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Welcome Ben, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. How about we start at the beginning? How did you get mixed up with game composing? I’ve been writing music in some form since grade school, and I’ve been interested in electronics pretty much since the beginning, so in college I studied composition and focused on electronic music. I always had game audio in the back of my mind, since my cousin was also in the business, and after graduation I got a contract job at Sierra, which turned into a salaried position, and I ended up staying there for 7 years. What do you think are your biggest influences when writing a piece of music for a game? Every game is different, and the game itself has to guide the direction of all of the audio including the music. These days I’m responsible for the overall audio design, and often I work with other composers to provide the music; my job is to design how it should behave and fit in with all the other sounds (a kind of composition unto itself). It’s important to know the goals of the design team to understand what kind of experience we’re trying to bring to the player, and it’s also important that the audio complements the direction of the visual art. What kind of music do you listen to when you're just relaxing? I listen to lots of different music, and lately I’ve been trying to get up to speed on the music scene in China; it’s a fascinating time to be here. I’ve gotten to know Xu Cheng as well as the members of the band Torturing Nurse, who are all doing some really exciting things in Shanghai. For something a little mellower, I often turn to Morton Feldman, one of my favorite composers. I just bought his second string quartet on DVD, which is over 6 hours long in one uninterrupted movement. I’m planning to set aside some time to listen to the whole thing during the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday. You are most famous for your score to Arcanum. How did you get into writing the score for Arcanum? I was working on staff at Sierra (the publisher of the game), and Troika (the developer), as a small development studio, didn’t have an on-site audio guy, so the producer of the project suggested that I could help out. I flew down to Irvine with him, we discussed ideas with the team, and it seemed like a good fit. The whole score of Arcanum was performed by a string quartet. Why did you choose this solution? Arcanum takes place in a unique universe in which a fantasy world of elves and orcs has undergone an industrial revolution, so I tried to capture this conflict musically. The idea was that the content of the music would sound more like medieval and early music, while the instrumentation would be the quintessential chamber ensemble of the Enlightenment. The string quartet is capable of a wide range of expression, and it seemed like an interesting, unique solution. It didn’t hurt that it was also easy on the producer’s budget. Tell us something about production of Arcanum music. What piece/section of music are you most proud of from this score? The production was a very thrilling experience. We had a fantastic quartet of Seattle Symphony members, and we recorded at Studio X, one of Seattle’s finest studios (where seminal grunge albums have been recorded, as well as a lot of soundtracks). My favorite pieces are probably the main "Arcanum" theme, which has some nice counterpoint, and "Tulla," in which each of the instruments get to take a melodic turn. I also like the way "Wilderness" kind of floats along. Did you know that Arcanum soundtrack was commercially released in Poland as an additional audio CD to expansion pack of this game? What do you think about this way of promotion of video game music? Yes, I did hear about this, and I actually have a copy of it, which is one of my prized possessions. I wish they had done something similar in the States. I think bundling a soundtrack CD is a great way to give players a little extra value. I heard something about your concerts in China. Tell us more about that. Back in Seattle I started producing a concert series called Sound Currents (www.soundcurrents.org) with some other composer friends, and now that I’ve gotten settled in China, I’ve picked it up again. Last November was the first Chinese Sound Currents, which featured the free-improvisation duo of Audrey Chen and Tatsuya Nakatani from the East Coast of the US, as well as two new electronic works by me. Audrey and Tatsuya were really mesmerizing, and we had a good turn out, so I was quite pleased with the show. My pieces both used programs that I developed using Max/MSP to manipulate and deploy sounds that I was recording on the fly, and both were influenced by the way I structure audio for games, stringing snippets of sound together in a non-linear way. At a future Sound Currents concert, I’m hoping to bring the Arcanum music and some other music by some Seattle friends to Shanghai. What is your opinion about big game music concerts like Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy or Video Games Live? It’s really great that people are putting on shows like this and getting the music before people that might not hear it otherwise. This was one of the objectives of the Sound Currents concerts, the first of which featured music from Arcanum. My only concern would be that with some of these shows, the focus isn’t really on the music, where it should be, because of all the visual distractions; if the music’s good enough, it should speak for itself. But the Dear Friends concert I went to in San Francisco last year was packed, so it’s clear that these concerts are resonating with people, which is fantastic. Do you play video games yourself? Absolutely. Not only do I enjoy them, but it’s critical to understand the medium and to be aware of new developments. I am eager to get my hands on an Xbox 360, but they’re awfully scarce here in China. Lately I’ve been checking out Call of Duty 2, which has some serious audio design, and this weekend I pulled out an old favorite, Frequency, again. Where do you see game music in the future? I think production values are no longer the big hurdle, now that we’ve heard orchestras, string quartets, and jazz orchestras in games. The big challenge is how to integrate it with the action; there’s still a lot of room for improvement, I think. We need to learn to organize data in a non-linear way, which is different from writing some linear music and chopping it up to fit. I think conceiving music non-linearly from the outset is the biggest aesthetic challenge facing game music. What are your future plans or projects? I currently work as a senior audio designer for Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio, and I’m heading up audio on a top secret, next generation project. I can’t really say much more than that, other than that we’ve got an incredible team working on it, and production is going more smoothly than any project I’ve worked on in a long time. Is there anything you’d like to say that I didn`t cover? I actually had a chance to revisit this music last year at the invitation of Thomas Boecker, who asked me to arrange some of the music for string orchestra, something I’d actually had in the back of my mind for a while. The result was Passage to Arcanum, which was premiered in Leipzig last August at the Symphonic Game Music Concert, in conjunction with GC Games Convention. Thanks a lot for your time Mr. Houge, and I hope you have a great time in your future endeavours. Thanks, my pleasure! |