January 21, 2009

Composer Winifred Phillips Talks SimAnimals and The Maw
By Louis Bedigian

“They wanted to make sure I understood that in a Sims game, you can do anything you want, and the music should always make you feel a sense of possibilities and wonder.”

Winifred Phillips has been very busy these days. Known for her work on God of War, The Da Vinci Code and Speed Racer: The Video Game (among many others), she is currently enjoying the release of her latest projects – SimAnimals and The Maw – both of which release on January 21st.

"For SimAnimals, I was contacted pretty much out-of-the-blue and offered the job outright," Winifred Phillips revealed during our recent interview. "It was a very short e-mail, which asked if I wanted the job. I said yes. It was that simple. I didn’t even have to audition. You can imagine the warm and fuzzy feelings I have about that experience.

"For The Maw, I also didn’t have to audition for the project, but it was a bit less out-of-the-blue, because I’d worked with the guys from the developer Twisted Pixel before, when they were with a different developer. This was before they struck out on their own and established their own company."

With SimAnimals being a new property (The Maw too, actually), you've said that you had creative control from the start with nothing to compare the game to. Ultimately that's what everyone wants – creative freedom – but does it ever prove to be daunting, having so many options but not an existing starting point?

Winifred Phillips: It was very exciting, and The SimAnimals Team was very helpful during those early days when my music producer, Winnie Waldron, and I were experimenting and developing a music style that would work for SimAnimals. The development team sent lots of videos and still images for inspiration. I submitted short musical ‘sketch’ tracks at the beginning of the project, which encapsulated possible directions that the score might pursue in terms of the style and aesthetic, and the development team offered some really helpful feedback. Working with The SimAnimals Team was a really great experience – they gave me a lot of room to be creative and define the musical style of the game, but they also offered a strong sounding-board and support system too.

The Maw was a similar experience, but taken to the extreme. Winnie and I would approach the guys at Twisted Pixel and say, “what do you think about this musical style for the game?” and they’d say, “whatever you think is best.” Winnie and I even developed the design for the musical interactivity and implementation for the game, and wrote a document for the developers detailing exactly how the music should react to gameplay. They gave us the go-ahead to define The Maw’s musical content at every level of the experience. It was incredibly empowering.

However, since there are other Sims games, SimAnimals is not entirely on its own. Did you consider The Sims franchise when working on SimAnimals?

WP: The team at EA didn’t really want us to do that – they made it very clear that this was a brand new franchise joining the Sims family, and as such it should have its own musical identity. Early in the life of the project, Winnie and I visited the development studio and had lots of meetings with the developers. During the meetings at the studio, we talked with the developers about the musical ideas that were embodied in the theme track I’d already written for SimAnimals, and how that style would integrate into the SimAnimals game. When we walked away from those meetings, we had a very clear vision of the unique identity of this new franchise, which was forging into the natural world while still retaining the innate charm that has always made The Sims so much fun to play.

Based on what I've heard of your score, SimAnimals seems to take an interesting direction. It reminded me of an RPG; not too dark but not too lighthearted either. Is this what you were going for?

WP: I’ve always loved role-playing games, so I suppose it's possible that I was subconsciously influenced by some of the great music I’ve heard in those games – but it wasn’t a conscious choice. For this project, I was really inspired by experimental music. Not that the music I created for SimAnimals was all that experimental, but I really liked the unique mind-set and musicality of experimental works – the sense of entering into a different state-of-consciousness. I think that the simulation-game genre tends to lead a gamer into that unique mental “zone”, where you’re intensely aware of everything that’s going on, but also sort-of relaxed and deliberate at the same time. I wanted to reflect that emotional state in the music for SimAnimals, which may be the reason why the music balances between dark and light.

The Sims music and sound effects can get pretty quirky. Are there any parts of the SimAnimals soundtrack that head in a quirky/zany direction?

WP: There’s an area of the game where the player encounters a junkyard (and the animals which inhabit it). The music I created for that area is pretty quirky – it incorporates an electric guitar and some rock-influenced drums with a pretty zany instrumental treatment and all sorts of metallic percussion.

Winifred Phillips and her, as she calls it, "frighteningly lifelike statue of The Maw."

Within your creative freedom, did the developers have any requests for what they hoped the game would sound like? Or perhaps your producer, Winnie Waldron, had some input?

WP: My producer always has lots of input. She’s a big part of all the [conceptualizing] and planning stages for every project, and during music creation she offers a lot of advice and encouragement along the way. Regarding developer requests, I can remember that they were very adamant about how important the feeling of freedom is in a Sims game. They wanted to make sure I understood that in a Sims game, you can do anything you want, and the music should always make you feel a sense of possibilities and wonder.

Will your music appear in both the Wii and DS versions of the game?

WP: Yes. I wrote the entire score and theme for the Wii version, and the title theme I wrote is also being used in the DS version of the game.

Your SimAnimals score is now available for purchase via iTunes and Amazon.com. This is a new thing for game composers; even during the glory RPG days when gamers paid $50 to import OSTs of their favorite Final Fantasy titles, publishers still couldn't see the value in a domestic release. What are your thoughts on this development (scores being more readily available to purchase), and do you think there will come a time when every score from every game can be acquired on disc or in digital form?

WP: I was very fortunate that Electronic Arts has its EA Games Soundtrack program in place for the express purpose of providing game soundtracks to the ever growing audience of game music fans. I was also fortunate that they wanted to include the SimAnimals soundtrack in their program. I think Electronic Arts is doing an incredibly admirable thing in making music from their games available as commercial releases. This really validates the authenticity of game music as an art form, so I’m really grateful to them for supporting the music I wrote for SimAnimals with a soundtrack release.

Regarding the possibility of game music soundtracks receiving more commercial releases in the future, I hope that will be the case. I have enjoyed and been inspired by the music I’ve heard in game music soundtracks, and I’d like to see more of them available for purchase in the future.

Now for The Maw, you seem to be throwing quite a bit of different sounds at the game, many of which seem to fit with its over-the-top alien theme. How did you prepare for a score of this nature?

WP: The guys at Twisted Pixel sent me lots of videos and images from the game, and I immediately fell in love with the green-tongued, purple blob that is Maw. He’s basically just a huge mouth with an eyeball on top, and he gets around on a little squishy foot, sort of like a snail. So I used sounds that make you think of a mouth, and sounds that make you think of something squishy. I assembled a library of mouth sounds (tongue clicks and pops, gargling, mouthwash swishing, all sorts of vocal beat boxing, etc.) and squishy sounds (plungers, mud, paint sloshing in a can, frog noises, pig snouts, the list goes on). I used these sounds by assigning them to keys on my keyboard, as both percussion elements and melodic instruments. Some other quirky sounds I used came from such sources as vacuum cleaner hoses, elastic bands, bottles, bed springs, Styrofoam cups, radiators, bath towels…the list goes on and on. Those sounds formed the rhythmic core of the music. The rest consisted of a jazz band, some sci-fi synthesizer sounds, and my own singing voice.

A glimpse of SimAnimals (Wii version).

So what can you tell us about the score? I hear it's supposed to be interactive.

WP: It’s very interactive. Designing the interactivity took Winnie and I quite a long time – there were so many ‘trigger’ points where the actions of the player would initiate a change in the music. Each musical track in the game consists of three different ‘sub-tracks’ that can be played in many different combinations. For instance, one of the pieces of music from the game consists of a rhythm track (drums and wacky percussive sounds), a ‘jazz’ track consisting of big-band instruments, and a choral track with harmonic women’s choir and sci-fi synth textures. At any given time in the game, you may hear just the drums playing quietly… or maybe the drums louder and the jazz band at a softer level, or maybe just the jazz band at full blast with no drums but with the choir playing softly… or maybe just the choir alone. And there are lots more possibilities, depending on what you’re doing in the game.

Do you think this is only the beginning of interactive music in games? And if there's room to evolve, where might it be taken in the future?

WP: There’s been some experimentation with generative adaptive music, and a lot of games are using an approach that revolves around short chunks of music that can be hot-swapped on the fly. There are even developers that are retreating to some very old-school MIDI-based techniques in order to get more interactivity into the music (sometimes at the expense of sound quality). I think interactivity is here to stay, but its just one of many techniques that game music can use to engage the player. As long as we keep our perspective and remember that music is first and foremost an art form, musical interactivity will continue to complement and enhance the gameplay experience in the future.

Since this is an online-only release (with a small 150MB game size, I believe), were you forced to produce the music differently than you might for a Wii or other console game? Or is the file type, file size, sound quality, etc., something only the developers have to worry about?

WP: At the beginning, we discussed a lot of options with Twisted Pixel for maximizing the music experience in the game, since we knew that the 150MB game size was going to limit the amount of music we’d be able to incorporate into the game. The interactivity design grew out of those initial discussions, and it was an excellent way to navigate around the limitations and keep the music feeling fresh as the gameplay progressed.

With SimAnimals and The Maw about to be released, what's next for you?

WP: At the moment I’m in the middle of music composition for another EA title, which is top-secret right now. Also, there is a second project on my horizon – an extremely high-profile mature game with a different developer, but I’m not allowed to talk about that either.

Thank you for your time.

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