By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hey, everyone! I'm video game composer Winifred Phillips. Last year, I participated in an online discussion session during a popular live-stream chat event hosted by Video Game Music Academy. The lively conversation that took place there seems worth sharing at this point. What follows is a partial transcript of the most substantive conversation from that hour-long session. I was interviewed by public school music teacher Daniel Hulsman. At the time, one of my projects had just released – the Spyder game for Apple Arcade – which had won a Global Music Award that year and was also nominated for a NAVGTR Award (pictured above). Much of the discussion focused on that project, but it also touches on my work in other games, and the topics broaden out to encompass more of the top issues pertaining to the craft of video game music composition. You'll see that I've also included a few videos here and there to supplement the transcript and illustrate the discussion.
Daniel: I was listening to the Spyder soundtrack, and it’s a really fun one. One thing I noticed about that game is that it leans really heavily into that feel of the spy genre. But obviously that’s a tricky thing? Where it’s got a really strong genre sound, but it still sounds unique and fun?
Winifred: I’ve actually had to do a lot of projects like that, where there’s an established franchise or an intellectual property. With the Assassin’s Creed game, it’s the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and that’s a very specific sound with a long history and a lot of fans. With my other projects like the Da Vinci Code, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Shrek the Third – it’s an intellectual property that exists and for which there are expectations. For Spyder, it was all about the nineteen sixties-era action spy thriller, and that was a lot of fun for me because I got a chance to really dig into research for it. That’s always my first step, if I’m going into a project that’s historically based. So I did a lot of research into music from the nineteen sixties… particularly for spy movies… the soundtracks from the sixties and early seventies. Just trying to absorb the influences, so that it becomes a vocabulary – a built-up reservoir of techniques and tools and ideas and instrumentation. Then you can employ that towards the ideas that you want to express personally. You have to reach critical mass, in terms of the amount of research you’ve done. At least for me, I get to a point where I feel that, ‘okay, now I have enough under the hood going on.’ I feel like I can speak in that language, because I’ve had enough immersion learning in order to be able to reflect it – but also still say the kind of things I want to say.
Note: Since this interview in 2020, the music of the Spyder video game has been recognized with a Global Music Award and a nomination from the NAVGTR Awards from the National Association of Video Game Trade Reviewers.
Daniel: That sounds like the most fun research ever, just like watching old spy movies and listening to the music from them. It sounds amazing. But there could be a double-edged sword for some people – the paralysis by analysis. You research so much that you have a hard time getting started. So how do you know when you’re at that critical mass… where it’s time to shift gears, buckle in and get to work?
Winifred: Well, deadlines help with that.
Daniel: (laughs) That makes sense, yeah.
Winifred: There’s always that ticking of the clock… it kind of feels like a hand at the small of your back, pushing you forward. That always helps to get moving. But for me, also, it helps if the research has gone well. I always know when I haven’t done enough, because otherwise there’s an anxious churning under the surface – I feel like I don’t have enough tools, I don’t have enough language to move forward, I can’t start yet! So then I have to keep digging, until it feels like there’s enough. If I’m doing it right, the research is just going to settle down into my subconscious, as a background to the work that I want to do. I think that’s a way to avoid the danger of feeling stymied or penned in by the research. If you’ve got enough of it, then you can set it into the back of your mind and just trust it – you can say, ‘okay, it’s there for me, but it’s not a rulebook. It’s not a ten-commandments. I can do what seems right for the project, but I can trust it’s there and it’s filtering through the work that I’m doing.’ Plus I can lean on it if I’m stuck for an instrumental technique… or for this particular project, a sense of the authenticity of the nineteen sixties. That big band sound… the rat pack feeling… the kind of funky, groovy, tasty flavors that were happening as you moved into the early seventies. That’s really informed my work for Spyder, and it was very inspirational.
Daniel: Yes! If you’ve really inundated yourself with that vocabulary, as you put it – instrument-wise, chords-wise, rhythms-wise – all those little pieces. When you sit down to come up with your own ideas, like you normally would… now all those things should be bubbling up to the surface, because they’re a part of your vocabulary.
Winifred: I think every musical genre is essentially a language. It has its own syntax and its own way of communicating. You’re conjugating the language of this musical genre. Our favorite musical genres are the ones we listen to all the time, so we can just express ourselves in that musical genre in a very intuitive way. We don’t have to think it through. I think the goal with research is to get to that point with a new musical genre – where it starts to feel intuitive. It starts to feel natural. Then the work becomes so much easier. So I get a little bit obsessed with the research, especially with a project like Spyder – because I want to hit that point.
Daniel: So there’s also something else I noticed. You’ve got this big band sound, right? Just part of the genre. And then you’ve got a lot of this time that the music isn’t at the forefront. So I was wondering how did you find the balance between that really peppy genre, and the fact that it’s going to be coming in and out?
Winifred: The team at Sumo Digital have a really great audio team there, and they came up with a great music design. Exploration in Spyder is a trial and error process. You’re trying to advance and get past obstacles. Creating music for games like that, you have to be aware of the fact that there’s going to be a lot of quiet contemplation and exploration. You don’t want the music to be in your face all the time. It just doesn’t feel natural. So we came up with a system with lots of short ambient pieces of music that would float in and out. There were over thirty of these for each level.
Daniel: Each level!
Winifred: Yeah, there’s a lot of these short pieces, and they were all spy-movie flavored. Some would be more orchestral. Some would be jazzier. The system of interactive music could trigger these short pieces in a semi-random order, depending upon what was going on. So the music always seems like it’s commenting, with a little bit of a nod and a wink, on what’s happening in the game – in a way that feels contextually meaningful. The music will settle back, and you’ll be just 
wandering around the submarine, listening to the little gurgling sounds and beeping. Then the music will suddenly wander in and comment on what’s happening. Then it will just ease out again in a way that feels very subtle and unobtrusive. Once the action music is triggered, it’s a dynamic music system built around vertical layers. So there are quite a few vertical layers that get triggered as you proceed. Once the action music starts, it really does pick up the momentum, and the feeling of purpose – because you’re heading towards some sort of culmination. The music really does push that idea. As you continue on, you get past obstacles and you solve more puzzles, more layers of the music are added. It keeps getting more complex until you reach the end of the level and everything kind of explodes. The end result is that the whole thing has a very slow build from the beginning of the level to the end. I loved the thoughtfulness and the meticulous attention to detail that the Sumo Digital audio folks had in making that system work. They did a fantastic job on it.
Daniel: If I’m remembering correctly, there was one part where – as the spider’s doing something around a radio – there’s music coming from it.
Winifred: This was one of the greatest ideas that the team had! You’re in the War Room, and there’s this old-time classic radio there. So I was asked to create a diegetic piece for the radio, and I wrote a lounge jazz piece with a scat vocal and a piano – very smooth spy flavor. It plays all during the War Room level. But at the same time we did have those thirty pieces of non-diegetic ambient music that had to be triggered when you wander around. This is while the diegetic music is also playing. So each one of those short segments had to be written so that it could be triggered alongside the diegetic music – linked to certain portions of the radio music. Triggered in those places, the nondiegetic pieces would make the music on the radio suddenly swell up with an orchestral texture. It would become more dramatic. Then the nondiegetic music would settle down, fade away, and you were still left with that radio music in the background. It was the first time I had a chance to blend diegetic and nondiegetic music together in an interactive system.
Daniel: That sounds complicated. (laughs)
Winifred: There were so many short pieces of music to create for the ambient system. It was a lot of work. But it was a great opportunity. I’d seen in other games the idea of essentially a grab-bag of short tracks that were triggered randomly. But not quite this way, and particularly not triggered alongside a diegetic piece. So that made for a really interesting challenge.
Daniel: Awesome! Is planning out structure a big part of your workflow? And how does that approach differ when you’re working with dynamic music, as opposed to more straightforward linear music?
Winifred: If you’re talking about a piece of dynamic music, then the dynamic system is really on your mind right from the start. At least for me it is. And it’s going to influence everything you’re doing. For example, with the LittleBigPlanet (2 and 3) vertical layering system, the philosophy behind it was that each of the six layers should be able to exist on their own, and also in combination with any other layer. So you write the music to be – let’s say – idea-rich. So there’s a lot of content in each layer.
Daniel: Keeping on the topic, would you do more counterpoint when you do vertical composition? I feel like you would have to, right?
Winifred: Hm. Yeah, that’s a really great observation. Yeah, you would want to have counterpoint. I tend to have quite a bit of it when doing vertical composition. But I think you also have to be aware of the fact
