If you are like many MMO players, you will eventually, if not immediately, turn off the music to your game as you are playing. In fact, in most of the games that I play, I have the music turned down to nearly zero, even Star Wars games, because the score, no matter how fantastic, will get in the way or become distracting to the actual work of playing the game. However, I have found a game that I have put over a hundred hours into over the last few weeks, yet I have not turned the music off or even turned down the volume. The music is so integrated with the game that it becomes as much a part of it as the sound of your character’s footsteps in the sand. That game is, of course, is Dune Awakening.
Last week, we sat down for a conversation with Knut Avenstroup Haugen, the composer of not only Dune Awakening’s score but the score underpinning many games, television shows, and movies over his 22 years in the industry. Knut Haugen (for his first name, you pronounce the k, so it sounds like k’noot) started writing music for video games with Age of Conan for Funcom and has come full circle by writing again for Funcom with Dune: Awakening. And during my discussion with him, I learned a great deal about the depth, thoughtfulness, and passion that goes into composing a score for a legendary (pun intended) intellectual property like Dune. Specifically, we talked about the unique challenges of writing for a video game versus other types of media and the grit it takes to overcome the hurdles that no other medium carries.
People can point to many fantastic scores in film, like the Star Wars theme by John Williams or even the music of Dune Part One and Dune Part Two by Hans Zimmer. But memorable game music is harder to come up with unless they have been around for over 40 years and have names like Mario or Zelda attached to them. Haugen pointed out this struggle when I talked to him.
“In terms of the music in a game, especially like in an MMO like Dune, the music needs to be, a lot of the time, quite withdrawn, or you need to be careful not to make too much out of it,” he told me. “So there are two problems: One, the player spends a lot of time in the same area and will be listening to the same music. How do you fix that without it getting boring? Two, the other thing, you need to be careful not to do something that stands out too much in the music because it will much quicker become annoying.”
In film or television, composers write music to the narrative or character, and to a point, they do that in games too, but as Haugen said to me, “In a film, it’s just the scene. It is what it is. It’s five minutes, and then that’s that. But if you write the five-minute cue for the video game, yeah, that’s good. Cool. But we need a hundred minutes more.” It’s a quandary that does not have a simple solution, and many games answer the question incorrectly, causing many people to do what I did before playing Dune: turn the music off.
Imagine you’re in a dance club. If you’re like me, that will take a lot of imagination because I don’t go that often, but I do like club music and enjoy the work of good DJs. How they are able to seamlessly weave the rhythm and instrumentation of one song into another song always fascinates me. This weaving of music allows DJs to stretch songs out or link songs together so that there are no awkward cuts or fades. The tricks that DJs use are almost exactly the ones Haugen used when arranging the music for Dune Awakening.
“All of the music – well, let’s say 99% of the music – of the game has been written in D minor and 100 BPM,” Haugen explained. “So that means you can take the drums of section B of cue number two and put them in section C of cue number 57, and they will still work. So suddenly, you have a Dune Awakening construction kit with almost unlimited possibilities.”
He also discussed slicing up the music “vertically,” too, meaning individual instruments could be added or taken away at-will. “Vertically” in this case derives from the way that tracks are laid out in the composition software. The tracks (or individual instruments) are stacked on top of each other, whereas the sound is laid out horizontally. Naturally, I asked him if vertical divisions meant that the music and instrumentation could be chosen at random.
“[You could] choose randomly if you like, or you can program,” he elaborated. “If it’s ABCDE, you can program it to be BECB. Or you can loop one, you can loop two, or whatever you want. So that helps, but then again, that’s kind of the vertical cutting, but you also have the horizontal cutting, because each of these sections can have maybe 30 layers. Each instrument is a different layer. You can pull them out, and you can put them in again. So you can have the same piece, let’s say, just focus on one section of the piece, you just want to hear the strings. And I want it to loop twice. And then the second time, I want the flutes to come in, or I want the drums to come in, or something like that. You can combine however way you want.”
And it works! Having played Dune Awakening for well over 150 hours now, I can tell you that I have not turned off the music; in fact, I haven’t even turned it down. The music is subtle and fitting the scene or zone I’m in. It gives me gentle nudges when something dangerous is happening without punching me in the face. Most importantly, it fits in the Dune universe.
In fact, there was some fear that when the Dune movies came out that it would mean extra struggle for the Dune Awakening score. “That’s always difficult,” Haugen said, “So the thing is, of course, that you cannot stray too far away because then people will say, oh, this is not Dune music. This is wrong. And also if you are too close, it’s plagiarism and you’re copying someone. So you need to find a balance… I think I found a good balance.”
My conversation with Knut Haugen was a delight. Music has been an active part of my life since my first days singing in the junior high choir (shoutout to Mr. Sutton). We had a fairly deep discussion about his career as a composer of video game music, but I wanted to share this excerpt with you first because I thought it was a fantastic departure from the standard way of putting music together for a video game. If you, the audience, would like to read more about that conversation about Haugen’s career and how video game music production has changed in the last 20 years, let us know!
Thanks so much to Knut for taking the time to sit and talk with us – and thank you, Funcom, for continuing to hire Haugen to compose music for MMOs! You can scope out more of his work across the industry on his website.
