So happy you’ve joined us! I’m videogame composer Winifred Phillips. Welcome back to our four part discussion of the role that music plays in Virtual Reality video games! These articles are based on the presentation I gave at this year’s gathering of the famous Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. My talk was entitled Music in Virtual Reality (I’ve included the official description of my talk at this end of this article). If you haven’t read the previous two articles, you’ll find them here:
– Composing video game music for Virtual Reality: The role of music in VR
– Composing video game music for Virtual Reality: 3D versus 2D
During my GDC presentation, I focused on three important questions for VR video game composers:
– Do we compose our music in 3D or 2D?
– Do we structure our music to be Diegetic or Non-Diegetic?
– Do we focus our music on enhancing player Comfort or Performance?
While attempting to answer these questions during my GDC talk, I discussed my work on four of my own VR game projects – the Bebylon: Battle Royale arena combat game from Kite & Lightning, the Dragon Front strategy game from High Voltage Software, the Fail Factory comedy game from Armature Studio, and the Scraper: First Strike shooter/RPG from Labrodex Inc.
In these articles, I’ve been sharing the discussions and conclusions that formed the basis of my GDC talk, including numerous examples from these four VR game projects. So now let’s look at the second of our three questions:
Do we structure our music to be Diegetic or Non-Diegetic?
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Before we launch into this discussion, let’s revisit one of the examples from the previous article. You’ll remember that we took a look at the Main Theme music I composed for the popular Dragon Front VR strategy game, in order to examine how music can best transition from a traditionally 2D stereo delivery to a 3D positional implementation.
So in this case, the big victorious anthem that I composed for Dragon Front makes its first appearance as a bombastic stereo mix directly piped into the player’s headphones, and then transitions smoothly to a spatially positioned environmental sound issuing from a small in-game radio. Just as a reminder, let’s take another look at that:
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Bebylon: Battle Royale proves that its possible to get away with a completely diegetic score, but we’d need really specific circumstances to justify it. Most games won’t be able to make this approach work. So, what then? I’ve found that there are three strategies to ease non-diegetic music into VR:
– Keep it subtle and gradual,
– Keep it dry and warm, and
– Keep it both inside and outside the VR world.
So let’s start with the first strategy – subtle and gradual.
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We’ve already discussed this technique in the first article in this series, when we took a look at the ambient music for Scraper, a first-person VR shooter set inside colossal skyscrapers in a futuristic city. Exploring the massive buildings in the Scraper fictional universe requires a musical soundtrack to set the tone, but introducing it so that it feels natural in VR is a challenge.
In order to address this problem, I composed the ambient music in Scraper so that it would come and go in subtle, gradual ways. As a technique for music implementation in VR, this can be an effective approach. Let’s take another look at what that was like in Scraper:
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I also recorded the music of Fail Factory with dry acoustics and a warm, bassy mix – this effect is especially prevalent during the Fail Factory tutorial.
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In the Fail Factory Tutorial, the instructor zips around on a hover craft while offering tips and guidelines. In those circumstances, having the music in a dry, warm mix allows it to feel closer to the player, and more separated from the spatialized sounds from the instructor. Let’s check that out:
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So we’ve now discussed the second of the three important questions for video game composers creating music for VR games:
– Do we compose our music in 3D or 2D?
– Do we structure our music to be Diegetic or Non-Diegetic?
– Do we focus our music on enhancing player Comfort or Performance?
We’ve contemplated what role our music should play in the VR experience – whether it should be considered a part of the fictional world or an outside commentary that shapes the player’s emotional experience. Both roles are valid, but the choice between them is especially meaningful within the context of VR. The next article will focus on the third of the three questions: whether music in VR should enhance player comfort or player performance.
Source: Gamasutra