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Dear Mr Houge, thank you very much for taking your time to answer our questions. Could you please shortly introduce yourself to our readers? Hi, I'm Ben Houge, and I've been creating audio for games since joining Sierra in 1996 to work on Leisure Suit Larry 7. I was at Sierra for 7 years and contributed to a range of titles, including King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Arcanum. I now work as a Senior Sound Designer for Ubisoft at their Shanghai studio, and I just finished Brothers in Arms for PS2. Over the years, my work has involved every aspect of audio for games, which has included writing music for projects like Arcanum, King's Quest, and others. I've been an active composer outside of the game industry, as well. Before moving to Shanghai, I was heavily involved in working with ensembles and other composers to produce concerts in Seattle. For more information, you can visit www.benhouge.com. Your music for Arcanum takes a very classical approach, and certainly has been something new to the game industry. Did you take this step with intention, for bringing something innovative to the game industry, or did you just feel it would fit well with the game? I didn't set out to be iconoclastic with Arcanum; the string quartet approach eventually simply emerged as the most logical direction for this game. The game itself was unique in its anachronistic central conflict of magic versus technology, and to have my music (influenced by early music and Renaissance polyphony) performed by a string quartet seemed like a good way to reflect this. Has it been easy to convince the producers of Arcanum that this kind of music would be the best for the game? Has it been difficult to get the extra money for the recording of the live players? Actually, part of the pitch for hiring a string quartet was that it was so cheap! Not counting my time (in addition to composing, I did all the copying and conducting, plus most of the digital audio editing and post-production), the live session itself cost less than $5000, as I recall. If I had performed the music myself on synthesizers, I think I easily would have exceeded that cost in time spent polishing sampled instruments, and the resulting quality would have still been far inferior. It's important to realize that there's a lot of room for creative instrumentations between a one-man MIDI solution and a 120 piece orchestra, and many of these less common solutions can be very reasonable in price. Talking about game music today, how do you think about the improvements over the last few years? Do you think the quality became better, not only sound (sample) wise? In your opinion, what should be improved? I've seen steady progress over the last nine years, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. We've had the ability to incorporate digitized recordings into games since the early 90's, so at this point having a score performed by live musicians is nothing exceptional. But there are still many problems to solve in the area of music implementation. A high quality orchestral soundtrack can fall completely flat if it's poorly implemented, and I still play high-profile games with big budget soundtracks that loop repeatedly until I want to turn them off. A successful implementation depends on the composer working closely with the design team to formulate a system for mapping game events to musical events, in order to achieve variety, consistency, and coherence. Game music often gets compared to movie music. Do you think this is the right way, or do you think game music should be something on its own? How do you think about movie composers getting involved into the world of video game music, like Danny Elfman or Harry Gregson-Williams? Games and films are inherently different media, each with its own characteristics. While it sometimes makes sense to borrow techniques from film (or opera or ballet) when confronting problems that have already been solved for other media (just as film music borrowed heavily from other time-based arts before developing its own syntax), there are new problems unique to games that film composers are not necessarily equipped to address. I reject the notion that a film composer is automatically qualified to score games by virtue of his or her success in the film or television world, and I strongly reject the notion that getting a name film composer involved in a project lends an element of cachet or professionalism that would otherwise have been lacking. Your music for Arcanum has been performed by live players in a concert before. You have been one of the organisers of this event. What was your intention with this concert, and why did you plan such an event? Have you been satisfied with the feedback you got? I organized a concert series in Seattle called Sound Currents (www.soundcurrents.org) that was intended to be an avenue for local composers to get their music heard, the idea being that it's part of a composer's responsibility not just to write music, but to get it in front of an audience (a time-honored practice, going back to Berlioz, Beethoven, and before). Part of the goal of this series was to showcase music by what I felt was an underrepresented group of composers writing for games and other media, although the scope of the series was not limited to this; I don't consider the music I write for games to be materially different from the music I write for the concert hall. At the first Sound Currents concert in February 2003, I presented music from Arcanum, performed by odeonquartet (www.odeonquartet.org), and it was thrilling for me to rehearse with the performers, to hear a live audience's immediate feedback, and to gain a new perspective on the music through a new interpretation. It was particularly fulfilling to see Sound Currents spark creativity in others. One of the composers, Mike Min, formed a new ensemble called Seattle School (www.seattleschool.net) to perform his music at our first concert, and this group (of which I was a member until leaving Seattle) is currently enjoying sell-out shows at one of Seattle's most prestigious clubs, the Crocodile Café. Another major achievement of Sound Currents was that we coaxed a string quartet, "Init," out of Nathan Grigg, music director at Monolith (FEAR, NOLF, Tron) and a very creative composer whom I respect a great deal. "Init" was premiered at Sound Currents 2 and has gone on to receive several subsequent performances. Ultimately, I'm interested in putting on concerts because I think it's a way in which an artist can contribute to a healthy society that creates and consumes its own art, fostering interaction between people and the open exchange of ideas. Leaving this environment behind was the toughest thing about moving to Shanghai, although my experience here has been full of exciting new discoveries of a different nature. I hope to eventually produce some kind of Sound Currents offshoot here in Asia. Speaking about the live performance, now it has been announced that your music will be performed by a 90 piece orchestra at the famous Gewandhaus zu Leipzig in Germany. What are your feelings about it? Is it like a dream coming true, or did you expect something like that to happen sooner or later, having your music performed live before? I think very few composers today can afford to be complacent about live performances; of course, it's a great honor to be included in this concert! I certainly don't consider my inclusion on this program to be inevitable, but I view it as a natural (and very gratifying) evolution from my work writing and presenting my music over the years. Also, as a big fan of Bach, it's a thrill to have a performance in Leipzig, where he worked as music director for so many years! Can you talk about the differences of your music for Arcanum at this year's concert? Are you going to change the arrangement drastically? How do you want to keep the original spirit of the music that so many people love? The scale of a concert like this is, of course, different from the scale of a person sitting at a computer playing a game. I think the string quartet version is ideally suited for the game itself and for a chamber concert, but for this event, I'm reinforcing the music for string orchestra to take advantage of the larger forces available and approach this music from a different perspective. I'm combining the two pieces from the original soundtrack that most prominently feature the main Arcanum theme, looking for interesting ways to interpolate and superimpose the existing material to create something fresh and interesting. Do you have any role models for your music? Do you actually listen to other game music, from the Western world and maybe from Japan? How do you think about these composers, and do you have any favourites? I'm a musical omnivore, and when I'm listening to good music, I don't really care if it's from a game or not. I've been increasingly considering game music (and game audio in general) as a sequence of non-goal-oriented aural states; I can cite Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Erik Satie, and Carl Stone as being significant influences. Every game composer should read John Cage's "Silence." I'm also fascinated by the work of people working in other new digital media, like Perry Cook, Tod Machover, David Rokeby, and Ben Rubin. These are the artists who have the greatest relevance to the challenges of structure and mapping that confront game music composers. If you are producing music for a game, how do you basically get started? Do you work directly on the computer, or on paper? Do you get any material, like screenshots, artwork etc. for getting the right inspiration? Most of my career has been spent as an in-house audio guy, which gives me access to every aspect of the game as it's being developed. It's critical for the music to be part of the design as early as possible in development. This means not only deciding on a stylistic direction, but determining how the music will be integrated and which game parameters will drive the music. It's a question of mapping. This all needs to be figured out before any music is written, or, put another way, the structure of the music is the part that needs to be written first. After determining the goals and structure of the music, I usually work ideas out on staff paper with a pencil (and a big eraser), and I don't make the leap to a notation program on a computer until I'm ready to do a first draft, at which point I usually print out a score and add things like dynamic markings and phrasings, which are then input into the computer in subsequent drafts. I will often try out ideas all along the way with a sequencer. Mr Houge, please let us thank you again for taking your time. This means a lot to us! Thanks, it's my pleasure! |