Jason Graves: Plumbing the Depths

Two-time British Academy Award-winning composer Jason Graves has helped redefine the sound of modern gaming with his evocative, textural scores for acclaimed titles such as Dead Space, Tomb Raider, Until Dawn, Far Cry Primal, and The Dark Pictures Anthology. Best known for combining live performance, custom instrumentation and innovative recording techniques, Graves’ unsettling soundscapes have become a cornerstone of what the gaming industry refers to as ‘survival horror classics’.

In addition to shaping some of gaming’s most iconic musical moments, Graves has contributed to film & TV projects including DC Comics’ Swamp Thing and 20th Century Studios’ acclaimed Predator prequel, Prey. Likewise, the in-demand composer is an instrumental force in the world of interactive gaming, recently completing Moss: Book II from the award-winning virtual reality adventure franchise.

Now, Graves returns with Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest, an expansion of The Chinese Room’s three-time BAFTA-winning horror game. Featuring almost 50 minutes of original music, the score explores new sonic depths, transforming prepared piano, waterphone and penny whistles into haunting underwater textures. Using Ableton as his creative laboratory, Grave adapts Live’s sound design features for use in interactive game engines.

When you studied Film & TV Music at the University of Southern California, was the concept of scoring for computer games even on the radar?

It wasn't even a blip on the horizon. Although game music was a thing back in 1997, that was before the internet and I even had to buy a book of college universities just to find the contact information for USC, where I went to school. We didn’t have the information overload that we have nowadays, but I do know that the program I took called Scoring for Film & TV is now called Scoring for Film, TV & Video Games, so they've widened their breadth.

Were you a gamer?

Let's go back to the ‘80s and ‘90s. At the arcade, my friends would play and I’d just sit and watch. I might have played on a quarter for two minutes, but I always preferred to practice instruments. In many ways, I sort of came full circle because now I have access to the developer’s builds when I'm working on games, so I can put them on ‘God Mode’ and basically have unlimited ammo and become invincible, which is kind of like playing with my friends without having to worry about dying every 10 seconds.

Were you intrigued by the sound design of classic arcade scrollers like Defender?

From a musical perspective, the sounds from Defender had all these 8 or 12-bit gnarly white noise- generated sounds and that's where I got started when I was doing arrangements for games on the Game Boy Advance, which boiled down to arranging stuff using two sine waves, a white noise generator and a square wave. One of the first ones I did was the music for Star Wars, but John Williams’ score had 10 things happening at once and I had to essentially narrow it down to three voices. I definitely remember going back in my memory and listening to a lot of those retro games like Defender, Asteroids, Pac-Man and, a little later, Super Mario, and I'm struck by how present all of that still is. Now I’ve got 1,000 voices and unlimited track counts on my DAW, but I still like the idea of creating a melody you can hum or play on a piano, even if it's very simple.

What was the biggest surprise or adjustment you had to make when moving from film to the new world of interactive gaming?

The interactive part is the obvious answer, but one of the first games I worked on with Sony was called The Mark of Kri, which was mostly percussion but felt right up my street because I was a percussionist. We ended up programming everything from scratch, uploading little banks of sounds into the game and writing MIDI files to trigger them. I did that with a lot of Game Boy stuff like Tim Power, which was made from break beats and big drum hits that I’d have to make sound finished before I’d even written the music, with the sounds triggered from within the game itself. Back then, you had to have a developer kit to be able to write the music, which they’d mail to you and you'd have to learn the programming language. I remember being on the phone for hours with the audio director just trying to get the computer dev game box to work so I could trigger the sounds. It's not like now, where if you know Wwise or FMOD you've probably got a handle on 90% of game music or game audio programming.

Talk to us about Still Wakes the Deep: Sirens Rest. Was it the underwater theme that attracted you?

The fact that it was developed by The Chinese Room was what primarily attracted me to the original Still Wakes the Deep and we pretty much had a six month hiatus between finishing the original game and them reaching out to do more music. I love the creative philosophy behind The Chinese Room because the way they write their stories is very cinematic. They have breadth and arc, there's character development and they always seem to have much deeper meaning than some paint-by-numbers shooter. So I was on board immediately, but the underwater aspect of Sirens Rest was basically what drove the entire sound of the DLC, because you're in a pressure suit and the only sounds you hear as a player are tactile vibrations. Everything sounds really muffled, so I wanted the music to reflect that underwater sound but also depth and pressure, which is why so much of it is really low end, broody, reverb-laden and a real pain to mix, but a whole bunch of fun to produce.

You're known for creating horror soundtracks, but Sirens Rest has got quite an epic, sci-fi feel. Presumably that makes just as much sense in this ‘alien’ underwater environment?

Yeah, totally – it’s got its own complete vibe where you might as well be on another planet or in outer space. The ocean is the most dangerous place in the world, especially the deeper you go, and the vibe is of isolation, loneliness and claustrophobia - all the stuff that was part of the original game. However, as soon as I saw some of the gameplay I told the audio director that we needed to wipe the sounds clean of all the metal and screechy things because we’re now on a sunken oil rig and it didn’t feel like that would work with all this underwater stuff, but we didn't know what it was going to sound like until we were about halfway through.

Download Jason Grave’s free Interactive Stems Live Set

So how do the sounds align with the game story on this second instalment of the Still Wakes the Deep series?

How the sounds are put together has more to do with how the gameplay is built and how you interact with the game. In the original Still Wakes the Deep, you didn't have any weapons – you were just trying to avoid the creatures, but there was a lot of metal, corners, corridors and long hallways, and the creature could see you so the music would shift appropriately to become tenser. Now, you’re underwater inside the sunken rig itself – there’s only one person that you can communicate with over an intercom and there are other things out there. What’s terrifying is that the game is completely open and you can’t see more than 10 or 15 feet in front of you, so as soon as something or someone gets close enough you're left to just panic, run, slash or swim as much as you can. You can even go around a corner and hide in a duct because it's very much open-ended, so the music needed to be a lot less instantly reactive to the gameplay and have more of an ebb and flow, taking 10 or 15 seconds to ratchet up. That required slow motion sounds with a slowly emerging pitch and using bendy, non-specific sort of muted, warm sounds that come and go, except for the occasional stinger that jumps out.

Do you, effectively, write to picture?

I've got a PC dedicated to playing games that projects up on my big TV above my computer monitors just like if I were scoring a film, except I've got a Bluetooth joystick and can play the game, have it come through my speakers and use Ableton, Cubase or Pro Tools running in parallel with the developer’s gameplay captures. That's nice, because I can throw stuff into my DAW and work with them in a linear format or pop open a chapter and look through detailed notes and chapter markings on Steam and play through those as well, especially once they've implemented music. The process is very back and forth because everything's always broken until the game comes out - it's the curse of game development!

What attracted you to Ableton Live in terms of it being suitable as a creative tool for gaming?

I haven't found anything better than Ableton in terms of being able to pull up an LFO and point it to anything you want or have an LFO go to another LFO and modulate it. It's infinite, and it reminds me of game programming in that it’s not a matter of whether I can do it, it's more about what's the best way for me to do it? I love using third-party plugins and rarely use stock plugins, except for Ableton, including EQs, distortions and compressors. As for the drum kit, I've built so many things just from the drum pads because you can link every pad to its own thing. I know that Cubase has finally added LFOs but, boy, the musical sound design potential with Ableton is freeing. Recently, I've been using my modular rig a lot, but you can even link the generators within Ableton to your modular and tune it. I also have a USB interface with 16 outs, so I've got everything routed in and out of my laptop and can record just the reverb, independent tone modules and all the different effects controls as I'm generating things in Ableton, pulling them in and out of the modular and affecting them from there. We haven't even talked about the interactive potential of Ableton itself, which is a whole other creatively inspirational thing.

Are there elements of your approach to using Ableton that allow you to simulate how game music might respond to player actions?

Oh, yeah, the way you can customize a clip, arranging an order and playback with randomization [via follow actions] is a big part of it. I probably started doing that 10 or 12 years ago when Ableton was the only thing that could, but now I’ll literally take an 8 or 16 bar phrase, throw it in the clips and have different channels represent different instruments and figure out randomisation and the best way to have things play back from an interactive standpoint. For example, I might have written three 20-second segments of music, but they're all supposed to be able to interact in any way with each other and I'm able to tweak how often each one will play and how many times they might repeat. None of that was available when I first started using Ableton, and I still really haven't found anything other than the third-party game engine programmes Wwise, MetaSounds or FMOD. The nice thing about Ableton is that it's purely standalone, so I'm not dependent on game states or anything like that. It's very similar to actually putting music in the game.

You’ve mentioned tools such as FMOD and Wwise. How does Ableton become a bridge to interact with that middleware?

The beauty of Ableton is that you can programme stuff, click with a single button using the clips and have them specifically programmed to do different things on different tracks. A lot of times I'm switching game states in a way that doesn't involve the developer, which means I'm looking at my Ableton screen off to the side and testing things out to see how they feel with transitions and gameplay states without having to depend on the developer to programme everything and play it back into the game later. It's like having a real-time preview. Even when I was programming into Wwise myself, it was easier for me to just throw all of my sound bites into Ableton and spend five minutes building a quick interactive session to see how things would feel in terms of switching and playing randomisation rather than waiting for the developer to hook up what all the middleware was doing. So Ableton allows me to simulate those processes very quickly and I can easily duplicate and expand if I want to. It's a great way to preview for developers too, because they're not dedicating time to putting everything in the game yet and can hear how sounds are naturally evolving and moving.

On the sound design front, I believe you used a couple of musical instruments such as a waterphone and penny whistle. How did they assist with the sound design?

The penny whistle was something that came in from the original game. It was one of the first times I was experimenting with recording at 192k, and I'm not a woodwind player or a penny whistle player, but I did order a couple of $10 tin penny whistles, played them at the same time so they were a little out of tune and recorded them in stereo. The idea was to capture a really high, thin, small sound, but once I went from 192k down to 48k it ended up dropping two octaves and becoming essentially four times as long. I basically took that one note and added an exaggerated vibrato that sounded kind of silly on the original pitch, but it ended up having this really cool, almost oceanic waves kind of feel. I love Ableton’s Simpler, so I threw that in there, started experimenting with it at 48k and it became the sound of one of the parts of the original game. The rest of the score was built around the same principle for Sirens Rest, so one of the first things I thought of was my waterphone. I've got a really big one that has lots of different pitches and just wanted to create the sound of something that was above the ocean but had sunk into the depths. I also used a Moog DFAM for some heartbeat kinds of sounds, but most of the time I used Ableton LFOs and reverse envelopes to simulate the sound of blood rushing through your veins or breathing. Being a drummer and percussionist, my first thought is always what original sounds can I create that are unique and make even more interesting? That's where the sound design power of Ableton really shines.

Will you often buy scrap items with a view to using them in the future?

Yeah, totally. I paid $200 for a piano about 15 years ago before I first realised that I was going to be asked to make a lot of scary, textural, abstract, suspenseful sound design, and that’s paid for itself 1,000 times over. I bought the waterphone and the penny whistles a while ago, but I’ll buy anything that I think will make an interesting sound. When working on a specific score like Far Cry Primal, I’d go shopping for rocks, stones, plants and bushes. Other times, I’ll just scavenge around - I have a car-size worth of instruments stored in one of my garages full of big drums and anything metal. You know that piece of metal that you move and hang your clothes from in a big cardboard wardrobe? I saved three of those when we moved 10 years ago and finally used them for the first time on Call of Duty a couple of years ago. I just hung them from a mic stand with zip ties and they have the coolest sound. I basically have an X made from carpenters’ tape in the middle of my room centred between about eight microphones set up for close, mid and far recording and I’ll just play things in real-time and record on all eight channels.

In terms of composing, have you noticed any specific evolutions within the gaming industry in recent years?

One of the things I've noticed in the last year is that every NDA I sign is basically saying, we're not hiring you yet, but maybe you can write or send us some music as long as you promise that there's no AI-generated material. This isn’t due to the fact that game companies don't like the way AI sounds; it’s rather that they can’t control the copyright to AI-generated sounds. I'm not talking about Soothe making my waterphone sound too tinny, I'm talking about the typing in of words and having AI spit out complete songs. There's a big Wild West frontier in terms of ownership and copyright right now, especially for games, so I'm seeing a lot of doors being closed to any possibility of AI-generated material. I know that stuff’s going to creep into our DAWs - it's already there. With Garage Band you can just turn a knob to make the drums more or less complicated or add a fill here or there – and that sort of stuff is helpful, but it’s not about hitting enter and just accepting whatever it spits out.

If you could design the ideal game soundtrack project for yourself, what would that look like?

That would be one that I’d never finish because it would have an unlimited budget and no deadline. I guess the only one I’d mention from a developer standpoint was when I heard that Naughty Dog had hired Nine Inch Nails for their soundtrack. I've always wanted to write for Naughty Dog because I love their cinematic, story-based approach to games, but I’d be literally competing against rock stars now! But it's nice to dream, so maybe it'll happen one day.

Follow Jason Graves at jasongraves.com

Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos courtesy of the artist