In this session, there was a presentation about sound production of Concrete Genie, which will be released from Sony Interactive Entertainment this spring. Concrete Genie is a very Sony-like game in which the visuals are wonderfully beautiful, with a story that the protagonist boy who gains the power to draw a mysterious picture with a magic brush becomes an adult through bullying from other boys and adventure, then saves the ruined city finally.
The speaker Samuel Marshall is a composer and audio director at the Sony studio in San Francisco Bay Area called PixelOpus, and focused on how to incorporate sounds and music interactively into gameplay, rather than just providing music. However, he said when he submitted the first demo, all of the music that amount to about one hour was totally rejected, he was so embarrassingly confused that it was not clear how to deal with it.
Therefore, first he listed the elements to be expressed from the game's story, then created sounds, fragmentary melodies, and small songs that clearly express those elements, and tried to make them to be played interactively as individual stem audio tracks, aiming to build a multi-layered music that changes depending on the situation. For example, the combination of the fun of drawing and the sound of the boy's human growth can be played simultaneously, which makes possible complex expressions of emotion. He named it as "the musical brush chime system" the mechanism that changes the music interactively as well as the picture drawn.
He also complained about playing music loops during gameplay, which is the common way of game music. "The situation where the music is always sounding will definetely weaken the power and impact of the music itself. Don't be afraid to stop the sound. Make the ending of the music exactly " I totally agree with his opinion and the challenge, and if music flows in an unnecessary and undesirable situation, people's feelings for music will only go towards disgust. I think it is necessary to reduce the meaningless and unnecessary background music flowing all over the city in order to enhance the value of music or to make people more interested in music. To put it back, he created it with the recognition that "the introductory part where music enters from silence is the most important part that can impact the game player most".
Also, Samuel played the sound while showing the Protools session file screen where the stems were actually arranged. It was also interesting that the session itself was marked with a lot of markers for playback points, but what was even more surprising was the high quality of the sound. The day before that, there was another session to review the demo song of the participants at the same venue, but the sound quality of the demo of the various participants and Samuel's music was too different. I think that participant's work consisted of a lot of sound, some was also over-compressed in terms of mixing, but in the case of Samuel, it succeeded in keeping the freshness of the sound by not going "too much".
I was able to talk with Samuel a little after the end of the presentation, so I asked him if he had ever released any other work as an artist other than game music, but he said the deadline for the current work is tight and It is not easy to for him to make the time for personal music production. However, "If I had a chance to make it, it would be a rock and roll piece where I strum guitars," I didn't know whether it was serious or a joke. lol
The Music of 'BATTLETECH': Big Sound on a Budget Jon Everist (Composer, Everist Sound, LLC)
I was looking forward to this most among composer-related sessions, but I misunderstood the start time and had a misstep that I entered the hall after about the first third. In this session, a composer Jon Everist who is working in Seattle made a presentation of "How to balance between a mockup with sample sound and a live orchestra in a tight budget to create the maximum effect" That was totally challenging and practical presentation for composers, using his recent work "BATTLETECH" as a motif.
Since I started to listen to the story from the middle, I don't write in detail about this session, because there were a few places which didn't make sense to me, but one thing that was very impressive was that he built his specific sound by mixing the live orchestra recorded by the microphone which was placed on "Away" or "Far" setting with sample sound, and used the live recording part as if it was a reverb wet component. Once I've heard that nowadays, orchestra sections tend to be separately recorded in a large budget project, then each stems will be changed or balanced, but I think this is a big change from such a typical way of big budget project in the way of thinking. In addition, the presentation method was very good. While alternately switching the recorded Raw data and the finished mix fleshed out with the sample sound, he played it back along with the movie where the orchestra is actually playing to hear the difference.
I feel some sympathy with him particularly, as he is active as a freelancer like me, but after he told me when we talk that he started his career as a rock and electronic musician, that makes me more sympathized with him. According to what I heard later from a Japanese composer who is also very successful in Seattle, It seems that Jon frequently organizes a party so that local composers can gather and exchange information. I realized that his great personality made the presentation so wonderful.
By the way, the GDC's session will be uploaded to an archive site called GDC Vault at a later date, so I would like to thoroughly check this session again.
I attended at a game developer conference called GDC in San Francisco Last week, and then participated in various audio and sound related sessions where the attendee can dive into the profoundness of game audio and composer's song making approach, so I'd like to introduce some of the interesting sessions among them.
The Gangs Bite Back: Music and Sound of 'Crackdown 3' Brian Trifon (Composer, Finishing Move, Inc.) Brian White (Composer, Finishing Move, Inc.) Kristofor Mellroth (Head of Audio, Microsoft Studios Global Publishing)
Crackdown 3 is a game where machine-equipped agents control a city covered with mayhem and destruction. Music is basically a hybrid of cinematic and dubstep. The music alone is also great, but Finishing Moves, which is the name of the composer team, emphasizes that both the head of audio and the composers have to be on stage to comment, because all the sounds have been completely combined and converged. For example, they completed the song of each enemy's boss character first and then disassemble the parts to extract impressive sounds, melody fragments, and themes to scatter them in the open world gameplay scene as iconic sound effects. On the other hand, they emphasize even the scene where the music doesn't sound during play, and described how to integrate them in such a way as to make sense on the world view of the game while presenting the transition from a scene without music to a scene with music on the screen.
Regarding the pieces of the songs scattered as a sound effect, some of the final song forms seem to be something that the player can't hear until the end credit. These approaches are also important for interaction with the audio director, and those were completed as songs at first to explain what the composers' intentions were when they wanted to use fractional sound effects. They said that it was the easiest way to get buy-in from directors or sound designers. Also, they were able to use Wwise to embed their own music themselves,
so they were confident that it would be a great advantage for the
reduced time of collaboration and the accuracy of the sound that is
actually reflected during gameplay.
In the presentation of the person in charge of audio, Mr. Kristofor,He said that in order to maintain the consistency between the song and the environmental sound, for example, "We built and incorporates tons of complicated program to lower the volume level of the music triggered by the frequency of the ambient sound when it sounds." It is very interesting even for me who doesn't specialize in game audio, then he showed us the difference by switching between the actual environmental sound and the echo sound or the early reflection sound that varies along with the situation where the playing character is standing.
I was able to talk with the three speakers after the session, then the two of Finishing Moves said that they feel some sympathy with Noisia in their position of media composer and musicality. Since I've actually listened to their albums as an artist (not for any video game) in advance, I also knew that they transcend Noisia in a sense, which is a music that uses meticulously tweaked percussive solid noise and even self-recorded real sounds, too. Finally, I asked an easy question "What do you use for monitor speakers?" then "Amphion is the best!" was the answer. They said they are working together at home studio, which remodeled by themselves. I was very impressed that their strong sound doesn't depend on a hyper super studio like spaceship that Noisia owns.
Dugo / Lingua Francaではイタリアの古楽器奏者アーティストEcovanavoceとも2曲コラボレートしています。彼らとの共同制作は以前にもブログで紹介したことがありますが。今回のDugoのアルバムに収録されたのはそのうちの1曲と、もう1曲はDugoの旧曲を彼らとリアレンジして新しい曲として再構築したものです。
