other people think because they're usually right and if even if you get some gnarly feedback it's a good chance for you to just improve of your work because usually it will end up much better and in the end it's not your own personal creation that matters it's the game as a whole that is important and if the game is excellent people will think your music is excellent too and another thing that happens in almost every project is that i i set up all these boundaries and i write music and then i can't write anymore because i feel like i don't have any more ideas and i usually notice this because

whatever i write will sound like a really bad copy of what i wrote previously and so what i tried to do then is to uh uh challenge myself and challenge the boundaries that i have uh and i i always think about a gdc talk from 2011 by yoshio sakamoto who made warioware and rhythm heaven to my favorite game franchises so he says something like this i tell all my artists composers and song guys to pull down their pants underpants and expose themselves of course he meant this metaphorically but i think what he was trying to say is that you they can't be afraid of exposing themselves in their work because if they're holding something back it will show and you you can't be afraid to just go all in and if you do that you you will

just make better stuff so i try to think of this when i get stuck and i try to challenge the boundaries when i that i already set up and see if i can stretch the concept further and don't worry about limitation or anything i just um just go ahead and and do stuff that i shouldn't be allowed to do according to my own rules and a lot of times i realize that i haven't been playing the entire field the the concept was much bigger than i originally thought and other times it will just create ideas for uh for for more music so and this i'm gonna play an example of a song where i i tried to challenge simogo uh i didn't think they were gonna like this because i thought it was too extreme and two outs outside the concept

so let's see [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] do so if you play the game you will feel like this is not outside the concept but at the time when i wrote it i felt like it was definitely in the outskirts of what what the concept would allow but simogo loved it and i mean i

liked it too and it ended up in the game and it was all good so a little summary pay attention to the pacing of the game and it's not important how you create the music but it should make you feel something remind the player that the music is present and don't forget that audio implementation is a really expressive tool um oh i guess i forgot to mention that and okay just real quickly how you implement the audio is crucial to the entire experience and this is something that simon fletcher is so good at and the reason why ear walk and device 6 both turn out so well if you think of the music and the sound effects like the chords and the melodies of a song

the audio implementation would be the rhythm and i would hand over songs to him and he would flip them backwards and pitch them up and down and layer them on top of each other and just create these really cool things and so if you're not doing the implementation yourself make sure you work really closely with the person that's doing it and you have a tight connection because that could really elevate something that is okay to something that is excellent okay next point is create contrast between songs don't play it safe if you get stuck try to challenge yourself and that's all [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

i don't know if there's time for any questions i think we ran over time all right thanks for the presentation one of your points was creating contrast between your songs within a project what elements do you focus on to maintain cohesion across all the songs for a game so what what i focus on to contain a coherent sound between songs even though i try to make them different it's usually just sound design i try to keep similar instruments or if i have a certain theme i tried to make that go through or like in device six case i had these background noises i would add them or something like that okay so you you keep open to the idea of tempo and rhythm and genre and all that sort of thing and

just try and keep like a sound palette to use across your songs like the same types of sounds uh yeah so if i use the same sounds between songs definitely i always start i create one song and then i for the next song i continue with those sounds and then i just add on and add on until i have like a big library of sounds right thank you thank you hey um on one of your slides you had a bullet point that said shortest frame of reference and i wasn't sure if i missed it or you glossed over and i was curious what that meant uh the shortest frame of reference i was referring to when i would listen to music the playlists and when i write music what would be the closest in in my memory thanks thank you

all right thank you very much you