Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything Else

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CaptainSecretFire
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Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything Else

#1 Post by CaptainSecretFire »

Greetings all! Pretty much a newbie here! I've just reached a kind of roadblock with my composing and thought I'd post my thoughts, in case anyone had encountered the same struggles.

Though I've written for visual novels before, I'm currently (and amatuerly) composing for them for the first time. So far I'm finding it's a lot harder to compose for certain moments, as the game is dictated by the player's reading speed. A slow building piece might never reach it's climax with a fast reader, whereas a cute happy loop could be annoying for someone slower. I'm finding it to be a difficult balance, conveying emotion in an open ended way like this. Without structure directly mirroring the story. You can play a piece at a specific time but actual moments within the piece I'm finding hard to convery without it sounding forced. Ughh.

Is this a common struggle? Am I coming at this the wrong way? I've only really composed for documentaries/short films/more linear games before so it's a real switch. Does anyone have advice or a different angle? Music is a very important part of any visual novel from my experience. How do you get it right? Big question haha, but I'm interested in discussion.

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Re: Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything E

#2 Post by trooper6 »

I think you should think about leaving strongly functional and teleological Harmony behind and embrace a consonant, but less tonal and looser structured piece.
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Re: Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything E

#3 Post by Ryuno »

CaptainSecretFire wrote:Am I coming at this the wrong way? I've only really composed for documentaries/short films/more linear games before so it's a real switch.
You are. Your only concern when making music for visual novels is doing the most fitting tracks for a specific mood or scene. With other media, you usually have a certain degree of control over the pace (not so much if someone else is doing the timing of the tracks in a movie or animation, you get the drift), but that's entirely dependent on the reader here.

Don't overthink this, just make thematically fitting music that loops well and doesn't distract the reader from the other aspects of the experience.
Last edited by Ryuno on Sat Jul 04, 2015 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything E

#4 Post by Ziassan »

Valid question ! I've been in VN music composition since more than 5 years and at first I really got stuck on this.
You have to know that people actually don't care that much about the background music.
And I'm not saying the music is not important (I mean, I'm composing music) but most people hear it, they don't listen to it, since they're focused on the image & text.
Of course there is always people paying special attention to music but honnestly it's minority. Again it doesn't mean music is not significant, it's just good to think about that when making it.

So why am I pointing that out ? Because most of the time the music in a VN will be about about a mood, a general ambience. What's important is what readers "feel" while hearing it.
It's often best that the wanted mood is clear by the first notes, even if you can allow a short build up.
If you want to make the track evolves later it's ok if the first part is already fitting the mood.
Anyway if the VN is well written and shaped your track will play at least 2min before a music change, you can even talk about it to the producer/writter if you feel you can.

However for "big impact" music, like a dramatic one, you have to get the very first notes right, as an example this one hits directly the spot in only 1 second (5 notes) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgtnVGqeT9U
Last edited by Ziassan on Tue Jul 07, 2015 3:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything E

#5 Post by thebackup »

If it helps, you might want to listen to music of other VNs (or perhaps VNs you like most) to draw some inspiration, and get ideas of what mood(s) / elements you want. At least, that's what helped me compose music for my VN.

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Re: Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything E

#6 Post by YossarianIII »

Ziassan wrote:So why am I pointing that out ? Because most of the time the music in a VN will be about about a mood, a general ambience. What's important is what readers "feel" while hearing it.

Agreed with Ziassan on this point. I'd consider myself a fairly active listener when it comes to albums and soundtracks in general, but when it comes to VNs, the music rarely leaves a lasting impression beyond a general mood. This is probably because reading takes so much concentration.

Still, I do think there are opportunities to go beyond "ambient" for music in VNs, particularly at moments when the player isn't reading, like the title screen, end credits, and animation/video. I also notice music more during moments when text is presented on a blank (or nearly blank) screen, which often happens during introductions.

As a (totally amateur) composer, I typically use soundtracks in a VN almost as if they're sprites with facial expressions -- as a way to enhance or change the meaning of the text.

Here's an analogy: In Hitchcock's Rear Window there's a famous example of film editing where the same clip of Jimmy Stewart smiling and looking out the window is used to convey different emotions. First, the smiling clip is used as a reaction to a cute puppy and everything's happy. Then, the basically same clip is used as a reaction to a woman undressing in another apartment and Jimmy Stewart becomes a dirty old man. Same smile -- very different characterization.

In a similar way, music can change the meaning of the text in a VN, particularly if you've already primed the reader to recognize a piece by playing it earlier.

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Re: Composing For Visual Novels as Opposed To...Everything E

#7 Post by Tempus »

CaptainSecretFire wrote:Is this a common struggle? Am I coming at this the wrong way? I've only really composed for documentaries/short films/more linear games before so it's a real switch. Does anyone have advice or a different angle? Music is a very important part of any visual novel from my experience. How do you get it right? Big question haha, but I'm interested in discussion.
I'd suggest this is a fundamental problem all aspects of interactive procedural media encounter, whether it be music, art, writing, or whatever else. How should the fact that the audience can alter the pacing and/or potentially fail be handled, if at all? It's an open question, one that can't be given a generic answer. Of course, whether or not it's actually a problem depends on your point of view. If you think games should be able to do everything other media can, then this will appear to be an issue.

Since the topic is music, I'll use that as an example. Take a big budget FPS game and chances are it has a dynamic music system. The system isn't just limited to changing audio from, say, relaxed music to combat music. Sure, it can do that, but it can also react to the player's position, the proximity of enemies, the player's health, the number of objectives completed, and so on, adjusting the music in subtle ways (other than simply changing the track) accordingly. One example of this would be Portal 2. There's a puzzle that requires three lasers be aimed into three receivers. Upon lining each laser up, the music incorporates new elements and becomes bolder. This isn't exactly procedural music but maybe it could be called "procedurally-augmented music". This is the approach I'm going to take for Kill The Din; elements of music (instruments, sections, melodies, and so on) will be introduced and altered as the player advances the text, without actually changing the music track (or maybe it will change, but in a Ship of Theseus-esque way). In this sense there's no canonical version of the music for game since it can be experienced in a number of ways even if the ordering is constrained.

The existence of music in a game is comparable to the way player life is treated in games where life and death (or some mechanically equivalent failure-state) exist. Player death or failure is typically not acknowledged upon restart. It's not canon, in other words. The repetition of music in games is similar. The sometimes awkward restarting of battle music in a game is just sort of looked over—in the game fiction it never happened. Without player rehearsal, the perfect score for a game is impossible. At least, "perfect"
as defined by film tradition.

One big difference between games (I'm including VNs when I say "game", whatever) and films is that games are, potentially, infinite. If you play a movie and don't pause it, it will end. Not so with a game. A game score in the style of film either necessitates the game adopt film-like qualities (fixed pacing, etc.) or that the developer hire a magical composer with who can author everyone's musical experiences. The former happens sometimes (cutscenes where control is wrested away from the audience) but is generally considered bad form (with some exceptions—30 Flights of Loving, for example), and the latter is impossible. As such games tend to take an asset-based approach where discrete chunks of stuff are made to be reused, sometimes in ways that allow for dynamic re-combination (such as the aforementioned dynamic music systems).

It's interesting to think about music in VNs. I wonder, if someone reads an important line of dialogue over a major chord do they have a different experience than if they'd read it over a diminished chord in the same piece? Or is the mood of looped music averaged out in the audiences mind? Or perhaps there's some threshold which determines when one or the other might happen.

Well, those are my inconclusive thoughts.
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