Game Audio

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Game Audio

How I approach composing and implementing game music

The 3 Basic methods

While there's many awesome and exciting intricate methods for mapping a interactive music system for a game engine, there are 3 methods of game music that are most common in the industry.

Vertical Layering

Vertical "Laying" or "Mixing" is a game compositional strategy where you have multiple music tracks that can play by themselves or play together simultaneously in different combinations to create a different composition or emotion. Essentially they are ingredients that taste good on their own or complete a recipe when combined in various ways.

In this video, I have a composition broken down into 3 tracks that can play on their own or 'layer' together.

Inside the Unity Engine, I have object colliders set for the player to trigger when walking through them. Green objects trigger an individual layer to play while the Red stops a layer's playback. Notice how smooth the transitions between them are.

There are also 3 white capsule objects that trigger a SFX/Music Segment. Using a script and parameter, when a one is triggered, the current playing musical layer(s) are 'ducked' in volume.
Interesting, right? This method is extremely useful in games that have levels of intensity and achievement notifications

Branching

For a medieval knight game, I created 4 loops of music based off of 4 game states the player goes through: Exploration, Tension, Battle and Victory

In Wwise, I have implemented the loops into segments that can 'branch' off of each other at any point when the player enters a new game state (i.e. player explores a forest and then bandits appear and attack, changing the emotional state.)

But a problem arises in games where the player can quickly be in different situations—consequently triggering various music abruptly. It can sound unnatural and weird. How do I get around this? I cut each music loop into much smaller chunks—phrases that are short enough to play through before immediately switching. It sounds much more purposeful and natural. It may not be a instant switch when a different game state occurs, but it will be less distracting to the player, which is the ultimate goal after all.

In my 'Standard' example, I have the same concept except the musical loops aren't broken into pieces but are complete with longer phrases. Because of this, the transitions are also longer; but this can be still effective as long as the transitions between each other are smooth, and the game states aren't changing very frequently.

↓ Advanced Branching Method ↓

↓ Standard Branching Method ↓

Horizontal Sequencing

"Horizontal Sequencing" is a term that I first heard from one of my former professors that describes the most basic compositional method of Game Scoring—loops that play sequentially and immediately change at different events in a game. To avoid distracting a player when having to switch to different kinds of loops (especially drastic changes in tempo and emotion), we can use 'Transitions'.

A transition is a very short non-looping phrase or stinger that is triggered before the next loop is played. It serves as a bridge to sound like it is naturally building into the next game event or state.

In this example, I have two musical loops that I composed to represent two opposing characters in a game. Notice that when I switch from the character "Miles" to "Phoenix", a single percussion hit with a cymbal rise is first triggered and acts like a bridge into Phoenix's theme.

Now notice that when I switch back from Phoenix into Miles, a loud triumphant segment plays signaling Phoenix's "Victory" before smoothly coming back into the first loop.