Do You Believe in the Surprising Power of Music in Video Games?

“The images tell the story, but the music tells you how to feel,” video game composer Grant Kirkhope said in a phone call with Mashable.

Video games consist of three components. The first two, visuals and interactivity, form the essential core of games, but the third component, sound, and specifically music, transforms games into something beyond an activity. Music can turn games into unforgettable experiences.

Good game music works in tandem with the visual and interactive elements to lead our minds into whichever space the composers and developers want us to go. A song like the overworld theme from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past composed by Koji Kondo, one of Kirkhope’s favorites, can envelop players and make them feel like they’ve been transported somewhere else entirely.

“A lot of the time you sit in your bedroom, by yourself, playing a game,” Kirkhope said. “It's brilliant. The world goes away. The music just takes you to another world. That's the glory of video games.”

The role of music in video games

Kirkhope is a composer known for his work on classic Rare games like GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong 64, and Banjo-Kazooie, as well as more recent games including Mario + Rabbids: Battle Kingdom, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and Yooka-Laylee. Before getting into game music he was a classically trained trumpet player from childhood, and later played in pub bands and a couple bigger British bands, Zoot and the Roots and Little Angels.

When former bandmate Robin Beanland got a job at Rare, Kirkhope was inspired to begin making music for video games.

“I started writing music that I thought was video game appropriate,” Kirkhope said. “I sent Rare five cassette tapes over the course of 1994. Never got a reply. And then out of the blue I got a letter that said, ‘Please come in,’ and I got the job. I couldn't believe it — at 33, my first job. I thought I'd be playing in pub rock forever.”

In the 25 years since then, he has composed countless hours of music, pulling from the wide spectrum of influences from his background, with the core idea that the music he creates really has one job.

“It tells you how you're supposed to feel — scared, happy, sad, whatever it is,” Kirkhope said. “It's massively important.”

But even so, music in games and even movies has a propensity to blend into the background and become an inextricable part of a greater whole. Sometimes you don’t really know what you’re missing until you turn it off. Kirkhope mentioned a video on YouTube that shows what the final scene of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is like without the music scored by John Williams.

“It falls completely flat,” he said. “You miss the drama and you miss that thing that points you toward how you're supposed to feel.”

The track “Balor” from Kirkhope’s soundtrack on 2012’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning just oozes drama. The song plays during a fight against the massive and powerful lord of destruction Balor, bringing added intensity to this boss battle and deftly complimenting the visuals on screen and the players’ actions.

On the flip side, Kirkhope’s music on bright, colorful platformers like Donkey Kong 64 and the Banjo-Kazooie series is filled with self-described quirkiness. It’s bouncy, it’s playful, and it’s not too self-serious. Tunes like “Glitter Gulch Mine” in Banjo-Tooie or “Jungle Japes” from Donkey Kong 64 capture that cartoonish essence of these games and offer the perfect backdrop for hopping around and exploring.

Complimenting that visual and interactive core of games lies at the heart of game music composition. Video game music composer Winifred Phillips, who has crafted scores for games including Assassin’s Creed: Liberations, LittleBigPlanet, Spyder, and the original God of War, spoke in a phone interview about how composition has to really connect with visuals, and, perhaps even more importantly, gameplay.

“Gameplay is, for a composer, very much a structure that we wrap our music around,” she said. “There is an inherent energy level and a visual kinetic rhythm to gameplay that as a composer I try to pay very close attention to. If I'm doing my job correctly, my music is going to kind of jigsaw well into the overall visual rhythm of gameplay, it's going to feel like it really marries well to the energy level and promotes the players' immersion and involvement.”

Before scoring music for video games, Phillips was a composer for radio dramas for National Public Radio where her intent with her music was to support the actions that listeners couldn’t see. Music in both games and radio tells people how to feel about things, sometimes subconsciously, she said, but games music can really feel like it’s being let loose to support the excitement of the gameplay.

Phillips composed the music for 2008’s Speed Racer: The Videogame, an ultra-high-speed racing game based on the Speed Racer movie that came out that same year.

“It was a classic video game racing score,” she said. “There are requirements for a score like that. It has to have that driving beat, it has to have the techno elements, the EDM elements… I knew that my music was going to have to convey speed because the racing game operated under the conceit that you were racing at over 300 miles per hour. It's a futuristic racer so the speeds are unrealistic and the music has to give you a sense that you are actually proceeding at that speed. ”

But Speed Racer is also an intellectual property with a lot of history, dating back to its beginning as an anime and manga from the 1960s. The original material was actually inspired by James Bond’s car, Phillips said, an idea she picked up and used as inspiration for her own compositions. It really comes out strongly in the track “Zoom.”

“I ended up adding a lot of big band and elements of ragtime qualities for jazz, lots of brass, things like that,” she said, combining those ideas with other effects like doppler, car screeches, engine sounds, and crowd noises to create the heart-pumping sounds that pulse through Speed Racer.

Creating Moments

In 2020’s Ori and the Will of Wisps, the vast majority of the emotional game is free-roaming exploration, whether it’s jumping and climbing in the soft, hazy forest of the Wellspring, swimming and gliding through the aqua blues and popping pinks of the Luma Pools, or digging like a drill through the tan sands of the Windswept Wastes. That exploration and platforming (and small enemy encounters) are punctuated by these difficult, adrenaline-triggering chases and boss battles that stick out like mountains amid the rolling hills of challenge that make up the rest of the game. For a player, there’s a huge difference in feeling between those sections of the game. For composer Gareth Coker, he makes sure his music gets that feeling right in both cases.

Coker composed both Ori games and has also scored music for other games including Ark: Survival Evolved and Minecraft. Before that, he started piano at the age of 8, went to school for music thanks to his ability to write melodies, and started putting his music up online to places like ModDB, a site for gamemakers and modders to share addons and mods they created for games.

In a phone interview, Coker described the delicate, stirring music during regular Ori gameplay as “fairly not in your face,” but when those big moments hit, he hits players over the head with a musical sledgehammer.

“They want moments,” Coker said of players.

In order to create a moment, it has to stand out in terms of gameplay, story writing, and music. Not only does that mean that everything has to have elevated intensity in those moments, but the rest of the game has to facilitate that elevation. From Coker’s perspective, all of the music in Ori exists on this intensity scale. There’s the low end which is regular gameplay, the medium space which includes mandatory combat sequences where players have to defeat an enemy or a few enemies before moving on, and then the high end for chases and boss fights.

“Having that differentiation between combat music and boss fight music and then regular gameplay music and there being quite a wide dynamic range between all three of them is the key to building an emotional experience,” he said. “If you have everything at 10 all the time, it's just not going to register.”

When Ori does hit 10, it’s really something. Coker pointed to his work on the gripping song “Mora the Spider” that plays during the boss fight against a huge spider named Mora, deep in the dark tunnels of the Mouldwood Depths. The fight has three phases, starting with a typical first phase in a room with the big spider and bold, scary, spidery music. Around halfway through, a shift happens and Mora chases the player up a rotten tree to a new area. The music transitions dynamically along the way and lands in a space that’s like a more optimistic, bombastic version of the first phase’s music.

“That's designed to communicate to the players that, yes you're halfway there, now keep going, yes I know this is hard but if you keep going you'll be rewarded with the end sequence,” he said. “That's the kind of thing that I think took it from just being a good boss fight to making it a bit more memorable for players.“

When building these moments, though, they aren’t really moments. For a challenging part of a game, players can be attempting to make it through these “moments” dozens of times, stretching what is ultimately a few minutes of action into a half-hour, an hour, or even longer.

In the game Celeste, another platformer dripping with emotional weight, players may be trying to complete the same sections over and over and over again, trying to get the precision and timing of jumps just right to make it through. It’s a game where dying happens a lot, it happens quickly, and it puts you right back on your feet to try again instantly. Composer Lena Raine provides an encouraging musical backdrop to keep players motivated.

“When you play music in a video game, you are saying something to the player,” Raine said. “You're saying, ‘You're on the right track,’ or ‘Something is going to be changing.’ It's creating these sort of subliminal messages to you that are communicating progress in some way.”

Raine’s background includes an education in classical and jazz music as well as compositional contributions to Guild Wars 2 and Minecraft. When composing music for the free Celeste DLC called Farewell, she composed a piece for a particularly difficult section of the game and sat with it for a while. After a few months, she went back in and played the game again with her music and realized it just wasn’t where she wanted it to be.

“The level was so huge compared to the length of the music I wrote,” Raine said. “People are going to be in here for hours figuring this out, and I was getting really monotonous vibes from hearing the same things over and over again.”

She went back and just about doubled the length of the song, writing a whole new section for it, resulting in “Farewell.”

It’s tracks like these that help leave a mark on players for years. Hearing these songs again instantly brings up memories of those moments, those triumphs.

One particular song that has left its mark on countless players comes at the end of of 1997’s Final Fantasy VII: “One-Winged Angel” by the composer Nobuo Uematsu, a song with a massive and even surprising presence. Winifred Phillips brought it up as one of her favorites.

“I remember playing Final Fantasy VII when the ‘One-Winged Angel’ track started,” she said. “Before that moment when you're battling Sephiroth, most of the score for that game is midi-based and it's very synthetic so it's actually quite a shock when that live choir bursts out of what was otherwise a very synthetic mixture of sound… Thinking about it now, it’s probably one of the reasons why I was so interested in chorus work as a video game composer. That really was such a powerful moment for me.”

Embraced by the Community

The power of video game music reaches deep inside millions and millions of people. For Gareth Coker, Grant Kirkhope, Lena Raine, and Winifred Phillips, their music has been embraced not only by fans who stream and buy copies of their soundtracks, but by musicians and remixers who take that music and turn it into something that reflects a piece of their own creativity. This circle of creators, fans, and remixers has garnered its own identity, the video game music community, aka the VGM community.

“One of the things that's so great about the VGM community — it's both about appreciation and creation,” Phillips said. “You get musicians that are a part of this community who are creating new realizations of the music that they love from classic games or more modern games, so they're keeping the musical language of video game composition fresh.”

Kirkhope has had countless people remix his music, put their own spin on his tracks, or make new musical interpretations of it. Both Coker and Phillips have had their compositions performed by live orchestras on tour. Search “Celeste remix” and you’ll find an absurd number of fans and musicians bringing their own ideas to Raine’s music.

“Within weeks of Celeste releasing, my inbox was flooded with remixes and arrangements from fans,” Raine said. “Suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of people being like ‘Holy shit this music.’ And then to have people love the music so much that they wanted to go out and play it and create arrangements of it, use that enthusiasm to start all of these really cool projects around the game.”

Some of the people that remixed and rearranged Raine’s music now work with her on new projects. An official release of a piano arrangement of the Celeste soundtrack was put out by Trevor Alan Gomes in 2019. Coker was impressed by his work on the album and hired him to do the piano arrangements for Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

“It's just a really, really cool community to be a part of and it's only getting bigger,” Coker said.

Kirkhope said his 17-year-old son pretty much only listens to video game music, with soundtracks and remixes found all over YouTube, music streaming apps, and artists’ Bandcamp pages.

The way video game music blends with these active experiences we have in games, helping to build these memories of moments or locations in games and in life, is a powerful thing.

“He has no interest in any kind of popular music whatsoever, it's all video game soundtracks,” he said, noting the generational difference. “Video game music has become such a force that you see it all over the place.”

Article Original Link: https://sea.mashable.com/entertainment/11043/how-music-shapes-the-way-we-play-video-games

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