Music for games enhanced

Chance Thomas, a composer, traveled to Salt Lake City last spring to conduct his version of the Ring, that epic tale of a powerful ring, clashing warriors and curious creatures.

But Thomas was not leading a performance of Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen" opera cycle. Instead, he was conducting his own score for a series of computer and video games inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels.

Thomas' aural depictions of hobbits, dwarves and dark lords were performed by the 50-piece Utah Film Orchestra and 24 singers from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. In a recent telephone interview from his studio in Oakhurst,

Calif., Thomas recalled asking some of the Mormon vocalists how they felt about singing the evil Sauron's speech. One replied, "We can always repent later."

Once demonized for their cheesy-sounding and repetitive soundtracks, game-music composers have less to atone for these days. Scores like Nobuo Uematsu's for the Final Fantasy series, Michael Giacchino's for Medal of Honor www.michaelgiacchino.com and Marty O'Donnell's for Halo halo.bungie.org/music.html are considerably more sophisticated than Pac-Man's bouncy beeps.

Although game soundtracks may not be as musically complex as Mozart concertos, their composers said the best efforts now rival the symphonic sweep and emotional impact of Hollywood film scores.

"Five years ago, the most advanced game soundtracks were not on par with the most advanced film scores," Thomas said. "We didn't have the budget, and we didn't have the technology."

They now have both. Games on DVD can hold hours of full-spectrum audio, including prerecorded orchestra performances rather than the synthesized versions. Faster microprocessors in computers and game consoles can function as sound studios, remixing and rearranging music on the fly so players are less likely to be annoyed by recurring audio loops. Beefed-up system memory can store multiple versions of a musical transition; a game engine can prompt one if a player eviscerates an alien or another if he slips on an eel. And the game industry's success has made developers willing to pay for live orchestra recordings.

Thomas, for one, has been inspired by the possibilities. As music director for the Vivendi Universal games based on the Tolkien books, he has created distinctive musical themes for each of the epic's races.

The hobbits' theme is in the natural-sounding key of C, while dwarves are portrayed in the more melancholy D minor. In his research, Thomas discovered that two different races depicted in the books played harps. For elves, he used the ethereal sound of a nylon- strung classical harp. For dwarves, he found a rare wire-strung harp. Its biting tone, he said, "reflects their hammers and the metal they're digging into the earth with."

While musical themes for games are sometimes recycled -- Star Wars games, for instance, rely on John Williams' overture from the films - -Thomas' approach is ambitious.

In opera, Wagner used musical leitmotifs across his four-opera cycle. Thomas is extending the tradition into games. Individual composers have been hired for "The Hobbit," a console game to be released this fall; "War of the Ring," a computer game due before the end of the year; and "Middle Earth Online," a massively multiplayer online game scheduled for 2004.

But each soundtrack will be built around Thomas' original score. Excerpts can be heard at the game series' Web site (www.lordoftherings.com).

But composing for an interactive game is akin to writing music for a Broadway show in which audience members could determine the order of the scenes and demand encores of any tunes they found baffling. Game-music composers don't know which path a player will choose or when, so they must be prepared for unpredictability. At the same time, they must take steps to assure that a player who spends a long time in one place isn't tormented by unchanging music.

Technology is helping. Unlike early computers and arcades, in which a chip might produce a single synthesized note at a time, computers and game consoles now support multiple audio streams -- up to 256 separate "voices" on the Xbox, for example. Whether the music source is a MIDI synthesizer or a prerecorded sound file, the systems are powerful enough to combine and modify the streams in interesting ways, provided that the composer has provided the options in advance.

"You conceive of the elbow joints you're going to need," said Clint Bajakian, a game-music composer in San Rafael, Calif., whose credits include "Escape From Monkey Island." "You create a score that is designed of building blocks so it can respond and adapt dynamically to the ever-changing situation in a musically natural way."

Although many interactive-music techniques have been around for more than a decade, composers said they sounded less clumsy now. Musical transitions can be programmed to play at a musically appropriate time rather than when a particular action occurs. Now, when the music reacts to a dramatic game moment, Bajakian said, "It's not like someone stops a CD and puts another track on."