EA’s Dead Space is easily one of the biggest titles of the year and we recently had the chance to catch up with the game’s composer, Jason Graves, to deliver some insight into the game’s music, influences and objectives.
EBA: Hey Jason! Thanks for taking the time to chat with EpicBattleAxe.com. So, how are you feeling about the overwhelming success of Dead Space so far? Did you have a gut feeling that this game was going to be such a hit? Be honest!
JG: I’ve always known that Dead Space was a really unique game, even from the first walkthroughs I did two years ago. We tried to make as cinematic an experience as possible for the players, but it’s hard to be objective when you work so closely to something for so long. It feels really good to read all the positive comments on the atmosphere and immersive quality of the game – the entire audio team worked really, really hard tweaking the sound to deliver the most thrilling experience possible.
I was a fan of the game since I first started working on it – I just hoped that the final version would live up to my personal expectations. I always felt like I was working on something special, something that would give me the chance to try something different. Obviously, I had hoped it would be a hit, but some of the feedback I’ve read has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m glad the game has turned out to be as scary as we had hoped – that was one of my main concerns. Like I said before, objectivity can be a hard thing to come by, especially when you’re trying to make the scariest game the world has ever played.
EBA: Now, down to business…At what point in the development process of Dead Space did you become involved and what type of materials did you have to work from (script, concept art, early game renders) when you started scoring?
JG: The concept behind the development of Dead Space was to spend a bulk of the time focusing on a small amount of gameplay. As a result, I was brought in about six months into the production timeline, which is extremely early to start thinking about music. By the end of the first year we had a complete, playable “level” of the game with everything properly implemented, including the music.
Once we had the green light for that level, we “went wide” and began working on the rest of the game. That would normally be the earliest a composer gets involved, but I had already been in the loop and working right alongside everyone else at EA to perfect the Dead Space experience for more than a year. Instead of having to play catch up and try to get an idea about the kind of music that would be appropriate, I was able to jump right into music production and start delivering final tracks for game implementation.
I can honestly say a two year production cycle for music is extremely rare, but without it Dead Space wouldn’t have the final score that it does. From the beginning, EA provided as much artwork, storyboards and walkthroughs as I needed. I also spent a lot of time on EA’s campus playing through the game as it developed, which allowed me to become very familiar with the gameplay and also learn how the game’s audio engine was adapting my music. The more I played Dead Space, the more I was able to tweak the score to provide the most cinematic, real-time, emotional feedback to the game, musically speaking.
EBA: Dead Space could be described as a very atmospheric game, quiet and subtle when it needs to be and then in a heartbeat, it’s roaring in your face. The music seems to follows a similar philosophy: what was your approach to designing such a dynamic score? Can you talk a little about the multi-layered music system in the game and how that impacted your role specifically?
JG: Essentially, most pieces I composed consisted of four separate layers of music. Layer one was very ambient and spooky, perfect for exploring the ship. Layer two added more tension and fear. Layer three had a combat/survival sound and layer four was the frenzied “someone is eating your face” music. Each of these layers were composed to work in concert with each other but also stand on their own if needed. All four layers are constantly playing during the game – it’s the engine that decides which layer plays, how loud it is in relation to the other layers, etc. This is all handled in real-time based on what’s happening on-screen.
There are two things to be aware of when composing dynamic music: how the score is composed and how the score is implemented. The first one is fairly obvious, but the second one can get neglected or even missed altogether by the composer. Even the best score in the world will not work if improperly implemented! Fortunately, EA already had an excellent, proprietary engine for music implementation – I just had to maximize its potential and make sure I composed the score to take full advantage of it.
Composer Jason Graves
The one thing I always had in mind when I was working was the idea of extremes – highs and lows, quiet and loud, tension and release, dissonance and harmony. How could I create a single piece of music that would cover all the basses and deliver maximum impact? I needed the score to play whisper-quiet in the background and also reach out and grab you by the throat at a moment’s notice.
There are many different ways to ratchet up the tension in a piece of music – make it faster, make it higher, make it busier, etc. Fortunately, I had an incredible variety of sounds and textures at my disposal and was given the freedom to experiment and try different combinations of anything I could dream up for the live orchestra to perform.
As a result, the music can react very quickly and provide an extremely cinematic soundtrack experience to the game. I think that’s an important element of the Dead Space score – it REACTS to the gameplay, it doesn’t predict it or give away a surprise. I wish I could claim that was due entirely to my compositions, but it’s mostly dependent on the way the music is implemented.
What I was able to contribute is HOW the score was composed, not only from a composition standpoint but also a sound design one. Since I was trying to evoke the scariest atmosphere possible, I composed as much “foreign-sounding,” non-musical material as I could. I figured the less the music actually sounded like music the more potential it had to sound scary.
The whole “music as sound design” concept also lent itself to a dynamic score very well. Since I didn’t have specific melody, harmony or chord progression restrictions in place there was a lot more freedom to move around and let the music do different things, even in the same four layered piece. I could have each layer play at different speeds, so that as the intensity increases the music builds on itself and not only gets faster, but more cacophonous and out of control. I could also compose each layer in different keys (pitch) to the same effect.
Normally, this kind of idea would just sound plain wrong, like the game had made a mistake and there was more than one piece of music playing. For Dead Space it was absolutely perfect – the confusion and chaos caused by different tempos or keys playing simultaneously only increased the tension and confusion the player experienced. AND it made for some beautifully interactive pieces of music!
EBA: It seems that the score draws upon some really excellent cinematic inspirations (The Alien series, Event Horizon, 2001). What were some of your musical influences as you began composing?
JG: In its infant stages, the score had references from film soundtracks, specifically “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and “The Grudge.” There were some psychologically tense pieces that conveyed the emotions EA was looking for in the original score to Dead Space. It was a good jumping-off point because their ideas immediately narrowed my musical focus and allowed me to spend more time fine-tuning. It was also clear from the beginning EA was much more concerned about the emotion the music conveyed – there wasn’t a lot of emphasis placed on specific instruments or composition techniques.
A lot of people have compared the Dead Space score to past “outer space” film scores but the fact that Dead Space takes place on a spaceship didn’t influence the score. It could have been underground and I would have composed the exact same thing. My focus was on fear and sheer terror – I just wanted to scare everybody to death!
I studied with Jerry Goldsmith and Chris Young, so I can see how some comparisons were made, especially to Goldsmith’s masterful score for Alien. However, most of the musical influence for the score came from 20th century concert works. Composers like Varese, Bartok, Stravinsky, and Ligeti who pioneered avant-garde techniques and experimental textures with the orchestra. I was drawn to their music because it had such an unfamiliar quality to it – it was more like sound design than melodic phrases and chord progressions.
It was that musical unfamiliarity that intrigued me. I figured the stranger I could make the orchestra sound, the scarier the experience would be for the player. A good example of this type of approach was used in some of the music to Kubrick’s film adaptation to “The Shining.”
EBA: Considering how driven this project was from the outset, how did you try to “raise the bar” when compared to your previous works or from music in this genre in general?
JG: The entire score to Dead Space was a giant, two year-long experiment, from the concept of “non-musical music,” to the methods I used for composing and recording the orchestras (of which Dead Space had two recording sessions a year apart from each other), to the final implementation of the music into the game.
I always look at each job as an opportunity to learn something new and try to better myself as a composer. In that sense, Dead Space was a master-class in 20th century techniques and interactive composition. Every aspect of the score was “bigger and better” than anything I had worked on before. I would have made it that way for myself anyway, but it was the game itself that dictated such an immense scope.
I spent months researching contemporary music and honing my ideas to razor-sharp points before the recording sessions – usually I have a few days to get my ideas together before I have to begin composing. The average game score is around an hour long – Dead Space was three hours, and that’s a conservative estimate. Most game music has a three or four month production cycle – Dead Space was two years. You can expect to record between four and six minutes of music per hour at a live orchestra session – I averaged forty minutes an hour with Dead Space.
The sheer amount of music and work that went into the score makes Dead Space both the most difficult and most rewarding project I’ve ever worked on. The only goal I had in mind was to create the scariest, most original-sounding “transparent” horror score possible. I wanted the music to spook players so much that by the time a creature jumped out and attacks, it could be a fluffy white bunny and they would still jump out of their seat. On top of that, I didn’t really want the players thinking, “Wow, this music is really scary.” I wanted an immediate, almost sub-conscience reaction to the situation they’re in. If the score does anything to “raise the bar” in the general horror music genre, or if people enjoy listening to it on its own, that’s just the icing on the cake for me.
EBA: In addition to your music, the sound design in Dead Space is very haunting and the two working in concert do an amazing job of immersing the player in the game experience. Are there any special considerations you had to take into account in order to keep these two elements from competing in the mix?
JG: From the beginning, I knew the music would be much more effective on a psychological level if it didn’t draw a lot of attention to itself and say, “Ta-da! Here’s the music score for the game – ooh, aren’t you scared now?” I also knew I wanted to get under the player’s skin and really creep them out. If they didn’t realize the music was playing, it was even better. So I had a “music as sound design” kind of approach in mind before I went onto either of the scoring stages with the orchestras.
The fact that so much of the score is essentially non-musical, from a traditional standpoint, allows it to blend almost seamlessly into the background. I knew there were going to be lots and lots of creature sounds. I also knew they were some of the biggest, baddest and scariest sounds I’ve heard in a game. I composed the music thinking about the space that would be needed for those sounds to be heard properly and sonically “carved away” at the score so they would have room to breathe.
As a result, a lot of the score is either a series of evolving ambient textures or harsh, shrill stabs and shrieks that pulse and grind against each other. Those kinds of textures seemed to blend the best with the other-worldly, animalistic sounds from the creatures. Another benefit of the more ambient music was that it was already so non-musical – it seemed to naturally blend into the ambient sound to create a wonderfully creepy atmosphere.
EBA: How did you go about selecting the specific instruments for the Dead Space score?
JG: EA always wanted a huge orchestra to be the base of the score. We experimented with different combinations of orchestral instruments and electronic textures. In the end I scrapped the electronic sounds in favor of the more unconventional, naturally-occurring textures that I knew the orchestra could produce. The electronics seemed to make the gameplay more heroic and “let’s go kill some Necromorphs!” Once I pulled them out and made the orchestra the focus of the barbaric, animalistic ideas I had, the game suddenly took on a feeling of dread, like you were convinced you were about to die at any moment. That’s exactly the kind of emotion I wanted to add!
There were trumpets on the first recording session, but it was decided they sounded too heroic and “Hollywood,” so I used them sparingly in the final score. The same rule applies to high woodwinds like flutes, oboes and clarinets. Flutes were just too darn pretty! I did use the really pinched, high, shrill woodwind textures – there were also some great low, bending clusters I got the wind instruments to play that ended up being the basis for several of the ambient cues.
The instruments I placed special emphasis on were the low ones, especially those that had potential to sound as ugly and scary as possible. I joked to the players at both sessions that I wanted the most non-musical sounds they could possibly produce, even if they were just playing single notes. I used a lot of low woodwinds, brass and strings as well as men and woman’s chorus, but again with very low voices. Most of the women could sing even lower than I could!
EBA: What type of new “20th Century Orchestral Music” techniques did you implement?
JG: Every one I could find! And then I made hours and hours of new ones that I thought would work within the Dead Space universe. The beauty of avant-garde music is it’s all experimental – there almost isn’t any such thing as a wrong note. I had players tapping their instruments, playing all kinds of fast, random notes, over-blowing for shrill shrieks and hisses, improvising different rhythms all at the same time, tapping their music stands – the list goes on and on. Another excellent technique I discovered was getting each instrument to play well out of its comfortable range, either by playing extremely high or extremely low. Quite often the results were very disturbing and unrecognizable. A lot of them had folks on the sound stage holding their ears as we recorded – they were just downright nasty, evil, piercing sounds. In other words, perfect for Dead Space!
I also implemented a lot of chance elements into the score, which is another big part of avant-garde music. For example, I would have all 48 string players sustain a random note on their highest string, which produces this amazingly wonderful, rich, 48-note chord. It really sounds more like a synthesizer than an orchestra, but is so much more flexible and emotional, especially since the chord sounds completely different each time it’s played.
EBA: How does it feel to know your music is helping scare the crap out of grown men?
JG: It feels pretty good! I’ve watched some people as they’ve been playing and it’s very entertaining to see them jump out of their seats at the least little thing that happens. Like I mentioned before, objectivity was a tricky thing to come by in Dead Space. I became totally desensitized by all the scary music I was composing day in and day out. I was constantly thinking, “Is this scary at all?” Everything seemed liked it needed to be more dissonant and “bigger.” That is, until I had some time away from the music and heard it in the game. THEN it was plenty scary! I think the final result of sound and picture combined together is really amazing.
EBA: When is the Dead Space soundtrack going to be available and where can people get it?
JG: The official soundtrack will be on sale November 11th. I personally produced the album, selecting my favorite music from more than three hours of score. The result is hopefully an accurate representation of the score as it exists in the game. It will be available on iTunes, Amazon Digital and EA’s own music site, eatrax.com.
EBA: Thanks for your time Jason! Excellent work on Dead Space. We hope to hear more from you soon!!!
For more on Jason Graves, head on over to his official website.
