The Challenge

The great thing about designing audio for a Sci-Fi/Horror game like Dead Space is that there really are no rules (which oftentimes means, “WTF am I going to do!?”) We’ve shipped a wide range of genres out of the EA Redwood Shores Studio over the years, but this was our first attempt at Survival/Horror. A lot of people in a lot of disciplines were asking themselves a lot of questions. One thing that was pretty much on everyone’s radar though was that sound and music were going to be a huge part in selling the Horror.

In the audio team, we were asking ourselves questions like these:

• How do we re-create, in an interactive environment, the perfectly timed tension swells so common in linear horror movies? 
• How do we create and sustain a creepy vibe? 
• How do we keep the tension high throughout the game? 
• How do we scare people?

So, we all dusted off our favorite classic horror movies and got to work.

The Plan

The plan from the very start was to create mood through overall sound design. We weren’t going for traditional music composition or memorable themes but instead approached the entire soundscape as a single unit that would work together to create a dark and eerie vibe. This is not to say that we didn’t use music to help create the atmosphere, because we certainly did; however, the music was used much more texturally than thematically. In this way Dead Space has really blurred the line between music and sound design. When you get right down to it, music is really just sound design with a lot more rules!

The Dead Space Sound

We knew the music for Dead Space needed to range from dark and brooding to intensely chaotic. We also wanted the music to reflect the twisted nature and classy look of the Dead Space visuals. All of this led us to settle on a modern, aleatoric, orchestral style. After sifting through dozens of demos, we settled on a composer that not only fit the bill artistically, but also one that we were confident would work closely with us and within our interactive/adaptive music system. The final music credits read “Music Composed and Conducted by Jason Graves in Association with Rod Abernethy.”

The Fear

The first thing we needed to figure out was how to create a game run-time music system that could seamlessly emulate the classic “build up to the BOO!” musical technique so essential to the horror genre. While this technique is pretty straightforward in a linear movie context, we needed a way to simulate it in an interactive video game context. Linear media allows the composer the luxury of knowing precisely what is going to happen; for example, the film dictates when and how long – exactly – a musical build-up will take. This is not the case, however, for interactive media where the video game player determines how the scene plays out.

To build a run-time system to interactively simulate this linear technique, we had to stop thinking like musicians and start thinking like programmers:
 
1. The music builds because things are getting scarier;
2. Things are scarier because there is more fear;
3. Fear is caused by eminent danger;
4. Certain objects in the world are (seemingly) dangerous.
5. Ergo, find a way to attach a sense of danger (fear) to various objects in the game world.

It occurred to us that our games already had the ability to emit point-source effects such as sound and light, so all we needed was a way to emit fear. This was the birth of the Dead Space Fear Emitter, which is simply a first-class game object that designers can place in the world or attach to other objects, most notably, the enemy alien creatures. Fear emitters are really nothing more than a “sphere of influence”;  however, with this one tool we would be able to affect myriad audio sources such as music, ambience, mixing parameters, or whatever. But… of course, the devil’s in the details.

The Implementation

It was essential that the music system be able to respond to gameplay at a rate closer to the frame level than to the bar or beat level, especially since the aleatoric style of the music in Dead Space didn’t necessarily adhere to a beat structure. In order to seamlessly swell and subside the musical tension over time, virtually every composition was delivered as four stereo layers, each of which was then packaged into a single eight-channel AIFF file. The layers would typically range from “creepy/ambient” to “intense/chaotic.”  A music system was designed to adjust the relative mix of the layers at run-time, based on the game’s current fear level via a simple “fear to volume” function. Unique meta-data was associated with each music file, including specific fear to volume envelopes for each layer of the composition. At any given moment in the game, for example as the Player Character walks toward a blind corner where a fear emitter may have been placed, the music system automatically adjusts the mix accordingly, fading out the ambient tracks in favor of the higher energy tracks – or then back down, in reverse – as the player moves toward/away from the fear source.

Fig. 1: The sum of all active fear emitters within range are sent from the game engine to the Dead Script Fear Manager, which, after some massaging, forwards the updates to the Music Manager. The Music Manager sends the new aggregate fear value through the fear-to-volume functions of each music layer, the result of which is then passed on to the volume control of the layer.

With this system in place, the game player, along with his or her interaction with the rest of the game world, acts as the music Conductor.

The Tao of Decomposition

Okay… things were in place, we were ready to try out this new system with real music composed specifically for Dead Space. Jason Graves went back to his studio and created just what I had asked for, a few two-minute loops of music, each broken into four separate “layers” that ranged from “ambient” to “bombastic.”  But when we plugged the music into the new system, however, it just didn’t work. The problem was that the music had been composed… well… too musically!  If you played the layers back all together, it sounded like a two-minute piece of well thought-out music, full of form, peaks, valleys, mood-shifts, themes, etc. While that was what I had asked for, I quickly realized that it wasn’t at all what I really wanted.

The new direction was as follows:  The four layers of each cue should not be thought of as “stems” that when played back would be a complete piece of music or a “song”; rather, each individual layer should represent a continuous “vibe” or “texture.”  That is, rather than writing the music traditionally – building to different energy levels, sections, and moods – we needed to trust the game itself to do most of that. I was more interested in layers of aleatoric techniques, sustained textures, moody ambiences, and cacophonous barrages of sound than a “musical composition.” 

To this order, I went through several of my favorite horror soundtracks, clipping out dozens of short examples of “techniques and textures” that would serve as examples. From these examples, Jason orchestrated similar yet original techniques and textures, which were often more written improvisational instructions to the musicians than musical notations. From there, we recorded a full orchestra (or individual section) playing these “techniques and textures.”
 
Back in the studio, Jason “recomposed” these musical ideas into layers to be dynamically mixed during run-time based on gameplay. Although Jason of course did a fantastic job of carefully integrating many aspects of traditional composition into this scheme, I believe that this relatively new way of thinking about composing – the “decomposition” and “recomposition” of textural music – and its integration into our custom adaptive mixing system was what created the unique essence of “The Dead Space Sound.”

And, In The End… (the sound you make is equal to the music you break)

In the final incarnation of the game, the music of Dead Space plays a huge role in the game’s overall soundscape; it’s the drama behind everything. It is often very subtle, but can at a moment’s notice move seamlessly into a blaring dissonant cacophony, supporting the action and drama of the gameplay. The music in this game doesn’t “call itself out,” nor do you walk away humming the Dead Space theme. The music in Dead Space was designed to support the mood and gameplay in the same way the sound effects and ambience support it. Actually, it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what is music and what is sound design. In fact, I have read some reviews that seemed to imply that Dead Space didn’t use any music at all (which I took as a compliment!). Sound as music, music as sound; clearly the result of a tight integration between a talented composer and a highly interactive/adaptive, procedural music system.

Don Veca
Audio Director, Dead Space
EA Redwood Shores Studio
www.deadspacegame.com