# How much does a game composer need to know about programming?



## janila (Aug 7, 2008)

I've done game music but I've done just fine without knowing that much about the programming and the tools used to place the audio into the game. I've done some basic programming years ago and I know my ways with computers so I'm not intimidated by it either. I'm just wondering if there's something I should look into.

Do you know what for example FMOD and Wwise are and do you have some understanding about the way they work?

Are there games and engines that use any sophisticated interaction between the music and events in the game? What kind of tools are used for that and what does it require from the music production?

Is there anything else in the process of making games that isn't directly related to music but might be worth learning?


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## Stephen Baysted (Aug 7, 2008)

Hi Janila

In my experience it depends on the development company and how they operate. 

In my current gig, I'm responsible for composing all the music and the overall sound production. We use FMOD and various proprietary tools for implementing sound and music in game. 

I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have to get my hands dirty quite often (unfortunately). I'm lucky to have some good programmers who work closely with me and bail me out when I get in over my head (which is quite often). 

I would say try to get as much experience of a variety of sound engines as possible, but you'd be seriously unlikely to be asked to do any programming as a composer or sound designer, and depending on the company, you'd be likely to have at least one specialist audio programmer to help realize your ideas. 

HTH

Cheers


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## Waywyn (Aug 7, 2008)

As Rousseau mentioned it depends on the job. If you do FMOD stuff, you surely need to know about the format and the data.

I personally never had jobs where I had to care about the programming. Of course certain things are important. Are there tracks which have to loop, are there tracks which blend over at a certain time (so they need to have the exact same lenght and start point) ... are there tracks which have cue points etc. ... tracks with separated intro and ending, probably little stingers or middle parts which drop in when a certain level or area has been reached.

Of course I can just speak from my point of view, but I am lucky to just stay with creating music ... o/~


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## Jaap (Aug 7, 2008)

For me it is the same story as Rousseau. For my current work I am a lead audio designer for a US based company and I have to do as well a large part of Fmod design. I am not a hardcore programmer and most of the tech side stuff is going to be worked out by the programmers, but for an adaptive system we are building I am using Fmod a lot. 

The good thing is that with Fmod you have a designer version which is for the composer/sound designer and you can prepare the implementation and how the sound/music will work ingame from there. The technical implementation will coded with Fmod EX.

In general it is good to know middleware like Fmod, Wwise, Miles etc or how some of the audio engines work (like for example the unreal engine). It is not that you have to code all the stuff yourself, but it certainly ease up the communication and it is often easier to explain if you want some special stuff that you know how it works.


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## janila (Aug 7, 2008)

Thanks guys! I love this place.  

That's pretty much what I was expecting to hear. I don't know what kind of a future if any I'll have in games but I'd rather do my share of advancing the art if I get the chance to do so. I don't play enough games but when I do it really bugs me if there is no real interaction between the events in the game and the music and sound. Oblivion is a good example. Top notch music (even if the production isn't stellar) with abrupt and obvious cue points and far too much repetition considering the lengthened nature of the game.

What are your favourite games regarding creative use of music and audio? I don't mean the quality of music or audio themselves but their use in ways that support the game and especially if it's done in a way that can't be done atleast as efficiently in other media.

What gaming platforms do you own and how much do you play games? Do you do it for fun without giving much thought for the music and audio or do you consider it a part of the job? Jobs are allowed to be fun. (o) 

What do you recommend for starting points in learning Fmod, Wwise, Miles and all that? Should I just find their online tutorials and manuals or is there some common ground to them that could be read from a book from a third party? All the books in Amazon seem dated, I don't expect there to be much of Xbox 360 or PS3 in a book published in 2002. Should I try to learn one (which one?) more thoroughly or do they have different features or obvious strengths or weaknesses that need attention?


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## Scott Cairns (Aug 7, 2008)

janila @ Fri Aug 08 said:


> What gaming platforms do you own and how much do you play games?


 Hi, Xbox, PS2, PSP and Nintendo DS. I play the games I work on, plus some others for 'research' :lol: 



janila @ Fri Aug 08 said:


> Do you do it for fun without giving much thought for the music and audio or do you consider it a part of the job? Jobs are allowed to be fun. (o)


 A bit of both, you cant help but notice whats happening in another game after a while.



janila @ Fri Aug 08 said:


> What do you recommend for starting points in learning Fmod, Wwise, Miles and all that?


 Go to the websites and download the designer versions of their software, this is free. There'll be help files and examples included. 



janila @ Fri Aug 08 said:


> Should I try to learn one (which one?) more thoroughly or do they have different features or obvious strengths or weaknesses that need attention?


 Which one you learn depends on your employer at the time. My main clients use FMOD, but a friend of mine is using WWise every day for his inhouse sound-design position.

Here's what my friend says about FMOD and WWise;

_I could rave about WWise as I've been using it for a while.
I've used older versions of FMOD in the past but am not up-to-date to comment on it. I believe both are very similar in their functionality.
FMOD seems to be more geared towards doing a lot more hardcore stuff technically and is probably more suited for building tools around the FMOD SDK at least that's how I've used it in the past.

As far as WWise goes, I'm very happy with it, it's allowed me to prototype technical challenges without asking the engineers for a thing, then demonstrating it to them and they understand exactly what they need to do to support it. Their involvement is minimal besides allowing hooks for events and providing feedback to the engine in terms of values and switches and state changes.

As far as being able to create content WWise allows me to do this very quickly and accurately. Being able to change the entire way sounds work together in real-time helps craft an element's sound design from a technical standpoint. Being able to mockup features not yet in the game with another tool which runs at the same time as WWise allows me to demonstrate to an audience how things will work within the game with the right feedback from engineers.

It's one of the most rapid sound development tools I've worked with so far.

I'm sure others will have similar things to say about FMOD as well, from last I'd seen of it at GDC this year it was keeping up with current demands and also supported something of an event based system. FMOD does support more platforms than WWise does, and has been around for longer.
Both systems are at the forefront of audio implementation. I'd say download the Tools for both and have a mess around. For me 8 months ago, WWise's interface was a lot easier to wrap my head around both logically and visually. WWise also stores it's information in XML format so it's easy to do things to create behavioral templates and replace names.
_


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## Will Roget (Aug 9, 2008)

Ditto - as a music content provider working by contract/freelance, there's really no reason you'd ever need to know any programming. It's only when you're responsible for doing music or sound implementation that you need to worry about that particular side of the tech. In those cases, Wwise/FMOD is actually only half the battle - their "designer" modules are just tools for creating a complex sound event out of a simple alias. For example, you can wrap an event called, say, "footsteps_male_grass", and it'd contain a set of randomized .wav's for each step; or perhaps "engine_jeep" and it contains the sound of a jeep engine, reference to speed parameters that can control its pitch, distance parameters that can crossfade to more distant-sounding .wav, and so on. You can even call music in the same way, using aliases in FMOD instead of direct .wav calls so that you can tweak fading, attenuation, timing, sequence, or randomization behaviours (eg. "jungle_battle" can be a set of several possible battle tracks, randomized each time the event is triggered). 

You would still however have to attach sound/music events to their specific actors or events in the game, which can easily be the more difficult challenge. Those are the cases where you'd need to dig into a level designer's scripts or world-builder tools, and figure out what does what. For example, what exactly triggers that in-game cinematic, or where in this scene does the player get the beautiful vista view of the landscape where you want to attach a music stinger? For those cases, it's great to have some rudimentary knowledge of 3D art programs (like Maya, 3DStudio Max, Blender especially (cuz it's free!)), and it can be rather helpful to have some knowledge of scripting and programming languages. Generally you wouldn't have to write your own scripts/programs, but you would probably need to be able to look at someone else's and figure out what exactly is it doing, and where.


So, I guess, short answer = "No" with an "unless" :D


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## Scott Cairns (Aug 9, 2008)

Further to what Will said (hi Will!), you'll find that *generally* you need more hands-on experience with these tools if you work inhouse.

If you're an outside contractor, often you'll only need to supply the audio assets.

Having said that, its better if you can have some say over the implementation of the audio as it will make your work better in the end and make the game sound better overall.

Often, when I submit sounds, I suggest whether or not they're to be played randomly, and if so, how often. I also sometimes supply an FMOD event file that has all my sounds already crossfaded and tuned. (A car engine is a good example of this, by sending an FMOD event file, Ive set when the rev changes happen, the loop points, and various layers.)


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