GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Science and Technology

Welcome back! I’m game composer Winifred Phillips – my most recent game release is the original music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord: the smash-hit 3D remake of the classic 1981 dungeon-crawler (listen and download my award-winning soundtrack for free).  This is part four of my series of articles based on the content of the lecture I gave at the Game Developers Conference 2024!  My lecture, entitled “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” explored how we game composers can adopt the audio assets and production techniques of sound design when we’re composing music for games.  To allow everyone to access this discussion (including those of us who couldn’t attend GDC 2024), I’m happy to share the substance of my GDC lectures in an article series that incorporates the entire discussion, along with the videos and illustrations that were included in my GDC lecture!

In case you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you can find them here:

In part three of this series, we further explored how we can use animal vocalizations in eccentric ways, infusing our game music with lots of quirky character.  So now that we’ve considered what the animal kingdom can do for our music, let’s tackle the next item on our list – The Diegetics of Science!

Related:GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: Sounds of Nature

It’s a lot of fun for us as game composers to create music for high-tech situations and awesome sci-fi worlds. Integrating actual electronic and scientific audio into our sound palette allows us to lavish some futuristic sheen on top of our music when we need it most.

The diegetics of science and technology

Let’s start with a simple example: in the Shattered State VR game developed by Supermassive Games, you’re the head of an elite government agency during a period of national crisis. As a high-tech thriller, the game required a musical score that evoked the science of expert intelligence gathering – and that approach began with the opening cinema. While this prologue sequence focused on the news and popular sentiment surrounding events in recent history, I wanted my score to emphasize technology, so I prepared some satellite telemetry and data entry sounds that I could use during composition:

Let’s see how that worked in the cinema:

This was a somewhat understated use of science sound design, so let’s now check out a more overt example. In the Spyder video game for Apple Arcade, developer Sumo Digital created an over-the-top 1960s spy adventure starring a tiny robotic spider. Creative direction for the sound of this game included a groovy 60s-style spy score and lots of retro futuristic sound design, so I made extra efforts to inject that famously quirky sixties sci-fi audio palette into my musical compositions:

Related:GDC 2024 Dial Up the Diegetics: The Animal Kingdom

There were lots of opportunities to spotlight this sound design approach in my score for Spyder. Here’s how these effects sounded during the menu sequences between missions:

Also, this same kind of approach came in very handy when I wanted to use it in very subtle ways during low-keyed exploration, to insert a tiny bit of sci-fi sonic weirdness into the mix:

Finally, let’s listen to an extreme example of how we can use scientific sounds in our music. The Fail Factory VR game from Armature Studio dropped players into the roles of interns manning an out-of-control robot assembly line. It was my job to make the situation feel as comedically hectic as possible. So, along with a peppy jazz style, I absolutely jammed my music full of robot factory sound design. Here’s a taste of some of the sound assets I was using in this project – these were meant to give the impression of “electronics run amok.”:

You can see that, unlike the sound effects I used in Spyder and Shattered State, these sounds for Fail Factory are particularly aggressive and strident. Here’s how that worked during gameplay:

Up to this point, we’ve explored sounds of the environment, vocalizations from our animal friends, and the electronic and technical sounds of science – so now let’s move on to the industrial and mechanical side of things.

From the faintest clicks to the most thunderous clangs, machines provide a wealth of sonic inspiration. So, let’s start small and work our way up!

Industrial and mechanical diegetics

In The Da Vinci Code video game, The Collective and 2K Games adapted the world-famous novel in which a Harvard professor uncovers an ancient mystery by solving intricate puzzles. The narrative focuses on a race against time, so as the composer for the video game, I focused on one of the simplest sound design assets imaginable – the ticking clock:

It’s a great way to motivate players and add suspense to gameplay, and it’s the most fundamental mechanical sound we can use in our music. Here’s an example of how this worked in The Da Vinci Code game:

We can see how the ticking infuses this puzzle gameplay with a bit more tension by emphasizing the passage of time.

In part five of this article series, we’ll be considering how best to use sounds derived from larger-scale technological sources including vehicles.  Until then, thanks so much for reading!