Music Takes on a Hollywood Edge

Video game music, once composed with cheesy electronic bleeps, now rivals anything Hollywood produces.

In fact, game music increasingly comes from Hollywood as developers try to achieve the same dramatic depth as movies.

The soundtrack for “Metal Gear Solid 2,” for example, was written by Harry Gregson-Williams, who scored dozens of films, including “Shrek,” “Armageddon,” “The Replacement Killers” and “Spy Game.”

It’s not that game developers have suddenly acquired an appreciation for music. The sophistication in game music comes from advances in computing power and memory, allowing for playback of vast amounts of high-fidelity audio. In fact, the concept of interactive music has been around since 1991, when LucasArts developed iMUSE, a proprietary program that changed the music according to what was occurring in the game.

“No one at the time had ever thought of doing interactive music,” said Jeff Kliment, sound development manager at LucasArts in San Rafael, Calif. “The idea was revolutionary.”

Today, music can be piped into a game dynamically, based on the player’s location, health status and circumstance, Kliment said. In “Myst III: Exile,” for instance, dozens of musical and sound elements can be simultaneously played and seamlessly changed as the player journeys through the game.

If the player approaches the sea, the sound of crashing waves becomes louder. If the player rotates so the sea is to the right, the sound would adjust so the waves would be louder on the right speaker, giving the illusion of three-dimensional sound. Altogether, the game contains thousands of musical elements and sound effects that can be summoned real-time.

Game music is recorded digitally, as are film scores. That lets traditional film composers make interactive music without having to know anything about video games.

Gregson-Williams, for example, hasn’t played a video game since “Pong.” But the Santa Monica composer has garnered raves for his score for “Metal Gear,” which he wrote as a creative experiment.

Question: How is composing for a video game different from composing for a film?

Answer: It was very different from how I usually work. The very essence of composing for a film is to write music to every single frame. But I never saw this video game. And it wasn’t finished when I completed the music. Instead, I had to write music based on a number of adjectives and a number of hypothetical situations that the hero might find himself in. So it was rather like writing a series of modules, a series of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that later would have to be put back together in a way that had nothing to do with me, thankfully. For instance, I wrote a series of music pieces titled “sneaky,” where I had to imagine the main character sneaking around unseen, unheard. There was a lot of tension perhaps, but not a lot of action. And I was writing it to various degrees, from being quite safe to being on the edge of some action taking place. Then I would take another adjective, for instance “action,” and do the same thing. Perhaps he was being heroic. Or in a perilous situation.

Q: You wrote hundreds of pieces of music, of the jigsaw puzzle as you put it. How long were the pieces? And did you have any hand in making the transitions?

A: There was no point in writing a 40-minute piece of music because that’s never going to be heard in full. Because it’s interactive, it would always be interrupted by the player. I have no idea how the music flows. In that sense, it was very liberating. Usually, everything I write is determined by what’s going on in the screen. We kind of turned that upside down in this project. I literally had no pictures to work from, just some adjectives. I think the longest single continuous piece of music was just five minutes.

Q: Any other differences between game and film scoring?

A: Another difference was that my clients were in Tokyo, and they were very busy. And I’m in Santa Monica. So what I would do is write music and send the music as MP3 files overnight. The next morning, I’d get an e-mail with a bunch of comments. In the world I usually work in, the film world, the director would sit here on my couch and listen to the music with me, and I would present music that way. This way, it was totally blind. I probably saw my clients not more than three times total.

Q: How was the feedback?

A: It was very incisive. Hideo (Kojima, the game’s designer) knew what he wanted from the music. That made a big difference. Often, when creative people hover on the brink and aren’t quite sure, it tends to undermine your confidence. You’re not sure which way to turn. But he was quite sure of his direction. On the whole, he liked everything I did for the game.

Q: Now that you’ve had a chance to see the game, what do you think?

A: It’s quite good. I noticed they took apart some of my music and used the pieces individually. See, each piece of music I’d send was made up of different “stems,” each representing the bass, or the percussions, and so on. So I recognize it as my music, but it’s quite different in how it’s used in the game. This PlayStation thing is interesting. Do you know where I can get one?

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Alex Pham covers the video game industry. She can be reached at alex.pham@latimes.com.