This Is the World’s First Interactive Video Game Symphony
With Journey LIVE, we’re creating a video game experience in which gamers can choose their own sonic adventure.
What comes to mind when you think about video game music? I’ll bet you can still hear the electronic soundtrack to Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros — the bright-sounding “ping!” of collecting a coin and the accelerated carnival-like soundtrack heralding the in-game star power-up that renders you temporarily invincible.
We’ve come a long way since the bleeps and bloops of ’80s games, but this savvy use of music still demonstrates astonishing skill in establishing mood and providing cleverly coded sonic information.
Music has always been essential to the immersive video game experience. Composer Nobuo Uematsu was the first to use 8-bit and 16-bit processors to emulate the sound of an orchestra for the Japanese role-playing game seriesFinal Fantasy. More recently, games have adopted recordings of real orchestral instruments to replace the digitally generated sounds, serving to augment the immersion of the gaming experience in ways that place interactivity at the forefront of the gaming experience. This has opened up a whole new platform for classical composers, who have also begun writing music specifically for gameplay.
Interactivity is the main thing that differentiates video games from film — and the most successful music in video games gracefully facilitates that interactive experience. A stellar example: Austin Wintory’s GRAMMY-nominated score to the game Journey. Journey is more than a game. It’s an interactive parable in which gameplay, art, and music weave together on an almost operatic level.
Wintory’s gorgeously orchestrated compositions sit solidly in the tradition of the great classical masterworks — but uniquely tailored to react to a player’s every move. No two playthroughs of Journey are alike, so no two playthroughs will ever result in the musical score unfolding in precisely the same way. Players traverse an imaginary but psychologically real universe that is mysterious, exotic, and largely taciturn, sometimes alone, sometimes with another, as Journey can pair random strangers in its gameplay. Players who happen upon each other in the online game can travel together but not communicate with each other using text, and Wintory’s score provides an aural expression of a narrative conveyed without words.
Here’s where I come in. As composer and Director of Artistic Programming for the classical music organization Fifth House Ensemble, my passion is reimagining classical music for a 21st-century audience. Our ensemble is always looking for ways to present classical music in fresh and engaging ways, and after a series of collaborations with graphic novelists and animators, we felt that live gaming could be the next frontier. As a fan of both Journey and its music, I wondered how we might create a musical event that would challenge the common perception that video games are antisocial. We’d take an experience we’d each had alone on the couch to one shared publicly with a large, participating audience.
I reached out to Wintory and Journey developer and TED Fellow Kellee Santiago. She’s a visionary in the game industry who’s just as interested in reimagining video games as I am classical concerts. We hit on an idea: creating an arrangement of Journey’s music that could be performed as a live concert by Fifth House Ensemble’s musicians, following a kind of choose-your-own-adventure format. As audience members played the game, the musicians would respond to gameplay decisions — and the game is projected on a large screen for all to see.
This might be easier said than done, and we’ve already hit a few snags. For example, we realized early on that we wanted to perform the musical score live — but we still needed many of the game’s sound effects, such as the pitter-patter of the avatar’s feet in the sand. Luckily, our friends at Sony (who released the game as a PlayStation exclusive) created a special build of the game that has the music removed but with sound effects intact.
But it will be well worth the challenge. In the process, we’re creating a brand-new, unique art form — a natural progression from films to games to interactive symphony. In this format, Journey won’t just connect people from the gaming and music communities. It will generate an on-the-spot classical music piece that’s co-created with its audience. It also frees classical music from its ivory tower AND gets gamers off the couch.
One of the remarkable aspects of Journey is how — in the game’s beautiful but frequently lonely landscape — companionship and altruism are valued in spite of, or perhaps because of, anonymity. In the human journey, the game seems to imply, all that matters in the end is the effect we had on the lives of others along the way. That sentiment is reason enough to want to shareJourney with as many people as possible.
Want to get involved? Visit Fifth House Ensemble’s Kickstarter page to contribute, or look out for performances of Journey LIVE at such venues as Chicago’s historic Steppenwolf Theatre (where the piece will debut on 28 February 2016), conferences like gaming and comic-book convention Magfest, and Brooklyn’s National Sawdust.
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
