TITLE: Music: Not just an afterthought, please AUTHOR: Tom Carrick DATE: 8/11/2005 10:30:00 ip. ----- BODY:

Is Hubbard locked the cupboard? It would seem so. Rob Hubbard - considered one of the greats in composing music for Commodore 64 games back in the 80s - now has a cushy job as Audio-Technical Director at EA, which involves no actual composition of music. Why? Seriously, why? One of the greatest game music composers of all time, and he's composing anymore. He used to compose for EA, but why not now? Apparently, game music has no place in (at least western) games anymore. Nowadays, the best music you can hope for is if the music changes when you get into a battle. Now, Japanese RPGs, and Square's in particular, has nice music, just for the record, Final Fantasy 6/7/etc, Xenogears and the rest have some really awesome music, but let's just concentrate on us westerners for now. Back in the days of the C64, music was well thought out, and it could be written awesomely thanks to the SID chip. Let's take Supremacy as an example. If you don't know the game, go check it out, you basically try to overthrow this evil guy in space by manning planets and builing an army. The music, is stunning. It starts with just one sound type and an echo. You get the feel of the emptiness of space, the complete lonliness. In a possible reference to your colonisation of space, it gains more notes, a bassline, and the tune is much more pronounced. It also hints at the progress against the rival, and this comes to a climatic point, maybe hinting at his eventual defeat. The music then suddenly changes tone to a sort of... "there's something worse out there", and the last piece repeats. I guess for the next rival this repeats again a few times, until the music is over. This is well thought out music. What's more interesting, however, is that this was composed by one man - Jeroen Tel, one of my personal favourite C64 composers. One man. These days an entire team has the nearly the whole devlopment cycle to work on the music, and all we get is a fairly dull ambient soundtrack at the midrange, and maybe some half-decent songs at best. The best relatively recent music in a game is probably from Omikron: The Nomad Soul. However, the music serves more of a plug for Bowie than as a game soundtrack, mostly because the music can only be accessed once, at specific places. The one exception to this is the intro music, which complements the intro perfectly. As another example, Robocop 3, again the C64 version by Jeroen Tel. The intro music (don't remember if it's loading, intro, or title, or what, but the first piece of music anyway) is just awe-inspiring. Ot at least violence-inspiring. By the end of it you seriously want to yell "DIE MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRS" at the screen and hit the fire button with a hammer in an attempt to kill everything on the screen. Just to change the composer, let's go to Rob Hubbard himself. Sanxion. Best piece of music in a game. Ever. In this case it has nothing to do with the game, it's just nice music. While this might just seem like a rant of the "omg sid am good", I'm actually aiming at something here. Game developers and publishers these days have big audio teams. Like, big, seriously. Why don't they make use of them? Tel and some others are still going, but not many big games get the music/sound outsourced, I would imagine it's too expensive when you already have a team. A useless team that does nothing, though. I'm just going to re-iterate for the sake of it. Music is important. It can make me feel like I'm in the game. I don't want to be shooting at starfighters and have bland elevator music in the background. I WANT ACTION. Even the almighty X-COM fails in this. Dark broody, excellent music, but it's a pointless when I'm in a massive firefight, isn't it? Make the music represent what is happening in the game. However, big however. Don't use music when silence is better, you can still fail here. If I'm playing Thief, or Metal Gear *, or Splinter Cell, I don't want music. Just stfu already or I won't hear the next guard tootle into the path of my blackjack/neck braking skills. Yeah, it's a balancing act, but it can't be that hard, eh?

----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Anonyymi EMAIL: URL: DATE: 14:28 Evil Genius, X2, anything by Maxis, GTA, Civilization 3, etcetera.

All fairly recent games with fairly decent music, I'm sure people would agree. Of course, you may not like this music, but given that the music in The Sims, for example, is sometimes actually sung in that crazy gibberish of theirs, I suppose you're allowed not to. You do, though, have to agree that these are modern games with music that at least has made the effort.

I guess that the biggest problem with game music today is that there's more of it. A quick look in Civilization 3's music directories turns up over two and a half hours of music. Now, when game music was a single four minute SID file, I certainly remember waiting for the music to loop round again to "the music where I kick ass" and that's a pretty easy situation to get into when you spend twenty minutes listening to this four minute loop. You'll hear the entire soundtrack to the level five times during that, of course you're going to get used to the tune, make it personal to you, know its rhythms. That little three kilobyte tune is going to be one of the only solid things in your ever-changing action-game world.

To look at a modern action game for contrast, Lego Star Wars has eight hundred and sixty-six megabytes of music.
Bit of a difference, there.

Modern game music simply doesn't play the same way the old stuff did. It's longer, often quieter and more subtle than chiptunes, more likely to fade into the background because of the recent trend for reactive music, where the game knows what you're doing and plays music appropriate to the situation you're in. In fact, no matter how good the music in a game with that feature is, it's never going to be memorable, simply because, with the game constantly switching between tunes for quiet, tense and action moments in the game, you're probably never going to hear the same thing twice.

So, while Knyght makes a valid point that music is possibly less memorable nowadays, I'd have to say that modern game music is a more subtle beast, pacing itself to your gaming style, playing the tune that you need to hear, instead of pressing a pace upon you through sheer force of the composer's skill.

Which is better?
Obviously Nobuo Uematsu thinks that we should hear only one tune at a time, evoking setting and pacing according to his interpretation of the design of the game. That's fair enough, I suppose, but anyone who's played a Final Fantasy game will tell you how, after the first twenty or so hours, you pretty much want to kill, maim and generally harm each and every person responsible for making you hear the game's single, repetitive, ever-returning battle tune yet another time as you have to kill off yet another group of generic monsters.
So is reactive music the way to go?
Maybe it is. Maybe it won't become repetitive. Maybe it won't annoy the people playing by looping itself for the millionth time, triggering a complete nervous breakdown. Maybe it will be up in all the right places, down in all the right places and somewhere in the middle in all the right places. Maybe it won't. With reactive music, the game is in some ways dependent on the player for its pacing. If a game is failing to engage a player, and the music which might have added some pace to the game, created some kind of edginess, tension or all-out violence in the mind of the player is not triggered, perhaps the player will simply get bored and walk away. Perhaps the player is looking for the guide that a definite, looping, steady, standard tune would provide.

The very nature of games is changing. Pacing is increasingly left to the player. Action is increasingly left to the player.
A composer cannot write simply write a "charge into the fray, all guns blazing, kill or be killed" tune for a game anymore because the player might not be in the mood for it. The player might be in the mood to play that game at a slower pace, perhaps sniping the enemies from a distance. Maybe they will sneak round the back and not fight anything at all. The music in a game needs to be able to react to the player. It has to be loud in the loud bits and quiet in the quiet bits or the game stops working.
In fact, think back to the games that did have that kind of "charge into the fray, all guns blazing, kill or be killed" tune. Think of Alien Breed. Or The Chaos Engine. I can certainly remember having that crazy, blood-pumping music playing away in the background and having nothing to fight. Maybe it was a puzzle area, maybe I'd just killed everything around me already, but listening to music that was egging me on to kill, kill, kill while at the same time having absolutely nothing to do was just the most jarring music in the world and probably did more harm than good.
But I still remember what that music was. Reactive game music? The music I'm listening to when a game reacts to me probably doesn't even have a name. It's probably called "level 5, early level, action tune". It's probably an incredibly appropriate, impeccably produced, wonderfully immersive and completely soulless bit of instrumentation.

Which is better?
Your call. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Tom Carrick EMAIL: URL: DATE: 19:12 I like the music in the Sims 2,it's fitting. I can't say I'm a fan of any of the others though.

You fail to see my point though, and that is that music is so *boring* now. it's like some subtle thing that's pushed into the backroom in favour of newfangled graphics effects and pixel shaders and whatever. It's just completely uninspired. While the music may be *good*, it's completely non-earth shattering in the same way that gameplay is these days. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Anonyymi EMAIL: URL: DATE: 21:44 I wouldn't say I failed to see your point. I just wouldn't say that music is "boring".

Yes, music is generally less memorable in games today, but I would say that that's due to the things I mentioned, as well as a few other things.

Chiptunes, like SIDs, like MIDI, and, to a certain extent, lower-tech sampled tunes — such as the Amiga's, where there is a lot of use of short, low-bitrate samples, where modern dance musics and the like, which have a lot more memory and so potential for subtlety — were very harsh-sounding, creating sharper, more jarring, more piercing tunes. Not that I'm saying anything against them, it's just part of the nature of the technology that they had to reuse short, generally sharp sounds, simply because that's what sequenced music was geared towards.

So we had high-impact music, repeated often, repeated for long periods of time. Of course that will stick in your memory a lot more than any given song from a modern game with a longer soundtrack (gives longer play between tunes and so less opportunity to make an impact on the mind), more subtle and understated tunes (less likely to make a strong impact on your mind, less likely to make you notice it at any given time) and reactive music (you may never hear all of a given tune, or maybe never hear the part you would have called "not boring").

Just because you cannot remember the music afterwards, it doesn't mean it wasn't doing its job at the time.

I do have to agree with you that I would like to have music that I can remember afterwards. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Anonyymi EMAIL: URL: DATE: 10:45 Play God of War, it's got probably the best music score that i can remember. ----- --------