Everyone Chases the Frogs: The Changing Sound of Video Game Music

Ryan Roth, sound designer and composer for the video game Starseed Pilgrim, asks me at one point if I know what a 12-tone scale is.

“Sort of,” I tell him. I know the traditional Western scale has eight notes. I know the 12-tone scale was pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg, and has something to do with dissonance.

“Oh.” I think I detect a hint of disappointment in his voice. It might be the realization, or the reminder, that most listeners aren’t musicians themselves, that their fans never experience the music they care about in the same way as the people who made it: the post-idealist disappointment that comes from looking out over a gulf that has always existed between artists and their audiences. “Well...”

With the briefest introduction, as you can see in the video above, Starseed Pilgrim drops its player off on a floating island in the middle of a white void with the only instruction the game ever gives: “TOUCH SPACE TO GROW.” Said player is supplied with a handful of seeds that can be planted, that grow over time, brick by brick, laying out paths to follow to pick up keys en route to different islands, as a “corruption” bubbles up from below. Each seed is a series, each series is a piece of a melody, extended with each seed planted. As bricks fill in, each plays a note on a different instrument: sitars, bells, reverbed voices, a single orchestral hit. The corruption itself is a three-note pipe organ tune that grows in strength as it gets closer, and Roth informs me that the whole sound-world is structured in such a way that, no matter how or when the randomly-generated seeds are planted, every sound generated harmonizes with every other. His collaborator, designer/programmer Alexander Martin, mentions offhandedly that all the game’s sounds, and the mechanics behind them, were produced in a few days toward the end of development.

Somewhere in there is some Herculean math that takes seven different seeds, one to eight or nine notes each, combining in however-many ways, that equals to 12. “There’s a secret in the game,” Roth tells me, “where if you can make a 12-tone scale... something happens.” It’s also possible that the disappointment I detected was that no one would ever find it.

The net result of Starseed Pilgrim is twofold. It’s a game of intractable, ratcheting tensions: harmony and encroaching threat, ecology and abstraction, survival and ephemerality. Everything the player builds will be inevitably destroyed. It also almost plays more like an instrument than a traditional game.

“Players can be other than human... but I think the idea that musical instruments are players [too] maybe is not so immediately intuitive if you haven’t played with them a lot.” That’s David Kanaga, sound man for Proteus and Dyad. He’s diving deep into the idea of the feedback loop between composers and players, with whichever definition of those words one chooses. The conceptual is his province, and when he gets started on an idea, he hits the ground running. “I think one of the most interesting things we can do with games [and] music right now is to tangle up all these relationships past the point of a clean rescue.”

I ask him if the problems in composing for games are similar to those to doing comedy in games, the difficulty coming from the idea that the designer can’t completely control the pace of play or the timing of events. “I think if you try to approach game music just like recorded music, you’re going to hit some snags... but if you listen to the free variables in the game, what it’s like to the touch, what is playing and just let all of this happen, I think everything that happens works by necessity, just because it’s playing. We just need to listen to it and play too.”

Playing the instrument that is Proteus is all about proximity. It's less a traditional game than a vaguely-directed wander, an essentially friendly drop-in virtual world that seems like the sort of thing that should get made more often than it does. Instrument lessons take place almost passively, as the player glides through the world, learning progressively that the seemingly dumb objects populating the world are all there to trigger events. Sit under a canopy of trees and falling leaves give off an icy tinkle. Pass by a group of standing stones on a path, and each emits a low, round tone in a melody. Then the wander becomes something like a hunt, chasing not only environmental triggers, but also the local fauna, all of whom run away from you with tiny, tinny skittering noises, or, in the case of the inevitable frogs, a trio of keyboard trills as they jump away. Everyone chases the frogs.

“I love rhythm, I think it’s definitely the most obvious cross-over between games and music.” Kanaga’s responding to a query about the more conventional rhythms most listeners are used to, the imperative, syncopated lock-step of most pop or dance music, and how those, on the surface, would seem the most obvious analog for design and mechanics. “What this I think ignores, though, is free rhythm, which isn’t constrained by a steady barline.... Free rhythms aren’t really ‘dividing’ time in that same way [as mechanized rhythms].... I think it’s these sorts of rhythms that, just like in everyday life, happen most in games. So, once we tune into those, then everything is rhythmical... the sort of core ‘pulses’ of the game as music.”

Dyad may be more of a traditional game – a warped, kaleidoscopic combination of tube shooter and racing game. The player links colored pairs on the way and passes between and around them. Progress is marked by velocity: objects in the playfield whizz by in streaks and strobes, and the lush, fluttering score does the same, punctuated by almost vocal pings in scattered pairs and sudden whooshing bursts of speed. Regress is a record-scratch and a slow plod back up the hill. The effect is that of a constantly shifting rhythm – less the propulsion of techno than the torque of psychedelia.

“I think that there are some strange loops” – a loop where one always ends up where they began, regardless of hierarchy, into infinity – “happening in the music design process, where the ‘composition,’ ‘instrument’ and ‘player’ categories can get very tangled, and I think right now, the more tangling going on the better,” Kanaga says. “I think that they could be pointing to the way to rhythmic strange loops, where tone becomes rhythm becomes form becomes tone, etc. Very exciting!”