Now that Farpoint for PSVR has been released and the soundtrack has dropped, we bring you Part 2 of our own Krista Grace Morris’s interview with Farpoint composer Stephen Cox. Check out Part 1 here.
In this portion of the interview, Krista and Stephen discuss signature sounds the 8-bit days, preparing sound “tool boxes” and the state of VR and AR markets. Can’t forget VR addiction and more on Farpoint.
Signature Sounds
Stephen Cox: I think with a lot of games, it is about the “signature sounds.” It’s almost a branding, if you will…
KG: Tetris?! Mario Bros.?! Definitely!
SC: Exactly! I mean, it could also just be one little tone that you hear throughout. When you hear it, it just triggers you like “Oh! Enemy incoming!”
KG: That conditions you.
SC: Yeah. Mario Bros.! And in creating those signature sounds, in creating that palette, it was just exhilarating.
Then, the next step was taking orchestra and making the signature sounds work with that giant sound design . . . mess that we made. [both laugh]
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I played a handful including Simpsons… Now, we look back at the games we played as kids, and they’re almost laughable like “man, the graphics are so bad.” There’s this kind of ironic nostalgia that’s a reminder of how quickly technology moves and is moving.
Did this play into your compositions for Farpoint, or how you crafted the sounds?
Five, ten, twenty years down the line, did you think of how the music might sound in the future? That maybe the music for Farpoint might sound a little cheesy further down the line?
Maybe your eight-year-old son will be in a VR retro “barcade” as an adult, see Farpoint and say “Oh, no way! My dad worked on this!”
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KG: We didn’t even see the cell phone coming, so there are things right around the corner the neither we nor Sci-Fi can predict.
The Year of VR
KG: Sony is putting a lot into VR right now. Last year was supposed to be the year of VR. 2015 also.
Now, we’re in 2017 and it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen… but there’s something that just needs a little nudge to push VR over the edge. And I don’t think that Sony has figured it out, either.
AR, on the other hand, is already taking off.
SC: The Director of AR at Atlantic Records has told me the same thing. He sat me down, said, “okay, AR is going to take off, I want to be on that train. How do we do this? How do we put the moving parts together” because it’s not easy.
You have to get developers, you have to get a project manager who knows how to put all these moving parts together, and you’re going to source graphics, sounds.
It there’s anyone that can do it, it’s the Impulse Gear guys. The guys who made Farpoint, who made that AIM controller. Seth Luisi and his crew.
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AIM Controller | Farpoint | | Impulse Gear | Playstation VR
And they’re a small crew but they are a lean mean fighting machine. If they had the time and ability to do it, I think they would. They’re on the forefront of innovation.
KG: My personal opinion is that right now, the barrier to VR being super accessible and in everyone’s home is an infrastructure question. Cost is part of that. Just the headset alone will set you back a few hundred dollars. Then, you’ve got to invest in other equipment, games…
But, Augmented Reality is really taking off because it leverages technologies that people use every day, they already use them. Like the cell phone. Going back to Pokémon GO, it didn’t require you to buy anything else- no special equipment.
I don’t know if you remember this, but when I was little, I remember taking airplanes and looking at those Skymall catalogs and at a certain point, there were video phones! It almost looked like an older PlayStation console with a screen.
You think, “wow! That’s great! That’s awesome!”.
Then you think “but who am I going to talk to? No one else has this video phone, no one else is going to invest $400 dollars in this and I’m not going to buy two and give one away so I can use mine!”.
Then, smartphones come out, cameras are already integrated, and someone realizes they can leverage those two things to finally give the world video phones. I’m seeing a parallel with VR and AR; for me, VR has the same infrastructure problem that Skymall video phones had.
It’s this marriage of infrastructure and content. The content obviously has to be relevant, has to be engaging. I think we’re almost there with the content and games like Farpoint are pushing that a bit by delivering quality content, emotional content, emotionally-driven content.
But, content still does not solve the infrastructure issue. VR is not integrated into something that people use every day. Like a cell phone. Not yet, anyway.
SC: Wow, that’s really insightful. Maybe Google was trying to get ahead of this with Google Glass. Get the infrastructure in place.
It’s going to be a crazy next couple of years. Sony has already helped develop a VR album on the music side, and for Farpoint, I pitched an AR experience that experiments with the music.
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Source: EdgyLabs