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Hollywood Sound: Part One If it ‘Aint Baroque, Don't Fix It Once style and structure are understood, there is very little else the composer needs other than the talent to deliver. If a game requires something innovative and different in terms of its score, it will be evident. The project itself must make these decisions. Game structures will prove the primary evolutionary force in redefining music for games. The structure and styles will evolve with the gameplay and emotional content needs of the project, emerging as new genres emerge, as before with cinema on a film to film basis. The interactive arts may not represent the great breakthrough in the stylistic avant-garde some seem to be pushing for. The extant models of interactive music and their relationship with content, or 'image', have already been solidified into a mainstream phase. This is of course not to say there will always be stylistic and structural alternatives to any notion of a mainstream. Hollywood composing talent seems currently restricted within an exclusively orchestral context, and is arguably an initial phase of attaining critical currency on par with the film industry. Everywhere in the industry this push for 'equality' is prevalent, through specific BAFTA interactive awards, and in Grammy categorization. This will, in turn, open up more opportunities for established and successful composers from other media to enter the game development environment. The Music Industry: Licensed Content In much the same way that bigger name composers are being enticed into the interactive realm, the potential to make use of big-name licensed music content is also gearing up as the next-gen platforms all promise online compatibility. Hollywood films have, for many years, succumbed to the inclusion and cross promotional value of licensed music material, as in Flashdance's ‘high concept' marketing marriage of both film and music content (5). Licensed music can, of course, be used extremely artistically, in the case of Scorsese's Goodfellas and the majority of Woody Allen's filmic output. However, this does often happen as an artistic decision, but more a decision on the part of executive promotional pressure on a project. Licensed music content already has a similarly chequered history within the video game industry. Garry Schyman:
“Licensed music makes sense in games when it is appropriate. In sports games and racing games it's an obvious choice – it works and sounds right. In any game that needs source music, it would make sense to license the songs rather than have the composer write new ones. What I think is a big mistake is thinking that ‘kids' will buy a game because this or that band has contributed tracks to it. If a game is good they will come and if the songs actually are wrong creatively for the game then putting them in will make the game less appealing. Kids are smart and know intuitively when they are being condescended to. Songs do not entice people to buy a game and filmmakers have learned that lesson over and over again. When you look at the top 100 box office films over the last twenty years the list is nearly entirely populated with films with lush orchestral scores that droves of kids paid money to see.” (3) Used again as a predominantly promotional tool, licensed music has often sat uncomfortably within the video game's interactive content realm. The idea that the tracks were not interactive or ‘reactive' to gameplay could be espoused as a reason why they would not survive. With the dawn of the iPod came the notion of user-defined playlists and user-defined music content, notions already opened up by the Xbox. There is now a whole universe of downloadable content waiting to be hooked up to your interactive experience. The structural potential to adapt music content to gameplay is huge. Players become creators. We can use the analogy of a DJ, within the sampling and podcast culture, re-appropriating cultural content as the user sees fit, in order to create new unintended (at least on the part of the original creators) juxtapositions, in order to illustrate where this phenomenon fits in a cultural context. A game's soundtrack can be totally user defined and totally user controlled: a playlist for combat, a playlist for stealth, a playlist for stunts, for pause menus, for any type of gameplay that the user wishes to define. This actually establishes a completely new realm of music for games whereby the user becomes partially a creator of the content they play. This should not be an unfamiliar concept to the PC mod community who for years now has taken an active role in the games they play by sharing custom built levels, skins, and sound content. The next-gen consoles, to some extent, make this possible within the console market. Customization, skinning, modding, and user freedom is something wholeheartedly embraced by the Xbox 360's pre-release campaign. Further to this, one can imagine a situation whereby the content of a piece of music can be scanned and ‘beat mapped' by the console. It would be able to put the tracks into categories based on tempo, key or on ‘genre' fields for certain categories of gameplay. It could even transition seamlessly from track to track in much the same way the DJ software (such as Native Instruments' Traktor DJ) currently allows the user to overlay tracks of similar tempos. The sound implementers can be clever about how they set up the structures for any customizable content to fit into the game. They could automate the breaking up of any track into the interactive components mentioned above in the structural composition section. Identifying intros, outros, high intensity looping sections, as well as calmer sections or sections from different songs in the same key, musically educate the console to transition in a ‘musical' way from a track in the same key to a related key. Programmatic stripping of audio data into useable chunks and re-appropriating of that data is ripe for exploitation in online consoles that allow for user defined musical content to be used in any game. The old notion that licensed music wasn't adaptive will become a long forgotten adage. Same game, Dual content In terms of music content, this could mean that the soundtrack a game ships with is only given a cursory listen before the user decides to utilize their custom content. This, in fact, makes it more and more critical that the user is given a hook on the music that is included in the game. Big name composers and exclusive licensed content may be the only way to do this. The notion that a game is a complete cultural artifact, a gesamkunstwerk (or ‘totally integrated work of art'), in that its music, sound, performances, and visual style are all part of the experience has yet to be seen. One cannot imagine, for example, removing Howard Shore's score from such a fully integrated work as The Lord of the Rings movies and replacing it with user defined content. Maybe this is because the very interactivity of a video game encourages a variety of individual playing styles, problem solving techniques, tastes, and is in direct contradiction to the experiencing of a story being told in ‘one way.' The sense is that future games will offer an ‘authentic' experience with score and visual styles intact, as well as a modified option of the same game which offers users total freedom via customizable content. We are, indeed, already seeing these shifts being made in this direction. Where next? While game sound and more broadly speaking, video games in general, begin to adopt a Hollywood action genre model, both in terms of content and marketing, one can only hope that the games industry will truly mirror the film industry, in that there has always been an independent and underground vein which the mainstream feeds off. Where this will come from in the post-goliath, publisher-centric battlefield remains to be seen. Most independent games companies currently exist to be groomed and bought up by the big publishers. Only time will tell how the ‘independent video game' will compete with the giant publishers, and how their musical needs will be serviced and created by a Hollywood or Independent sound production sector. In part two: a long overdue, in-depth look at Hollywood and mass entertainment convergence in Surround Sound, not only from the traditional technical perspective, but from the aesthetic and historical parallels of IMAX and Ride Film.
Notes: (1) This is not to say that ‘name' composers will be doing all the work. In the model used by Big Blue Box on Fable, Danny Elfman provided a theme which was elaborated on and worked into the game by the in-house composers. (2) Bill Brown Interview by Rob Bridgett, July 2005. http://billbrownmusic.com http://composer4film.com (3) Garry Schyman Interview by Rob Bridgett, July 2005. http://www.garryschyman.com (4) Scott Morgan, Sound Director for Radical Entertainment, Interview by Rob Bridgett, August 2005. www.radical.ca (5) ‘High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood.' Edited by Wyatt, Justin. Schatz, Thomas G, (University of Texas Press, 1994) ______________________________________________________ |
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