Trigger Happy
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blessed with total sonic freedom, because videogame
systems (apart from the poor Nintendo 64) now read
music directly off a CD, so soundtracks are recorded
with full banks of pro-quality digital instruments and no
restrictions on epic breadth. Sometimes the music may
even be recorded by a full orchestra of live musicians,
as is the case with Outcast.
The problem with such scores, even when—as is
increasingly the case—they are highly competent and
pleasing pieces of music in their own right, is that,
unlike the videogame’s visuals, they are not interactive.
A film score is written to accompany a predetermined
and unchanging visual story. So it is recorded once and
cast in stone. But videogames can change from one
moment to the next depending on what the player does.
One way round this is just to cut in a rather ugly
fashion from a light-hearted piece of music to a doom-
laden one when something bad happens onscreen.
Microsoft has developed a system called Direct Music
that hopes to automate this technique more smoothly.
But all this means in practice is that the composer
writes tiny little “cells” of music a few bars long that
are then algorithmically combined into longer episodes
by the processing engine. (Avant-garde classical
musicians had exactly this idea of combining cells in
the 1960s.)
