Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

One of the great things about video games today is that we are starting to see the history and evolution of certain threads. Threads related to game play, game design, visual art, animation… the list can go on and on. For me, I like seeing the evolution of the music and sound. Which brings me to the title of this blog. Why Grim Fandango? Why am I writing about a ten year old PC game? Aren’t there better games to write about?

Well, in a word, no. Ok, sure sure, there have been better games (quick help me out I can’t think of one!) however, Grim Fandango still stands as the best (and almost last, I’m sorry we have to think about The Dig again…) point and click graphic adventure game developed by LucasArts. The story was hailed as spectacular when it came out and the time and care that went into all of the creative elements was apparent. Tim Schafer as the writer and Peter McConnell as the composer were a great combination!

For composers, though, there is more to it than just another great game. Grim Fandango is one of the great game scores of all time. The soundtrack is very difficult to track down, but is now hosted by the fan site Grim Fandango Network. It was crafted perfectly for the game, elements of the folkloric side of the story as well as big band to match both the writing style and artistic realizations. This is one of the ultimate examples of weaving music tightly with the other elements of the game. A marvel of creative collaboration between visual, story, audio and, believe it or not, programming.

Why did I mention programming? Well, Grim Fandango also relied heavily on a technology developed by LucasArts called iMUSE, Interactive Music Streaming Engine. This technology was started with games like Monkey Island II and led to some of the most of the music toolsets video game composers have access to today.

Take a look at this trailer and tell me you don’t want to play this game!

Interestingly enough, I was preparing a presentation about Grim Fandango last week on campus, when a friend forwarded me this article, that talks about the game and why it was more of a cult favorite as opposed to a commercial success. I’ll write more about that presentation in the coming days, and why I think Grim Fandango is important in the timeline of video game music!

On Friday, May 30th, the annual conference hosted by Filmmakers Collaborative in New England will feature a panel discussing the future of film music. I’ll be hosting the panel of industry veterans to talk about how things have changed in the last 5 - 10 years. If you are a filmmaker wondering how to approach music for your film or if you are a composer wondering how music and scores are being completed for films these days be sure to stop by.

The Making Media Now conference has always been a great event for Boston and I’m sure this year will be even better.

Music for Film 2.0

1:30pm-3:00pm

Music for a film can present a daunting task to film directors and producers. Licenses, copyrights and contracts must be considered, as well as the individuals responsible for creating and/or editing the music. As we move forward into more collaborative creative environments, how has the relationship between the director and the music for their films changed? A panel comprised of industry veterans that have embraced new technologies and capabilities will investigate the move away from traditional music work flows and into a more flexible model. A look at the pros and cons of current practices will be considered as well as a look back at what worked in a fixed framework. Long-distance collaboration, non-locked pictures, international recording sessions, new licensing schemes and contracts will be among the topics discussed.

Panelists: Bill Elliott , Berklee College of Music; Tom Phillips, OBT Music; Alison Plante, Center for Digital Imaging Arts; Roland Tec, Pinkplot Productions. Moderated by Jeanine Cowen, Assistant Vice President, Berklee College of Music.

One of the most tedious tasks in the game audio world is re-naming a large number of files to conform to a set format. Something like “fs_male_gravel_01.wav” and “fs_male_gravel_02.wav”, etc. There have been many batch processors over the years but there are times when you might be away from your main audio workstation and you want to rename the files from within ProTools.

This is a fairly easy task, but some of my students have been surprised at the results they get. Understanding the way in which Pro Tools will apply the new names can clear up the confusion. Here we see a simple session with four edited footstep regions.

One might assume that a renaming command would name these files from top to bottom in the tracks view. However, Pro Tools doesn’t look at the track order when renaming, it looks at the order of the regions in the Region Bin/List! If we were to rename these 4 regions the naming order from top to bottom would be 3, 1, 4, 2 based on their order to the left in the region list. If you sort your region list by a known parameter you can force the renaming to operate in the way you want. Watch what happens when we sort our list by name, like this :

After we run the Auto Rename function we get this :

Notice the order on the regions. If you look at the track view only you see the rename function ordered the regions 1, 3, 2, 4. Take a look again at the original and then how the regions were ordered in the region list. I hope it makes sense now!

Using the PT ordering function you can effectively order almost any region list to obtain the sort of functionality you need on your project. In this example you can see that I’m sorting by Timestamp :

Which in turn, makes the rename function order the regions in the track view as 3, 1, 4, 2!

I used to always export my regions/files for renaming functions in other applications, but given ProTools fairly robust functionality, the need for that is less. Just keep an eye on your region list and it should all start making more sense!

I was forwarded an article today.

It speaks of the frivolous existence of delivering hi-res digital audio. You know, anything above our Redbook Audio CD standard of 44.1kHz 16bit PCM digital audio. OK, so certainly I have a bias here…

If you read the article it discusses a recent year long research project involving blind testing of CD playback vs a Hi-Res format (DSD). However, my immediate reaction was that they were all missing the point!

I do respect and admire the Mix Magazine author, but I have to believe that he knows the presented angle of the research misses the mark. The argument for hi-res audio, for me, has always been based on the increase in available processing power and not in the additional delivery of stored information to the consumer.

My experience has shown that a hi-res recording of the “basic” tracks of a mix really does improve the quality of the final mix. If the DAW has 24 bits of information and over twice as many samples (96kHz) to work with in ALL of the DSP involved, it will be a better mix. ALL of the calculations will be improved, throughout the life of the project.

The use of higher resolution (both sample rate AND bit depth) leads to a better final mix regardless of delivery format.

I’d love to see a research project look at the underlying presence of processing etc in the digital audio world rather than focusing on that last element of delivery format!

Last week the Berklee Learning Center hosted it’s annual networking event for the Boston/New England film community. This is an evening session that is held to bring together filmmakers and those people that do audio and music for film. It continues to grow each year! (and I see a few friends in the crowd here!)

Built as both a networking event and an expo, the participants meet each other and also learn what they each do. Filmmakers speak about making films and composers and engineers discuss creating sound for those films.

If you’d like to find out more and see additional pictures go to the official website!

The Game Developer Magazine has been doing a salary and other compensation survey for several years now. They recently released the 7th annual report. If you are thinking about working in the Video Game Industry it is well worth the cost of the digital download (or the magazine if you can find it!)

A few tidbits for audio professionals from the report…. 92% of audio professionals reported having some college-level coursework, predominantly a Bachelor’s degree or higher. I know there is an increasing trend in the U.S. for college level coursework regardless of profession but this seems indicative of the necessity to get some training/education before you start looking for a job working on game audio.

Salaries continued to increase, even for people with three years experience or less. That is great news! We’re still lacking on representation of women in game audio at just 8%. Not that the industry in general is doing much better…

All in all, salaries and bonuses were up in the game audio departments. It should be noted that the industry still continues to hire contract audio professionals more often than full-time employees although from my discussions with audio directors, more positions seem to be opening up each year.

With entry-level positions averaged at over $60k the video game industry should be a goal for many of you aspiring sound designers and composers, but only if you really want to work on video games!

Ok, so… you’ve restarted and then repaired your disk permissions and still your application won’t open, or worse, exhibits some very bizarre behavior. What should you do? Aside from wiping your system and reinstalling the OS and application!

Many times the issue may be caused by corrupt preferences. Preferences are the settings that an application loads everytime it is opened. It could be related to I/O, your session setup, your playback engine…. all kinds of settings that persist from session to session.

There is a wonderful new utility that finds all of these files/folders and moves them to the trash. Once you restart (there we go again! Don’t be afraid to restart!) ProTools will reset all of your preferences. You can find it here

ProTools Prefs and Database Helper

Now, the resetting of your preferences may be a drag, so I suggest, once you have your system up and running smoothly, use the Backup and Restore functionality in the Helper application. This will allow you to freely trash your prefs but also to restore your system to a working state that maintains your personal settings.

Notice at the bottom of that screenshot there is a very important symbol. It is the PayPal donate symbol. We as a community MUST support those developers who are supporting us by creating wonderful utilities such as the ProTools Prefs and Database Helper. I do not personally know Jean Charles Deshaies but I am grateful for this mini application and I want him to continue to update for new versions of PT and new versions of the Mac OS. I would gladly buy him a coffee (even a high-priced one!) everytime I use this utility. Doing the paypal donate is a small gesture of support and in reality, his little application saves me a lot of time when I use it.

I have a few more tips on troubleshooting ProTools coming up next!

It always seems to happen at the worst possible time, and it isn’t just Pro Tools, it happens with every single application I use everyday… Mail, DP, Word, Filemaker Pro you name it. There are just times when the application, inexplicably, is not very happy about running a session, the very same session you ran the day before! In Pro Tools land there are a few very good troubleshooting steps to take when things seem to go astray.

FIRST - RESTART YOUR MACHINE. Yes, I’m shouting at you. I once had someone working for me, in another room of a facility. He called me and said, “Jeanine I can’t do…” I said. “Hey, that sounds weird, why don’t you restart the machine.” An hour later, I wander by the room he is using and I say, “How are things going?” He says, “Ok, but it is a bit slow since I can’t do…” I make him stop, save and restart. Guess what? Once rebooted the machine and PT were very happy. So rather than waste the two minutes it takes to restart, my lovely assistant spent an hour working around an easily fixable problem…

SECOND - On the mac, repair permissions. The UNIX undercarriage of the Mac OS X system carries a lot of capability. Sometimes a thing known as “the permissions” for a file can be set incorrectly. It is a simple process to fix, go to your Utilities folder (inside the Applications folder) and open up the application called Disk Utility. Click on your drive in the left hand column and click on the First Aid tab in the top center of the window. Then click Repair Permissions and let it do its thing. Wonders will commence…

I’ve taught the PT101 class for many semesters now and there seems to be a question that comes up frequently. How to use Reason as a sound source for a PT session. While I am risking sounding ancient, this is an age-old question. I remember back in the day…. before Pro Tools could talk MIDI and before Performer (yes there was an application before Digital Performer!) could talk audio (or Vision before Studio Vision for that matter) we used to have to set up communication between many applications on our systems to get our work done. One application would handle the audio files and another would handle the MIDI sequencing. This is the history that leads us to being able to use sound sources, i.e. Reason, with another audio application (in this case PT).

Enter ReWire!

Setting up that communication used to be very arduous, but today it is streamlined through the ReWire plugin. If you think about sequencing and DAW operation there are three main protocols which must be dealt with.

First, we want to have our MIDI sequencer be able to trigger external sound sources. We want to be able to sequence a MIDI track in PT in order to make a device in Reason make a sound. So we need MIDI communication.

Second, we want to pass audio from the sound source into the DAW application. So we need audio communication.

Third, in a perfect world we would also have a relationship between the linear timeline of our main application and that of any ancillary applications so that any play/pause, meter, tempo, etc would be mirrored regardless of which application we were looking at. So we need tempo and transport communication.

ReWire provides all of this functionality which makes the possibility of using Reason instruments inside of a PT session a very real possibility. On campus, our MIDI systems course deals with just this topic for several weeks. To get a glimpse of how we use this functionality take a look at the following handout which steps through all of the configuration and operation uses when utilizing Reason within a PT session.

Using Reason with Pro Tools

Once you’ve mastered this protocol you will open up a whole new world of sounds to use in your productions!

Today was the first day of the full conference at GDC. I was thrilled to run into some colleagues, chat about the industry and to see some wonderful panel discussions. If you’ve never been to a large conference, I have to tell you, the possibilities are very daunting. You can schedule yourself solid from 9 am to 9 pm thrice over! Needless to say, I had to make some choices if I was going to be able to both see the panels I found interesting PLUS catch up with people I only have the opportunity to see at this one time of the year.

The morning started off with a keynote address by John Schappert, from Microsoft. He spoke about the burgeoning online game world. With the introduction of the next-gen series of game consoles, Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3, delivering content online has never been easier. Mr. Schappert’s goal is to democratize the process of making games, much like iTunes and other online services has done for the music world. Games made by individuals or small independent teams will now be available in the Xbox Live Marketplace. He also highighted the XNA developer’s toolkit as a great resource for anyone with a game idea that wants to do guerilla production.

After the keynote I ran into Berklee alum Dan Lehrich from Seven Studios. We met up at one of the best panels I’ve seen, on the topic of creating procedural music for the game Spore. Kent Jolly and Aaron McLean gave a rundown on how they are using Pure Data, an opensource audio and music programming environment, to create the generative music components used in parts of the game. Working with Brian Eno, they were able to develop some fascinating musical ideas. Kent started with a quick rundown of how they molded the PD environment to not only create generative music pieces but also to have the ability to select ideas that had a musical relevance. I’m hoping the GDC makes the audio transcript available. Here is a snapshot of the demonstration in PD. This isn’t a script from the game but rather what they used to demonstrate making generative music musical.

If you look closely at the generators you can see how they were able to get the generated music to fall into a given musical idea. Notice the weighting they can do to force a major, wholetone or minor scale. It was a very interesting way to algorithmically cause a musical scale! Aaron McLean went on to talk about programming the rules of counterpoint as stated by the master text by Fux which allows counter-melodies to be generated by the music engine. Very fascinating indeed!

This was interesting primarily because it was a lot of very technically minded creative people sitting around talking about music. Again and again on this trip I was reminded of the importance and relevance to being skilled not only in the technical areas of making games but also as a musician. The future is looking great, from my vantage point, for music and musicians!