“What makes video game music so special?” is a common question when referring to applied music as a genre. Applied music includes music for movies, television, marketing and video games. In slang, we often use the term “soundtrack” for this style of music.
In this text, we will deal with the topic of music for video games and try to explain why and how it is so specific compared to other applied music, as well as to commercial music in general.
The simplest explanation would be that video game music is non-linear, while other music is linear. What does that mean specifically?
Linear music has its own duration and course of action, especially if we look at film as a medium, while non-linear music has an infinite course and duration. The music in a film, TV series, or commercials depends entirely on the medium for which it was composed and will follow the flow of the medium.
Take, for example, a scene from a movie that lasts five minutes. Every time you fast-forward or rewind a scene of the finished movie, the music will follow the scene and will always be the same in the position you fast-forwarded to, no matter how many times you rewind that scene. Which means that the music is “locked”. It is linear in the sense that it has a definite duration.
Video game music, in most AAA and AA titles, follows the player’s decisions and depends on the player’s interaction with the game world. That’s why we also call music in video games interactive music, as well as non-linear music.
Let’s take an example of an open-world RPG title where you explore a specific region of the game, such as a forest.
While the player is exploring the forest and not getting into conflict, some peaceful background ambient music will play and will last depending on how long the player stays in the forest to explore. The moment the player engages with enemies, the action music is activated and lasts as long as the player is in battle. When the player finishes the fight, we return to the previous ambient.
To make the interactive music non-linear, we would divide the action and ambient music into segments that last several musical beats, and these segments would alternate randomly so that they never play in the same sequence one after the other.
Let’s say we have five segments in ambient music and as long as the player is just exploring the forest, that music plays endlessly by alternating segments 1 to 5, randomly playing segment after segment. For example, 1-4-2-5-3, then 2-5-1-4-3, etc, etc… The same goes for action music. To avoid abrupt transitions from ambient to action and vice versa, a transition segment is often used to connect the two “gameplay states” by raising or lowering the tension and preparing the player for what follows.
Of course, this is not a given rule, as there are certainly video games with linear music that can play as a “loop” and this is often the case in casual games.
Each Composer, in collaboration with the studio’s Audio Director, constructs the musical system by which the music in the video game will be played, and there are many different approaches. It all depends on the needs of the gameplay system itself and which audio middleware (Wwise or FMOD) is used.
From this, we can conclude that the specificity of music in video games is the way it is played during gameplay. It’s non-linear compared to linear film music that “serves” the scene and is limited to it.
The music in the film and on the CD release flows horizontally, while the music in the video game flows vertically, precisely because of those segments that are stacked one under the other in the audio middleware, and that is why the term “vertical layering” is often used when talking about interactive music.
Let’s go back to the example of action music in the forest:
We have the mentioned five segments and each of those segments has several instrumental layers (groups) that comprise it. For example: percussion, choir, orchestra and melodic instruments playing some light motif (theme).
Segments 1-5 play in random sequence, as explained earlier in the text.
For example, instrumental layers are activated depending on the intensity of the fight.With a larger number of enemies, multiple layers are played at once. Or, as stronger enemies come across, that’s how another layer is added.Let’s say the action starts just with percussion as you fight some lone goblin.
When we defeat all the enemies, a transition segment is triggered in which we return to the ambient music, or a segment is activated in which the music ends and there is a short pause with silence. The player is the one on whom the playback of the music depends, so it must be non-linear and last indefinitely, depending on the interaction with the game world.
This is where the real beauty and fun of composing music for video games lies because the task of the Composer is to create a musical “custom-made Lego set” from which the music system will be built.
