Is a CS Deg Needed to Make Game Soundtracks?

Kurtiz666 asks: "A good friend of mine has his bachelor's in music composition - he wants to score game soundtracks for a living. He's a very good composer but has had difficulty breaking into the industry, doing only occasional work like soundtracks for plays and such. He thinks getting a CS degree will help him and is making plans to go back to school, but I'm not entirely convinced he needs this degree. I don't want to sound like his mother or anything, but I also don't want him to waste 2 years on school if he doesn't have to. So, how do you break into the game soundtrack field? Are there any software skills you recommend, and is a CS degree really necessary?"

My experience

[SocialEngineer]

I haven't done large scale soundtracks for games, only smaller stuff (and not on anything that became a big completed product), but based on my experience, and what I've seen in the industry, he's on the right track with just doing plays and whatever he can. I've done scores for a couple theatrical productions, and having that on your resume will prove your ability to write music to supplement drama and action better than a CS degree.

My advise: don't get the CS degree. Keep doing music. Participate in small projects on the side of your regular occupation.

I've also heard that starting out just running mail and doing intern work is a great way to get your foot in the door at game dev shops.

Re:My experience

[Mattcelt]

I agree with the above to a degree (no pun intended). My girlfriend has a bachelor's in composition and a master's in film composition, and let me tell you - neither prepared her for working in LA. IMHO, I would tell your friend to go get an MBA instead. It will prove FAR more valuable than all the CS classes he could ever take.

Breaking into the game industry is the same as breaking into the film industry: it's not about what you know as much as who you know. And networking (in this sense) falls squarely

Shy & stuff

[x_terminat_or_3]

Funny how these stories always begin with "a good friend of mine". Are people really that shy to say "I"?

not just to get a job

[denissmith]

If he is going for a degree just to get a job, it's a bad plan. If he really is interested in computer science as a field he should go for it. It is never a good plan to choose a course of study just for a line on a resume. Over time that line falls farther and farther down the page. It always pays to study what you love - even though you may find it doesn't help you get a job at all.

I wouldn't think so...

[general_re]

I mean, John Williams does not, to my knowledge, have a degree in filmmaking. Your friend is probably better off putting together a portfolio of his compositions, and then shopping it around until he drops. Covering both theme and incidental music would probably be wise, as well as a variety of genres. Don't bother with scores - the people who would hire him likely can't make sense of them anyway. Tell him to call in every favor he's got, get some musician friends into the studio, and do some recording. Lotsa luck to him.

Better places to ask:

[dcapel]

ocremix.org
vgmix.com
etc?

Seems they would know better than /. :)

Find an OSS game

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the soundtrack for it, for free, and get yourself noticed.

Re:Find an OSS game

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

...and get yourself noticed...

By who? People that have no involvment or pull in commercial game production? And how would that help this guy who, obviously wants to work for the likes of EA?

Re:Find an OSS game

[agraupe]

Because HR managers wouldn't be interested in hearing you've already done a game soundtrack... Sure, you'll still need to interview, and show off your portfolio and skills, but doing an OSS soundtrack would certainly be an impressive addition to a portfolio. If nothing else, he'll learn possible useful skills in his chosen career. You never know.

Re:Find an OSS game

[ErroneousBee]

Vegastrike?

Huh?

[pclminion]

That's one of the most bizarre questions I've seen asked. The answer is obviously that it would be a waste of time.

What on earth does game soundtrack composition have to do with computability, context free grammars, operating system resource allocation, space and time complexity analysis, etc? The entire premise of the question is insane.

It sounds like this person thinks that CS is where you go to learn to use a computer. That would be like sending an aspiring painter to get a degree in physics so he could learn to use a paintbrush.

Re:Huh?

[melikamp]

A very true mean answer above :P

Re:Huh?

[islisis]

If you were interested in algorithms though specialising your study could reap some inventive ways to program music transitions and layering to fit the game environment balancing. When you think about limitations of the the media you wish to create for there is often a great deal of space which has never been traversed before. Wouldn't a musician interested in becoming more intertwined with game dynamics be exciting to work with?

There are plenty who think a degree in science doesn't prevent science fiction

Re:Huh?

[cei]

There are plenty who think a degree in science doesn't prevent science fiction writing

There are also plenty of IT workers with degrees in English...

Re:Huh?

[islisis]

sorry, did not even try to proofread that last post. meant of course, 'not having a degree' ... and the other typos are a bit easier to see ...

Yes

[booch]

Yes. You need a CS degree. That's all there is to it. You don't need any skills or experience or anything. In fact, knowing anything about music would be bad. Duh!

The Wizard of Oz to the Scarecrow: I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.

Re:well

[schon]

So, how do you break into the game soundtrack field?

You go to law school.

<muppet voice="gonzo">
Sure, if you wanna do it the easy way!
</muppet voice="gonzo">

Subconscious copying

[tepples]

You go to law school.

This is unfortunately more true than you may think. If you want to compose music for commercial purposes, you'll need an understanding of the law if you want to avoid having people sue you for copyright infringement through subconscious copying [slashdot.org].

need experience

[urdine]

For a job in the game industry, you need game industry experience. Stupid but true. The degree won't help at all. Why not save 2 years of tuition and time, and use it instead to make actual soundtracks for indie projects for free or minimal pay. Then you'll have an awesome portfolio and hey, maybe even make a few contacts with programmers that break into the biz that you can use to swing bigger jobs.

Absolutely not. Unless....

[SandSpider]

It would be foolish to get a CS degree for the sole purpose of composing music for video games. However, if he wants to make some sort of generative music system such as the world has never seen, then a CS degree might be worthwhile, though a cognitive science might be somewhat more useful, and working with someone who has done generative music (Thomas Dolby comes to mind, for some reason) would make more sense still.

=Brian

As a musician...

[gothzilla]

Writing music is an art, whether it's for top 40 radio, games, or theater. Most of the time you don't get hired to write music as a permanent job, though there are a few out there. If you want to get into the industry, start writing music and TONS of it. Get some games and re-write the music for them. Make some videos showing the game with your music behind it. Offer to write music for free for ANYONE who is willing. The best way to make money writing music for games is to get known as a game musician.

Another thing to do is learn how to write music on as many different audio apps as possible, as well as with physical instruments like guitar, keyboard, drums, etc. If someone asks you to come in and write music using a Jeskola Buzz Machine http://www.buzzmachines.com/ [buzzmachines.com], you need to already know how. You also need to understand mixing and mastering and need to know how to use analog and digital recording equipment. Mixing isn't too difficult but mastering really takes talent and skill.

Basically, he needs to shell out some cash on music equipment and software instead of on a degree. If he insists on going to school, he needs to go to a school like Full Sail http://www.fullsail.com/ [fullsail.com] that actually offers courses that would be relevant to the field.

In the 70's and 80's maybe, but not now...

[stienman]

Perhaps in the early days of computer games would a CS degree be nearly required since understanding the limitations of sound hardware was key to exploiting it to its fullest.

Now there are no practical limitations to sound hardware. There's almost no reason for a good composer to understand anything about the hardware their composition will be playing on. In some extraordinary cases, I suppose, it might be useful to know that a particular sound subsystem can only manage 128 voices instead of 256, or on

Re:In the 70's and 80's maybe, but not now...

[ottothecow]

The key samples to bring would also be the effect-inducing compositions. Sure the basic background environment stuff can sound cool but what is going to impress the person more is the unique music that creates the frightening mood or the joyous mood at the end of something. If you can do that well and get someone to feel the effect based on the music alone (without seeing the lighting and level design), they will understand that you can easily fill the inbetween points with something good.

Re:In the 70's and 80's maybe, but not now...

[tepples]

There's almost no reason for a good composer to understand anything about the hardware their composition will be playing on.

Unless the composer wants to create custom instrument patches for a given piece of synthesis hardware instead of relying on a hackneyed "General MIDI" package provided by the console maker.

In some extraordinary cases, I suppose, it might be useful to know that a particular sound subsystem can only manage 128 voices instead of 256

Nintendo DS has 16 voices, and sound effects an

HELL NO!

[sootman]

A CS degree to make game soundtracks? No way. All you need are musical skillz, industry contacts, and luck. MOST industries are "hard to break into." There are more major movies released in a year than major video games--you've got better odds in Hollywood.

Here's all you need to do: spend 10 years making soundtracks for free or cheap for every game you possibly can until someone "discovers" you. Alternately, move to where video games are made, take any job at any company so you can get in the building and f

I've been in the games industry since 1995...

[Quarters]

And I've *never* met a sound designer that had any formal computer science or programming background.

The sound designer makes sound effects and music. The programming staff integrates the sound assets, usually using a 3rd party library like Miles. All the sound designer needs to know is how to make music and save it in certain formats. They're never anywhere near the code, and usually that's just fine with them.

If your "friend" is having a hard time getting into the gaming industry he would be better se

Limitations of the format

[tepples]

All the sound designer needs to know is how to make music and save it in certain formats.

Except sometimes it's useful for the sound designer to know the technical rationale behind some of the limitations of the format. For instance, if the format allows only 8 voices or 1 MB of instrument samples per song, it would be useful for the sound designer to know why (Nintendo DS has 16 voices and 4 MB of RAM). That still doesn't need a CS degree.

A friend of mine had the same problem!

[biglig2]

He was writing music, and having some sucess, but he wanted to make really romantic music, you know, the sort of music that people play while they make sweet love.

Took him 12 years to become a gynacologist, but it was worth it. That man's name? Michael Bolton.

Didn't he end up in some office?

[mindaktiviti]

Mmm'kay? Yeeeaahhhh.

Don't forget to network

[scalveg]

I may make some suggestions here that seem obvious, but if they're obvious to you, just ignore them.

I've been working in computers since 1986, in computer audio since 1993, and I know a fair number of people in the game industry.

In my experience, I have never gotten a job that was worth a damn without having contacts on the inside. Never. I have had crummy jobs that I applied for randomly, and I have had cool jobs that I got because I knew someone. Maybe this makes me lame, but I suspect it makes me typical.

Make friends in the game industry, or at least also trying to get in to the game industry. You don't even need to know them in person; this is the era of the Internet. The goal is that sooner or later they'll be in the meeting where the project manager at their game company says "Okay we're shipping in two weeks; it's time to add the music", they'll be able to say "I know this guy..."

They don't even need to be high up in their company. I started at Creative Labs working tech support. Within a few years, I had moved around in the company to marketing, and I was in the meeting where my boss said "We need someone to compose some music for our web site." We hired Paul Godwin [be-in.com] because someone in that meeting knew him.

You have a web page up with at least snippets of some of your compositions up, right? If you can't find an open source game to help out with, turn off your PC speakers and compose some music for a game that already exists! Put 'em on your site arranged by genre: fps, rts, driving, puzzle, whatever.

In addition to a sharp looking site, you need to have some demo CDs. I bet you can make even the little business-card CDs in redbook format. I'd make 'em redbook with small song segments since you will be limited to 8-10 minutes of music. You can make them mixed-mode if you feel like, but I bet redbook with a nice printed label with your name and URL would suffice. You don't need to press them on everyone you meet, but keep them around.

If you don't already, spend some time learning about how the industry works. It may be boring and/or trite, but consider this: You meet someone who works for a publisher, and says "yeah we don't actually make any of the games ourselves." Dead end? Hardly! Maybe they don't make the games themselves, but they work with dozens of small software houses, each of which does need composers. "What titles are you publishing right now? Really, who is that by? Are you going to publish any future releases from them? You know I'd love to get in touch with someone there about composing some music for one of their titles."

Are you ready to be self-employed? Lots of small-time game operations are run on a shoestring. They're not going to need a properly-paid composer full time on staff. Get your state business license, come up with a nice looking invoice, learn how consulting contracts work.

And last, save your nickels and dimes, because next March 20-24, no matter what, you need to be here [gdconf.com].

Best of luck.

Chris O
San Carlos, California

Re:Don't forget to network

[cortana]

I had moved around in the company to marketing, and I was in the meeting where my boss said "We need someone to compose some music for our web site."

My apologies, but did your boss by any chance have pointy hair? ;)

So you want to learn CS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please remove the left recursion from the following grammar:

S -> SAb
A -> BSa
B -> ACSa
C -> dSD
D -> BaSBA

Is this grammar capable of producing sentences of finite length?

Also, determine an upper bound on the time complexity for computing Ackermann's function. Describe the significance of this function in the context of algebras.

Next, demonstrate that the grammar of ANSI C is not context-free. What modifications to the grammar would you perform to cause it to be context-free? Is the resulting grammar LL(1)?

I hope you found all that to be interesting, fun, and relevant to music scoring, because that's what you'll be doing in Computer Science.

Re:So you want to learn CS?

[tepples]

I hope you found [formal grammars] to be interesting, fun, and relevant to music scoring, because that's what you'll be doing in Computer Science.

Except that if you're trying to cut off one song and start another without using a cheesy fadeout, you may need to have the machine compose a smooth transition between the two, and that can be modeled using rewrite rules.

Thanks for your replies (I'm the original poster)

[Kurtiz666]

I know this was only posted an hour and a half ago, but there have been some damn good suggestions here, so I wanted to say thank you for your replies (negative and positive).

I'm not the one trying to break into the gaming industry...I'm a graphic designer. Ask me anything about QuarkXpress and I'm probably able to answer it - kerning, tracking, tabs, keylines, all that geeky gd stuff. You don't have to believe me, that's fine. But thanks anyway, and thanks in advance to anyone posting advice after this.

Thi

A day of synchronicity

[TeknoHog]

OK, first I got an email from an old friend saying he's switched from Windows to Linux [slashdot.org], then it's this article and I'm in the middle of making the soundtrack for a play. While I'm not aspiring to make music for games, I can relate a lot with the friend of the poster.

Reminds me of the one time I dropped acid and /. had a story titled "Periodicity, patterns and chemistry" :D

Find a good mod and write music for it!

[Ahnteis]

The same way programmers, artists, etc break into the game industry may very well work for him. Find a high quality mod and offer to write original music for them.

Do so.

Then he can point people to the mod and say "I sacored that".

Re:uhh...

[chivo243]

Read uhhh the first sentecne, he as a bachelors in music comp, that is a degree from a US university or college ;>)

Videogame Degrees and other stories

[TheZorch]

Schools like "Full Sail" teach videogame design courses, whether its graphical design, programming, sound effects and music, motion capture or whatever they teach it.

Your friend should make himself familiar with the music formats used in videogames. Research the Ogg Vorbis audio format, an open source rival to MP3s, and one of the most used audio file formats in the gaming industry (any game developed using the Unreal Tournament and the Unreal 3.0 engine uses Ogg Vorbis). Learn to use Mod Trackers for mus

Sure it is...

[Steven Reddie]

Yes, a CS degree is just as necessary for a musician working on game soundtracks as it is for the receptionist at a games company. A PhD in particle modelling or artificial intelligence certainly wouldn't hurt either.

What Wikipedia says:

[Frodo Crockett]

Computer science (abbreviated CS or compsci) encompasses a variety of topics that relates to computation, like abstract analysis of algorithms, formal grammars, and subjects such as programming languages, program design, software, computer hardware, artificial intelligence, and numerical analysis. By definition, computer science is the accumulated knowledge through scientific methodology by computation or by the use of the computer.

Computer scientists study what programs can and cannot do (see computability