Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

I am very passionate about the orchestral tradition and the fate of the modern orchestra. My choice to live in Boston was indeed influenced by the presence of not only the BSO but so many other fine orchestras and performing groups supported in our fine city. Many people I meet are surprised to hear me speak about my background as a classical musician and then to find that I work in video games, but for me, it is the perfect combination. In fact, some of the scores for games coming out today are simply amazing.

A former student (thanks Mitchell) sent me this link to a NY Times article this past holiday break. In it you can start to get a glimpse of the depth of this new media scoring and how it is breaking new ground for composers and musicians alike. Those of you who know me, know that one of my favorite games last year was 2k’s BioShock. I willed myself to finish the game (it is quite a bit more graphic than most games I enjoy) just to hear the music! Much has been written about the music, and unfortunately few people outside of the video game world have experienced the truly exquisite juxtaposition between the licensed period pieces like Django Reinhardt’s “La Mer” and Billie Holiday’s “Night and Day” and “God Bless this Child” with Garry Schyman’s 21st century classical score.

For those of you that doubt a video game could be the source of a great score, take a listen to the download on 2k’s website. Direct download here.

Game music is steamrolling ahead! Losing the limitations of older game hardware has made it possible for composers to expand to the point where they can fully express themselves in this medium. Berklee continues to push the envelope… we’ve been training composers, musicians and sound designers for decades, alums like Howard Shore and Olivier Deriviere are even mentioned in the NY Times article. Another alum, Shota Nakama, is spearheading performances of game scores on campus through his organization, the Video Game Orchestra (VGO). Through things like our courses on campus, online and even for the younger crowd through our summer programs I can only imagine the great music we’ll be hearing in the coming years in the virtual and physical school halls!

Skilled composers, comfortable with an orchestra, now have a new horizon… and that horizon is simply amazing!

Last week in my Introduction to Game Audio class a few students were inquiring on how to make the perfect background loop. This is a loop that will play as an ambient sound and needs to create the illusion of a never ending background ambience yet use very little disk space. Here is one basic  way to create such a loop. First I am going to start with an opensource ambient sound from a former student of mine Glenn Forsythe called “bottleambient” from the Berklee Sounds for One Laptop Per Child initiative.

Here is the sound

raw ambient sound

You’ll notice it trails off at the end which means trying to loop it simply by playing to the end and wrapping back around to the beginning will not sound seamless. Additionally, if we listen closely to the very beginning of this loop there is a slight “tick” sound which will easily key the listener into the repetition.

There are many ways to create seamless loops but one thing remains consistent no matter what the approach, we must NOT hear the end of the loop wrapping back around to the beginning! Many times a student will become fixated on exactly where the loop must begin and end, but in reality we, as the creators of this sound, can choose exactly where the loop can begin and end. One thing we know is that there is continuous sound happening in this audio, it is not happening naturally at the beginning or the end but it IS happening in the middle!

What?!#^$? you say… yes.. there is a perfect loop point in the middle of the audio. In fact, let’s separate our audio right in the middle of the sound! and then let’s place the first part of the sound at the end of the 2nd part of the sound.

Ok, now we can see visually why the file would not loop naturally… the original ending does not match up at all with the original beginning!

However, we know specifically that our new “end” of the sound will wrap perfectly to our new “beginning” simply because they  worked as a linear section before we made our edits. This is a powerful realization…. by simply cutting our audio in the middle and placing those cuts at our loop point we have created the seamless transition we need! If you are playing along at home try it for your self… set your DAW to loop and listen to how the beginning and end loop perfectly…

So now we have one simple task… we need to make the edit in the middle of this audio be imperceptible. Now we can use our DAW tools to move and fade any of the audio in the middle, realizing that because this is not music we have no boundaries around meter and time.

The following is a quick, very short looped ambient section built from the original, notice the fades and repetitions of audio that allow for extending the loop slightly while still maintaining an imperceptible loop from end to beginning.

bottle ambient loop short

This is one very quick way to create seamless background loops when working on video games or film.

It is hard to imagine the world of video game development when Nolan Bushnell released Pong in 1972… this is for my students who never had the opportunity to play. Beware! It is just as addictive now, even online, as it was back then!

Bafta article on Pong including an online playable version

Thanks to Graham for posting the link in class!

It is hard not to think about commercials during the frenzy known as the Superbowl. Much is written about superbowl commercials and most Americans realize the cost for placing a commercial on TV is at its highest during the superbowl broadcast.Which always makes me think about my friends, the poor, down-trodden commercial music/jingle writers at this time of the year. Now I know they can make a hefty sum when they land a national spot, but that is usually a one-time payment… unless the spot is picked up again. The fact of the matter is, today, as the writers of words “won” a strike to gain income from new and old delivery streams, and actors threaten the same for an increase in their payments, composers still have problems being paid for the OLD delivery models let alone anything remotely considered “new media”.Where actors and writers (as well as directors and producers) have long enjoyed residuals and royalties based on their work and it’s distribution, film music composers to a degree and commercial music composers to a much larger degree have been fighting for a more balanced and fair payment system for decades.Let’s get the facts straight. Does an actor get paid an upfront fee when a commercial is filmed? Yes. Does a composer get paid an up front fee when a jingle is completed. Yes. Does an actor make residuals based on the “success” of a commercial i.e. continued broadcast and reuse past the original intent? Yes. Does a composer enjoy the same increase in pay for a “successful” commercial scored? NO! The policy of surveying by our PROs and the further degrading of the value of a commercial composer’s work has long been a point of more than irritation among composers of commercial underscore. As we enter the season of ASCAP board elections I hope that if you are a member, you think carefully about your vote. As we enter this age of digital media even we, the writer’s of music, must be thinking ahead to the new models of business, lest we end up in a similar situation to that of the television commercial. Our representatives on the ASCAP board are important to our future, read their thoughts carefully…

There are some great events happening in Boston over the next two weeks, all to do with Video Game music and sound.

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On Tuesday, November 11th, there is a joint meeting of the Boston chapter of the Audio Engineering Society and the Boston Post Mortem group. AES is the only professional organization focused solely on audio, with many chapters around the world. Boston Post Mortem is a local group of game development professionals working in and around Boston.

Presenting on the 11th will be a colleague of mine, Keith Zizza. Keith will be discussing the role of the Audio Director in games. He’ll also discuss his experience developing an audio engine based on his work with Tilted Mill. The event starts at 7pm at the Skellig pub in Waltham, follow this link for directions and details.

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Next up will be the Video Game Orchestra (VGO) performing a concert on Saturday evening November 15th. Admission is free and the concert starts at 6:30. It will include not only 45 musicians from around the Boston college community but also the Berklee Chamber Choir Club. The VGO had a concert earlier this year at a smaller venue that was wonderful. Definitely a great way to spend your early evening next Saturday!

Here is a photo from the concert this past summer

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The following week, on Wednesday November 19th, the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council is hosting an event, that while not focused specifically on game audio, is focused on gaming in New England. Video Game Gold: The Prosperous Gaming Industry in Massachusetts promises to be a thorough look at just what is happening in this neck of the woods. There’s a lot more than most people realize!

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As if all of that is not enough, I’ve perhaps saved the best for last! I was blown away last March when I went to see an orchestra playing and people were cheering and hooting and having a ton of fun. In fact, I noticed that one of the musicians on that stage in San Francisco was a Berklee alum, Evan Price, formerly of the Turtle Island String Quartet and I meant to email him to ask “Just how many times do you play a concert where people cheer like the musicians are rock stars?” (Of course I never did email him… but now I suppose I should)

What is this woman talking about? you might be saying to yourself. Have any of you EVER attended an orchestral concert that involved cheering and shouting by the audience? Could it be that an audience hasn’t been this engaged with an orchestra since the riots at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiere?

Ok, ok… if you know video game orchestras, you know there is only one that I could possibly be talking about. The Video Games Live world tour is visiting Boston on Friday November 21st at the Wang Theatre. If you’ve never seen one of their concerts check out this youtube video…

It promises to be a great event!

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What a great month to live in Boston!

In the PT101 class, this week’s lesson involves working on saving and not saving sessions after recording to investigate how Pro Tools deals with all of the various audio you use in a session. One of the things that happens during the lesson, is that some audio is stored in one folder while other audio may be stored in another folder.

How does this happen?

Well, every session has a defined “disk allocation” setting that is stored with it. If you have started with a “new” session, the disk allocation is automatically set to what is considered the “root media” folder. From the help file we read:

“By default, Pro Tools records audio files to the Audio Files folder inside the session folder. You can use the Disk Allocation window to specify other locations for your audio files for each audio track.”

In practice, this means if you open the application and create a new session the “root media” folder will be set to the new PT session folder created for this project. In this screenshot, we can see I have created a new session on my hard drive (which is named “Projects”). What the Disk Allocation window is telling me, is that all new audio recorded will be saved inside the audio files folder inside the session folder which is on the projects drive.

Note that the disk allocation can be set for individual tracks! This is used on very large sessions where one drive can not provide the throughput or bandwidth to physically playback (or record) all of the tracks at one time.

Now, things start to get messy when you start moving sessions from one system or even one drive to another. If I save this session, and use the OS to copy it to a new area on my hard drive or a new hard drive entirely, I will create potential problems for myself. The reason for this, is that the PT session file will remember where the original audio files folder was located and continue to write new files to that location!

So the safe way, to move sessions, is either to use the Save Session Copy menu item or, if a session has been moved/copied in another way, use the Disk Allocation setup to set the correct audio files folder to record into.

I’m sure you have all already read about the Metallica debacle. It seems their latest album was released with tracks that have been so “massaged” to create the loudest mix possible that it quite frankly sounds awful. The loudness wars have been upon us for a long time… this is just the latest casualty. Interestingly enough.. the tracks are also available in the lastest release of Guitar Hero. Believe it or not, they sound much better because they have been delivered as separate tracks for inclusion in the game. Fans have been clamoring for Metallica to re-release their CD but they refuse….

I was reading through the Berklee News RSS the other day and I ran across an article on alum Miguel Zenon. Congratulations to Miguel on his selection as a 2008 MacArthur Fellow! That isn’t what I’m writing about today though. When I clicked through to the site I found this link. A study was just released looking at the experience of teenagers with video games. None of us is probably surprised to find out that virtually all teenage boys (99%) play video games. You may be surprised, however, to read that 94% of teenage girls reported playing. Of course, if you have teenagers you already see them up on various websites playing all sorts of flash/web-based games and on their cellphones/ipods flipping through some casual game.

(If I may digress for one moment….OK, so game developers take note… 94% of the future generation of middle-aged women are already playing games. Of course, statistics already tell us that adult women are already a bigger portion of the game-playing public than teenage boys, but that is for another post…)

What was interesting to me was the data that most teenagers are playing games with other people. No longer does the stereotype of the social misfit that has no people-skills and locks himself in his room to play videogames hold. Game-playing, as it has been for centuries, is largely a community activity, even with this new-fangled thing known as the “video-game”. Wow! and I thought my family was just an anomaly…

The other interesting item was a chart at the beginning of the report that showed the most popular games…

So we’ve got a bunch of teenage boys (and girls) that report that they play video games that aren’t just violent massacres with other people and “gasp” they even try to help the other people they are playing with. Shocking!

Read the report, I think you’ll find it illuminating…

I can’t help myself… I have been waiting for this game since it was announced… and here it is, September 16, 2008 and we can finally play it. Rather than bore you with my own game playing experience… I wanted to congratulate Berklee alum, David Collins! David is the audio director on the game and I have seen him working tirelessly to insure this game meets all audio expectations that the world of Star Wars fans could possibly imagine. From the attention to the score to the use and adaptation of classic Star Wars sounds, David has remained true to the concept yet added an exciting depth that allows a player to feel like they are in it.

Congrats David! Star Wars fans and Game Audio professionals everywhere appreciate your attention to the details!

(and here is David at the celebration last night in San Francisco, as the voice behind “Proxy”)

A student asked me the other day about using stereo tracks in Pro Tools and why couldn’t he get the pan automation to work the way he wanted. He wanted to be able to automate a stereo track’s pan from left to right with a single automation pass. For those of you that have tried this, you may have been stuck writing automation separately for the left and right pan controls. If we look at a PT session mix window we see two separate pan controls. In this example they are both panned wide left and right.

To further complicate the matter, if we attempt to write in panning manually in the edit window we see that PT offers two separate automation views, one for the left panner and one for the right.

So what is the best way to create a typical pan within the stereo field on a stereo track? There is another track option that is available to you in the PT Mix window. It is called the “Output Window”, if you’ve ever worked in surround, this may already be a view you use extensively. It is also very handy in stereo mixing workflows, and most control surfaces have a way to access this quickly with a simple button push.

If you click on that button for your stereo track, you’ll bring up one of PT’s floating windows. In the top right hand area there are two very important settings available. To really see how these work, first, set your panning on each side to fully center (you can use the shortcut of Option clicking on the mac or Alt clicking on the PC to force this to “zero” or center panned.)

Then click the “Link” button.

Now that you’ve linked the two panners, click on one and move it. Notice how your track is now able to panned to a specific area in the stereo field. Great!

Oh, but wait…. by setting it up this way we have basically turned a stereo track into a mono source! This might not be the sound we are looking for. Hmm… I’ve got a beautifully recorded stereo piano track that I’ve just collapsed to mono. There must be a better way! Of course there is! The other button in this window, right above the “link” button is called “inverse panning”. I’m sure you already know what this is intuitively, if not by name. In some situations it may also be called a “balance” control. It is a way to make the two panners adjust themselves by mirroring movements. As one panner moves to the left the other moves to the right. 

Playing around a bit with this, you will find that the way we have set things up, with our panners both starting in the center, these two options combined, the link and the inverse pan, will work to simply narrow or widen the stereo field.

The fun really begins by working with these independently to effectively pan a “stereo” image from left to right. Try unlinking the panners, and set one side slightly off-center.  Then relink and move the panner. This is a different treatment of the panning as you can see, and this is how you can do a single automation pass that affects both sides of your stereo pan simultaneously!