Video games would be considered a distraction in most classrooms, butfor 's students they are mandatory to the coursework. "We have been developing new classes, new curriculum over the past 12months to get kids involved in creating music and audio for games,"says Sweet, an associate professor at .
Thestudents use music to help stir emotional currents in the game, just asthey would with the soundtrack for a film. But to accommodate thecomplex, player-driven action sequences of video games, they learntechniques like looping, branching, and cross fading that make theirscores more flexible. "In a game the player is actually the directorin a way," says Filippo Beckpeccoz. "The music has to adapt always tomake it seem like it has been written for that particular moment, butof course it is one in a million."
Beckpeccoz, who graduatedfrom Berklee on May9, is largely responsible for the interactivemusic classes at Berklee. When he came to the school from Italy fouryears ago, the closest thing they offered were classes in scoring forfilm. He founded the Video Game Music Club, which quickly grew to300 members. "It's safe to say that a lot of us have listened to moreinteractive music than linear music in our lives," Beckpeccoz says,"just because we played [video games] a lot when were kids."
After pressure from the club, the college hired Michael Sweet, who had morethan 15 years experience composing for interactive media.
Soundtracks range from otherworldly to classically-inspired
BerkleeCollege of Music has long recognized the link between music andtechnology. The music synthesis department was launched 20 years ago.Department chair says his students are also preparingfor careers in the game industry, creating new sounds. "If you think ofa game that may be a science fiction game or something that takes placein outer space, there are no sounds in nature associated with that."
Studentsuse recordings of existing sounds, Biederwolf says, then manipulatethem with software programs to create something completely different. For example, to create the sound of a dinosaur, he says, "you mighttake the sound of a lion roaring and layer that with a couple of otherthings and transpose and pitch stretch and compress time."
"Gameshave really arrived at the top in terms of a viable, successful placefor employment and for artistic expression," says ,Berklee's Dean of Music Technology. He says several graduates havegotten jobs in the video game industry, and now they "come to thecollege specifically to develop skills that would allow them to bevaluable in the game business."
Video game music is gettingwider recognition as games outpace the sales of films and recordedmusic. "The genres that are inside these video games are grandscores," says Sweet. "There are really beautiful orchestral passageswith nice themes that hearken back to great classical music." Moreorchestras are adding scores of popular games to their repertoire in aneffort to attract younger audiences.
Berklee College of Musichas its own 90-member Video Game Orchestra that exclusively performs scores fromvideo games. It, too, is an outgrowth of the Video Game Music Club,and organized entirely by students.