Film Scores and Game Music: Links, Lacks and Looks

Martin Marks and Matt Weise

Music in Film
Films have a long history of music whereas with video games, it is only since the mid 90s that new technology enabled the player to download a lot of music with the game. The fundamental issue with video game music is that it is open-ended, with multiple possibilities, unlike film music, which is fundamentally linear. It must be noted that sound design has long been emphasized in video games, but in films, the process is different: the music has traditionally been composed separately from the sound design. However today, because of the advance in technologies and the expectations of audiences of a certain kind of sound experience, music and sound design are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.

There are three elements that must be considered while analyzing soundtracks for films – these include film genre, style and function.

The opening of a film score usually sets the mood and gets the audience into the world of the film. For a film like The Firm, the opening is a jazzy, almost bluesy solo piano composition. It was gutsy of the composer Dave Grusin to do this because most studios like big orchestral scores for their big budget movies. However the piano with its quick tempo manages to convey effectively information about Tom Cruise's character—where he is in his life, his environment as well as his inner state as we see him in quickly cut shots, doing different activities around the Harvard campus. The beat is what holds the opening sequence of the film together. Cruise's character is soon going to join a law firm that will change his life completely and make it almost like a prison; that is why the music stops immediately when he reaches the environment of the firm. This is an example of how one can convey a lot even by using a very limited musical palette.

The music in Star Trek II that is played whenever the crew is seen aboard The Enterprise is almost like a 19th-century (Romantic) symphony:– it is full of rich writing for strings—especially the cellos—and its function is such that whenever the audience hears it and sees the Enterprise crew, they wallow in the lush romance of the music and empathize with crew members. This is in contrast to the war-like, martial music that is used as the theme for the Klingons. This idea of using contrasting themes for different characters or groups of characters for functional purposed is a classical Hollywood tradition of music scoring. It is drawn from opera, especially the work of Wagner. The tradition arose of calling such symbolic themes leitmotifs, and in today's language we can call them motives, or guiding themes or character themes. The idea is basically that the score has several melodies that become associated, and developed, as the film goes forward, with different people, places, things.

A fine recent example of how themes can become representative of objects and ideas is found in the film The Two Towers. Since the film is part of a grand fantasy quest, it almost demands a Wagnerian kind of grand score—one that can connect the three films in the series. The Ring theme for example, keeps on growing in power and significance from the first film till the third.

Mission Impossible as a film is difficult to slot – it is certainly an action film, and it could also be considered almost like an action game – with the end result known because of the genre conventions and the interest being in how the film plays itself out. It could also be considered a mind game, with all its twists and turns. The film's music reflects this and the composer Danny Elfman, who loves mixing things up (classical with pop, jazz with rock) alludes to the original Mission Impossible TV theme throughout the film, but by using different instruments, makes the film score very unique and reflective of the nature of the movie.

In a very different way, the title sequence of the film Signs is powerful and menacing. It has a complex musical form and symphonic orchestration. The music virtually drives the titles forward with its power.

Music and Sound in Video Games
Sound as Drama
The traditional use of music in games was to enhance the game experience by supplying “ear candy” to the visuals, or to create a simple narrative ambience via “theme music” for certain characters, events, etc. However, in today's games, the music can greatly enhance the gaming experience by making sound an integral element of the gameplay. The virtual story-making canvas can be expanded by uniquely constructing character and drama through audio. Like film music, the sound in video games can peak and fall into hills and valleys and sound cohesive and complete despite the fact that will not be heard in a linear fashion as in films. Thus video game sound is organic/dynamic but it can be drawn from the same cinematic notions (for instance - suspense) as film sound. In the video game Metal Gear Solid, sound is dramatically used to create tension. There are musical patterns in the game – musical cycles that rotate around different events and different levels. It is like a simulator of film music – a kind of 'Tom Clancy movie music generator' that fits perfectly into the aesthetics of the game genre, which in this case is derived from the film genre that includes films like Mission Impossible.

Sound as Storytelling
On the other hand a game like System Shock 2 uses sound, not music, to tell the story of the game in a unique way. Games utilize sound to tell stories in unique and different ways from films. In system Shock 2 – there are two levels of sound happening. (The genre is that of a sci-fi war game – it is set on a space station, where 'things have gone wrong'.) The first level is the real time sound – of the player's character actually walking around and playing the game. The second level consists of a narrative of what happened in the characters' past – the recordings consist of audio objects of the past that play out even as you are playing the game in real time. What the sound achieves in this game is the possibility of telling two stories at once – a narrative multitasking. So the character might come across a dead body in the game's real time, and then hear the person's last words in the second level of sound. The experience is bi-sensory and multi-dimensional and it achieves an intense feeling of “virtual reality” or “emergence”.

Sound as Space
Grand Theft Auto is one of the few games that use popular songs in games. It is surprising that such few game designers do this. The makers of Grand Theft Auto decided that the music of the game would be songs that people knew and remembered. They leveraged this to create the game that was about the world, set in the 1980s. So the entire aesthetic of the game is that of the 1980s including the game music. On top of that, as a similar strategy to the aforementioned System Shock, where you can hear two levels of sound, Grand Theft Auto too has one level which is the world of what is happening in the game, but there is also a second level that includes the entire pop culture of what is going on in the background that is heard through the music the player can play on the in-game radio. How these two levels interact makes for an interesting game experience. The radio enables the player to switch channels and navigate through various types of 80s music.

Sound as Characterization
Sound as characterization is related to the idea of games being a spatial storytelling medium and if you can actually locate something in space musically and have the music being dictated by the space and by the player moving through it, it creates an intense game experience. Silent Hill is a horror game that creates a psychological soundscape for the player to navigate. Your character is in a town with scary things occurring all around – and when you move towards or away from places, a feeling is generated – and the intensity of it depends on how close you are to the phenomenon or place.

Other uses of sound
The above include just a few examples of the use of music and sound in videogames and there are several more. For example sound as gameplay, as used in rhythm games, sound to create character motifs in role-playing games, etc.

Music in Film and Music in Games – some comparative hypotheses
Music in Film
1. Deep Historical Roots
Film music has a century long history, which in turn reaches back to earlier traditions of concert and theatrical entertainment. Thus today's film composers have many great past scores to emulate, and it is easy to trace influences of composers across generations as well as within genres, studios, national cinemas, etc.

2. Commercial importance
Revenues from soundtracks – especially those featuring popular songs – can rival or surpass those of their films. Many films are made with such considerations in mind.

3. Relative weight
Music is usually the last aural component to be produced, after voices and sound effects, and speaking voices are usually given more prominence for narrative purposes. Yet while music's role is most obvious when voices and f/x are absent, there is a role for music to play in complex mixes of all three soundtrack components, and many great music composers have mastered the art of "underscoring".

4. Every kind of music has now been used in films
The range includes the types of ambient music now heard in many video games today, but also much more. Likewise there is an enormous variety of narrative functions and formal structures.

Music in games
1. The past is a brief prologue
The genre of video game music is young, so we can trace some of its immediate antecedents, but we cannot be certain what traditions will take hold. In some respects, today's video game music seems analogous to the quick changing commercial "spots" heard on TV than to feature film scores. But the influence of film-scoring styles on many games is clear.

2. Web based marketing of video game music
The number of recordings is small but growing. It is unclear whether video game music truly lends itself to soundtrack modes. Does video game music offer a comparative listening experience to either a pop or an orchestral movie soundtrack?

3. A different hierarchy
In video games, sound effects have been given the most attention and have been developed with tremendous imagination, especially in the action and role-playing fantasy game genres. Largely for technical reasons (until PS2's arrival), both music and voices have ranked far behind, and even video games based on film seem to use voices less expressively than their counterparts.

4. Video game music is now defined as much by its limitations as by its achievements
For example, until recently, by limitations of timbre owing to audio technology; of style owing to market demographics; and of function and form – owing to the dominance of certain genre conventions, the lack of pre-determined game structures, and the need for open ended musical units capable of innumerable repetitions.