Music in Games

Unfortunately, systems in the iMUSE vein are rarely explored with modern, big-budget game development. Land believes this comes down to the complexity of his project; as game development budgets soar, innovative music solutions aren’t really feasible. ‘I think it’s mainly because it’s very difficult,’ he concedes. ‘There’s a different evolution of game music, where Hollywood production values have affected how music’s made. Where we tried to be interactive, the newer approach is to say, “Music has got to be linear and not particularly interactive, but, boy, is the orchestra going to sound great.” So, it’s a different way of hitting the player’s emotions. But ultimately, I don’t think the two approaches are actually mutually exclusive. It’s just obvious that in the evolution of videogame music, production values would naturally go up. And then, I think you’ll start seeing interactivity more and more.’

The dearth of truly ‘interactive’ music in games these days is the primary reason why you’ll immediately notice something different about Amon Tobin’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory score. The Brazil-born avant-garde electronic artist, who’d never worked in the gaming field before, delivered iMUSE-esque music for the Ubisoft title, where melodic layers would stack on top of each other based on the level of tension the player was currently experiencing in any given level.

‘It was difficult, for sure,’ Tobin laughs. ‘It had to adapt to what players were doing. And it had to work in a sort of interactive way, which meant every map for the game had to have four different levels of tension, and depending on what the player did, I had to have the music adapt to that. The hardest thing, really, was trying to make it somehow coherent, given that it could change at any moment. You can imagine being halfway through a bar or a melodic line, and suddenly, it has to change, not necessarily tidily at the end of the bar, because somebody is spotted by a guard, or something. It’s a challenge to create music that can move between different things.’

Despite not working in the industry before working with Ubisoft, Tobin was still prepared for making interactive music – he firmly believes you need to understand the gaming medium to write music for it. ‘You need to have full understanding of how the music would interact with the game,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have to read Tom Clancy’s material behind the game or anything like that, but I needed a true understanding of how the music would have a role in the game, and I was working pretty closely with the developer. And throughout the soundtrack, we bounced back and forth all these different ideas to make it work.’

Curiously, although he sees the process behind scoring games as being fairly different to creating music for films – the closest parallel – he thinks they both ultimately serve the same purpose. ‘They’re both about trying to accentuate the action or the emotion that you’re meant to feel at a certain point, and punctuate it. But mainly, just enhancing the experience; making it more convincing.’