Composing by parameter is not the only way to write music, but it is rewarding. What you do is listen into the texture for individual elements and develop sensativity to how they affect musical expression across time. There are no formulas, but as you develop sensativity you develop awarenesss and understanding.
 

•Register. What is the highest note? What is the lowest? Around which notes is activity clustered?
 
•Density. How many lines or notes play concurrently? Are there registral gaps?
 
•Linear motion. Is there fundamental linear or scalar activity? Does it go up, down, or across?
 
•Rhythmic activity. How many attack points are there per measure?
 
•Rate of cycling. How often does the music repeat? At what level? Is that rate increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same?
 
•Clarity of pulse. How hard is it to tell where the beat is?
 
•Clarity of harmony. How hard is it to tell what the root is?
 
•Dissonance level. Which intervals are featured? Dissonant, imperfect, or perfect intervals?
 
•Space. Are there silences or moments with no attack points? How long are they? How often do they occur?
 

It’s impossible for every element to have a definable shape in every passage. Sometimes, for example, you can’t say whether or not the bulk of rhythmic activity is clustered in a particular register. Don’t worry. Focus on a few parameters or maybe just one. You’ll be surprised at the power of subtle changes.
 
Speaking of surprise, you can play with the listener’s expectations by shifting which parameters are the nexus of contrast. For example, this passage is about varying rates of rhythmic activity while that passage is about varying levels of density.
 
One final point, regarding why this type of thinking may be especially helpful to a game composer. Look at those individual elements again. Wouldn’t it be fun if they were tied to game states? There’s no reason not to try.
 
This will be the focus of upcoming collaborations and articles.

Let me tell you the real story of Mario. It’s not the story of a beautiful princess captured by a scaly reptilian super villain. It’s not the story of a plucky plumber and his gangly sidekick who storm the reptilian’s castle only to discover they’ve been duped (seven times!) and confront the scaly super boss only on the eighth attempt.
 
No, the real story of Mario goes something like this.
 
When I was in Kindergarten we got the NES and the second video game we played was Super Mario Bros, right after Duck Hunt. My family gathered around our living room TV and played. My mom tried exactly once and when she died to the first Goomba never expressed an interest in video games again. My dad lost interest and to date the only game he plays (and still plays) is Tetris. My brother was older and got pretty good. I can’t remember if he beat Super Mario Bros but he got very far. I remember spending more time watching than playing. Eventually I gave up on the game as too hard.
 
The first video game I beat was Mickey Mousecapade, which we borrowed from our neighbors. It was incredibly easy, but because it was the first game I ever beat, it felt like a real accomplishment. When we got Mario All-Stars on Super NES I beat Mario Bros 2, also an easy game. I remember thinking how odd that game was compared to the others. Of course it was all a dream!
 
My fondest memories were playing A Link To The Past and Super Metroid. I played them again on emulator in college and after grad school and they still seem like masterpieces. The best stories were playing Super Mario Kart with my brother. Rainbow Road, we maintained, was a psychedelic experience. In the summer after eighth grade we borrowed someone’s Nintendo 64 for a week. I tried the Mario game on it… it was OK but also kind of weird. I couldn’t get into blocky 3D with awkward camera angles.
 
So that was the end of my interest in consoles. This was the era of Golden Eye and boy did I suck at that game. But I got into PC gaming and that means Brood War, which I still watch. When I play these old games today I’m impressed at how they teach you without you realizing you’re being taught.
 
So that’s the story of Mario, or at least, my story of Mario. I’m sure yours is different. The point is your game doesn’t need a narrative to have a story. Humans engaging with a system over time is the story. Always is. No one loses sleep over Princess Peach, but we’ll stay up all night to beat the boss.
 
So when composing think of the player’s emotional journey, not the character’s. Imagine the players playing the game and anticipate their feelings. The music writes itself. And while you’re at it, consider the role of session length and totals hours sunk into the game. As Mario demonstrates, your feelings towards a system change over time. Maybe the music should reflect that too?

In a previous post I suggested a framework for using the persuasion technique of pacing-and-leading in dynamic audio: first the sound reflects the player’s expectations. Later, the sound does something expected, which makes a successful prediction. Then the sound transforms the player’s perceptions as it diverges from the game.
 
Let’s sidestep the “everyone is different” discussion and work with generalities. What screen information informs a player’s aural expectations? To know we must understand the screen, so let’s take a closer look. As you consider each element, imagine its possible sonic representations.
 
In what kind of physical space does the game take place?
 
•Realistic
•Semi-realistic
•Surrealist
•Abstract
 
What actions does the game reward or punish?
 
•Defeating enemies, taking damage
•Gathering powerups
•Reaching a goal point, getting lost
•Solving a puzzle, trying a false combination
•Finding a hidden area
 
What can we expect from the game genre?
 
•RPG
•Puzzler
•Platformer
•RTS
•Action
•Adventure
 
What are the stages of the gameloop?
 
•Start screen, play, next stage / death
•Explore, fight, level up
•Navigate map, solve puzzles, unlock new map areas
•Harvest resources, build units, explore, conquer
 
Does the game fit a cinematic genre?
 
•Fantasy
•Sci-fi
•Detective / crime
•Soap Opera
•Costume Drama
•Romance
 
What is the color scheme?
 
•Light or dark
•Vivid or muted
•Crisp or muddled
•Simple or complex
•With or without a point of focus
 
What type of line predominates?
 
•Thick or thin
•Textured or plain
•As outline, as texture?
•Straight, angular, or curved
•Parallel or perpendicular
•Euclidean or non-euclidean
•With or without a horizon line
•Layered or flat
•Simple or complex
 
What shapes predominate?
 
•Open or closed polygons
•Number of sides
•Round or angular
•2D or 3D
•Euclidean or non-euclidean
 
What are the general patterns of motion?
 
•Fast or slow
•Constant or pulsing
•In one direction or back-and-forth
•Single, few, or many moving objects
•Layered or flat
•With or without a relationship to a horizon line
 
What off-screen informaton is vital to convey?
 
•Technology level
•Cultural signifiers
•Danger
•Theme
•Tone
 
What is the overall Information density? How much information must the player track at any given moment?
 
•Simple or complex
•Focused or dispersed
•Layered or flat
•Increasing or decreasing
 
What is the challenge level?
 
•Easy or hard
•Increasing or decreasing
•Predictable or unpredictable
 
Certainly this is a lot of information, so pare it down. Of the characteristics above, which are salient? What must be emphasized? What does not need to be emphasized? What is not important at all?
 
In the next step, as I alluded to earlier, music, sound effects, and ambience reflect the player’s expectations. This will be the subject of future posts, where I’ll examine past examples and unmined possibilities. We will consider the experience that visual and ludic materials are meant to portray, because this is the plane where design intersects sound. We will also see how focused design leads to expressive audio.

Deal-making, basic precepts:
 
If you’re making money, I should be making money.
 
If there’s no money, your game should express something I want to say.
 
If I have to put other projects on hold, you should pay me up front.
 
Revshare is only as good as marketing.
 
The bigger the project you want me to commit to, the more past success you should demonstrate.
 
A build says more about a design than a design says about a build.
 
Skillshare is as good as cash, if you’ve got something I need.
 
You can be time poor and money poor, but not also competent.

I’m writing a trumpet ensemble piece and need to increase my speed.
 
I need a system, not goals. It’s not enough to say “X pages by Y date.” I need to focus on the repeatable steps. What’s tasks can I perform with 100% reliability? What tasks can I perform with nearly 100% reliability? What tasks are not reliable?
 
Things I can always do:
 
•Clean my room
•Sit at the piano
•Line staff paper
•Circle roots
•Write a pedal point
•Play a part into my DAW
•Take a walk
 
Things I can almost always do:
 
•Write a melody
•Edit a melody on paper
•Expand a local pedal point into a contrapuntal part
•Evaluate a secondary part in my DAW
 
Things that take a lot of time:
 
•Hear a fully realized texture in my mind and try to recreate it on paper
•Play multiple parts on the piano
•Evaluate multiple parts while playing
•Imagine the overall shape of the piece in my ears
 
For my purposes, I’m going to pretend that all the tasks in the last group are impossible. If I catch myself doing one, I will immediately switch to a task in one of the first two groups. Furthermore, if I have any difficulty performing a task in the second group, I will immediately switch to a task in the first.
 
The number of measures or pages composed will have no bearing on my evaluation of a composing session. Instead I will consider a session successful if I maintain awareness throughout and switch tasks appropriately. After each session I’ll reflect on the process of task awareness and task switching to consider what I can do to make it easier.
 
Lastly, how to evaluate the system? Before I start, I’ll declare what Nassim Taleb would call an “uncle point.” That is a cost which once reached, the endeavor ends. In this case, since I know my writing speed (I track my hours) I’ll give myself 10 writing sessions to implement the system. If my writing speed is slower by the end, I’ll abandon the system, since the opportunity cost of implementing it is too high.
 
We’ll know soon!

A good system reduces your reliance on:
 
1. Memory
2. Willpower
3. Decision making
4. Emotional resilience
 
(Yes, physical effort too, but that’s not so germaine to game audio.)
 
 
I could leave the post like this, but I want to reinforce this point.
 
Memory: the more external reminders you get the more your mind is freed up to muse, imagine, and explore.
 
Willpower: the more tasks are broken down into smaller components the easier it is to focus on each one. Also, performing tasks when you know you’ll be in the right frame of mind makes then easier to perform.
 
Decision making: the more that simple decisions can be routinized the more you can focus on the big picture (ie., forming systems to handle groups of decisions) and the more cognitive power you have left over for complex decisions.
 
Emotional resilience: don’t waste energy on avoidable toxicity.
 
It’s easy to confuse systems with goals. Scott Adams distinguishes between them:
 
“Goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.”
 
This understanding carries an implicit critique of goals.
 
“Thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.”
 
As Scott points out you can waste a lot of time playing semantic games defining the two. It’s best to simply approach each situation with “how can I be more systems focused?”
 
What does that mean? Break an activity down into a repeatable process that you can always apply. Whenever something doesn’t work out the way you want it to, think of something that’s low effort which works to bring eventual success.
 
Finally, if all you’ve got is a checklist, as Nick Taleb might point out, you don’t stand to benefit from unforeseen opportunities. (To be honest, I would love to write more about Taleb’s ideas, but I wouldn’t know how to do them justice at the moment. All I can say is, go out and read everything by him you can.)
 
And that’s it for systems.
 
And if you were curious, this was typed mostly on the train or during times when I couldn’t focus on composing. If I veered into a topic that would take me hours to explain, I pulled back. As soon as I detected a stopping point, I stopped. And when I put this on my website, I gave myself 20 minutes to proofread and format it.

Conceptual discussion. Many approximations herein.
 
Basic idea: sound effects and music both react to the game. Typically sound effects react immediately and music reacts a bit slower. Also, sound effects tend to be in the world and music tends to be in the players head. Tendencies only.
 
Let’s extrapolate. Assume at any given moment there are four independent simultaneous layers. A quadrant:
 
 
Fast reacting / In the world.
Fast reacting / In the players head.
Slow reacting / In the world.
Slow reacting / In the players head.
 
Speed of reaction is on a spectrum. (Immediate, fast, medium, slow, nearly constant.) Diagenics is either / or. (Either tied to a game world object or constant position relative to player.)
 
Some emotional reactions are delayed. There’s the immediate reaction, which is slightly after the stimulus. And there’s your reflections on that feeling. And there’s your sense of what’s coming next. There’s a sense that you may be hopeful or weary of the future. There’s such a thing as how long you feel a certain way before the feeling subsides a bit. Or maybe the music is tied to the present moment.
 
Assuming the player wishes to continue playing we can anticipate what he is thinking and his feelings on it. Another way to say it, the mechanics of a game direct the player towards certain thought patterns, and success / failure (deferred success) helps us anticipates his feelings.
 
How do mechanics effects thoughts? Hypothesis: challenge level. When the challenge level is high enough to demand full attention, focus is towards the present moment. When the challenge level eases off, thoughts go towards reflection (how did I do? How can I do this better?) If the challenge level starts to increase again, the player becomes more future oriented (what can I expect now?) These thoughts are what you use to anticipate a player’s feelings. You can employ strategic ambiguity when you can’t be sure how a player will feel. Challenge level increasing but not yet requiring full attention: an anticipatory moment, future oriented. Maybe player is optimistic, maybe pessimistic. So write in both. What matters is future orientation of music, so nothing is totally certain. Chaotic. Conflicting feelings.
 
Having an idea of what the player is likely to think / feel helps us with pacing. Need to match and reflect player’s state to gain trust.
 
Trying to move beyond emotional intensity curves here. A good first step but not always appropriate to the action of a game.
 
How to represent different time orientations?
 
Present: minimal variation. Static state. Directly representative of in-game mechanics / state. No reflection, meaning no variation of material once stated.
 
Reflective: no new material, but endless variations on old material. Slower pace of information. Sense of examining the same thing under many different guises / from different points of view.
 
Future Oriented: New material. Chaotic, meaning information rate is not fixed, but generally faster. Also, musical grammar never completes. No full sentences. Ideas interrupt each other constantly. (Like a classical development section, but cinematic action fits the bill too.)
 
This suggests ways for music to flow. FMOD implementation ideas: future orientation leading to a present state… perhaps the future orientation is cycling through many ideas over loop. (Perhaps the length of the loop, meaning the number of ideas in it, increases as the high score increases). Eventually you reach the point where your full attention is required. We could say this is when you reach the current high score (of the session.) Each moment of the future loop is ready to become a present state. New material suddenly stops being introduced and is repeated with minimal variation tied directly to the game state / mechanics. (Which means its complexity increases directly with the game.)
 
So, a future loop could have sections a, b, c, d, e. And there would be equal number of present-oriented deep examinations of each: A’, B’, C’, etc, ready to transition at the drop of a hat. (I think going to a reflective area is a little easier because the use of space of sound design aided transitions helps a lot.)
 
Extrapolating, where you are in one loop determines where you start in the next. This allows on-a-dime transitions with minimal (still plenty) transition material.
 
So far this has been about short and long time reactions. The short reactions happen the most during present, steady state music. The longer reactions determine which time orientation you are in and are connected to challenge level and high score.
 
Left out of discussion: long scale in-world sounds. (ambiance.) This suggests that changes in challenge level might correspond with a change in level / visual information, to justify a change in ambiance. Otherwise, ambient intensity could be a slow moving thing.

The music is the soundtrack to the player interacting with the system. (Not always, but this is my personal favorite starting point.)
 
Imagine watching the player playing the game. You are composing the soundtrack to that.
 
Length of a session. Story of a session. Session to session. Story of that.
 
The simple fact of playing a game over a period of time and interacting with it is something the music needs to reflect.
 
Gameplay footage. Now imagine footage of a player interacting with the game to produce that gameplay. What can you expect the player to think and feel?
 
Persuasion technique: pacing and leading. Watch skilled rhetoricians in action. First describe the current situation. Reflect people’s own thoughts and experiences back to them. Nothing more. Gain trust. Show that your mind is like their mind. Then make predictions about what they will be feeling and thinking. Vague if necessary, like astrology. Always a way it can come true. When your predictions come true the crowd trusts you more and more. You go from reflecting to something more. Be patient with this. Eventually you break the barrier between their mind and you mind. They are in your reality now. They expect anything you say to be true now and will perceive reality differently to make your words true. You can persuade anyone of anything with enough time. You must believe this.
 
Now with game music. Imagine footage of a player interacting with the system. At first, reflect what they see back to them with music and sound effects. Reward and encouragements. Establish comfort. Tropes, genre expectations, cliches. Establish trust.
 
Now the music does something which is weird and doesn’t reflect the game. Huh, what’s that? Then the game moves into the next part. It’s a perfect fit! Wow, the music predicted that. Repeat. Sharper contrasts between music and gameplay. More time between prediction and fulfillment. Trust, trust, trust. Break down the barriers between minds.
 
Learn, from deep experience, intuition, testing, where this breakdown occurs.
 
Make sure, along the way, that the music, in addition to matching the game, also follows it’s own internal logic, whatever that may be. Rhythm, theme, harmony, color, etc.
 
Now follow the music to its own place. The player is ready. Barrier between minds dissolved. Go further and further. Make the player invest in your frame. The player will see in the gameplay and the visuals whatever it is the music is suggesting. You have transformed the game with your music.
 
This of course is the ideal. May only ever be partially realized. No formula, only heuristic. Art, not science.
 
Remember, tell the story of of an individual session and also the story that happens from session to session. The game knows when you’re playing a lot. The game knows when you’ve taken a break. Learn, through heuristic, when to shift down from dissolution to prediction or reflection. Remember, heuristic, heuristic, heuristic.