Imagine you’re on a plane to Seattle, all dressed up in shiny new shoes and headed for your first real job. The guy next to you begins the clever in-flight banter. “So, what do you do?” You explain that you compose music for video games, and Mr. Chatty lets out a laugh so loud that the tray tables rattle. Your new shoes suddenly seem scruffy; your ego is deflated.
That happened five years ago to Jeremy Soule, who was all of 19 at the time. “The guy said, `Oh, you make all those little noises, all those beeps and boops?’ It was so depressing,” the composer recalls.
But in the last five years, the music for interactive games has gone from simple beeps and boops to large-scale symphonic orchestration. Soule is one of about a dozen artists in the vanguard of this burgeoning field. His score for Total Annihilation, a popular strategy game released in 1997, was recorded by Northwest Sinfonia, a 95-piece orchestra made up of musicians from the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, and Northwest Ballet. The music sounds like the soundtrack for a popcorn flick–lush and emotional, full of peaks and valleys. It’s no wonder that John Williams is Soule’s favorite composer.
Total Annihilation was one of the first games to feature a symphonic score, but it’s becoming de rigeur in the gaming industry. Games like Myst and Riven have separate soundtrack CDs.
Soule, 24, is the in-house composer for Cavedog Entertainment in Seattle, where he’s working on the score for Cavedog’s upcoming adventure epic, Amen: The Awakening. He sounds like a cross between the artist in the garret and the kid glued to the video screen when he describes his work. “Our hero narrowly escapes an atomic blast by going into a manhole and flipping down into the subway tunnels beneath New York,” Soule explains. “There’s moss and decay everywhere. I created a score with a lot of low strings, a very soft mallet on a gong and muted percussion. It sounds like you’re in a tiny room, with a serious feeling of claustrophobia.”
Soule didn’t exactly imagine that he’d be composing scores for computer games. He says he started composing melodies when he was 3 and that he could notate music before he could write his name: “My mother can prove it,” he says. His father is a music teacher (“I call him Mr. Holland,” Soule says), and Soule took college courses in composition when he was in junior high school. He went straight into the profession at 19.
And the on-line industry is burgeoning. “The interactive game industry is opening the door to opportunity, which is always a good thing,” says Ron Sobel, assistant vice president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
Soule’s self-produced CD samples are at www.jeremysoule.com.
