Game Audio Is Eating the Avant-Garde (and That's Fine)

Somewhere in a rented office there is a composer being asked to deliver, by Friday, a piece of music with no fixed length, no fixed instrumentation at playback, no guaranteed order of events, and a requirement that it remain bearable after sixty hours. She is being paid properly for it, she has a contract, and nobody is going to describe the result as difficult.

Every part of that brief was, forty years ago, an avant-garde position that had to be argued for in essays. It is now a line item on a production schedule for a game about diving.

The score as a system, not a piece

The first thing to understand is that the deliverable has changed shape. A game composer does not hand over a piece. She hands over a system: stems designed to be layered in any combination, alternative sections that can be entered from several directions, short transitional gestures that cover a seam, and a document specifying what triggers what.

The two basic techniques have names so plain they hide how strange they are. Vertical remixing means the music is a stack of simultaneous layers and the game decides how many of them you hear, so intensity is a fader rather than an event. Horizontal resequencing means the music is a set of blocks and the game decides the order, so form is negotiated at runtime. Add a rule that music must duck under dialogue and effects, and you have a score that is being mixed live, by nobody, several million times a day.

This is indeterminacy with a bug tracker. The concert avant-garde wrote the ideas down, argued about them, and performed them to rooms of two hundred people who had already agreed to be there. Games shipped the same ideas to an audience that never asked for them and mostly does not notice, which is arguably the more radical outcome.

Three games that are really instruments

Tidewrack is a diving game whose score is mapped to depth. Six layers fade in and out as pressure increases, and the entire mix loses its top end as the oxygen meter falls, so you hear your own situation deteriorating before the interface tells you. Players describe the last thirty seconds of a bad dive as unbearable. Nothing dramatic happens musically. A filter closes.

Sundial, a farming and scheduling game, runs a twenty-two minute cycle that never repeats identically. Motifs are attached to crops, so your fields determine the orchestration, and a failed harvest transposes the following in-game week down a third. It is a strategy game that quietly grades your competence in key changes, and thousands of people have absorbed that without once using the word modulation.

Grey Harvest generates its music from your own movement. Footstep rate sets the tempo, direction changes trigger new material, and standing still collapses the whole score into a single held drone. Players consistently report the drone as the most frightening thing in the game. That is a composition finding, not a design one, and it arrived because somebody built an instrument and then watched a hundred thousand strangers play it.

The constraint nobody in a concert hall has

Sixty hours. That is the real difference, and it is the one that produces the interesting writing.

A concert piece has twelve minutes and a single hearing, so it can afford to be emphatic. A game score has to survive being heard for longer than a working week, often while the listener is doing something else and occasionally while they are furious. It cannot be dramatic on a schedule. It has to be built out of long forms, textural writing, slow change, and above all it has to know when to shut up, because a listener who mutes the music has ended the composer's career in that room.

Those are precisely the disciplines ambient music invented, and precisely the ones concert music never had to learn. Neither constraint is nobler. But the game constraint happens to force the outcome the avant-garde said it wanted all along: music you live inside rather than sit in front of, that behaves differently depending on your attention, and that has no correct performance to compare yourself against.

You can hear the traffic going the other way too. Half of Nadia Volt's Overcurrent sounds like a menu screen: patient, loopable, waiting for something to happen. She means it as a compliment, and she is right to.

The avant-garde has always followed the budget

The objection to all of this is that it is not really composition, because it is functional, commissioned, constrained by a client and subordinate to something on a screen. Which describes almost every piece of music written before about 1800, most of what was written for radio, and the entire history of film scoring. Adventurous music has always lived wherever someone would pay for it: courts, churches, broadcasters, cinema, state ensembles, universities. The money moved. It has moved again.

Something real is lost in the move, and it is worth naming rather than waving away. There is no fixed object. Nobody hears the same performance, so there is nothing to argue about afterwards in the way people argue about a recording. There is no score to study, only a middleware project and a spreadsheet of triggers. And the authorship is distributed across forty people and a piece of software, which makes the work almost impossible to canonise even if anybody wanted to.

What is gained is an audience of millions who listen for hours at a stretch and who will notice, and post about it, when a filter moves. Concert programmers could commission the Tidewrack score tomorrow. The awkward part is what they would need to make it work, which is not an orchestra. It is a player.