GDC 2016 - The Gothic Horror Music of 'Bloodborne' Bloodborne Wiki » Art of Bloodborne » GDC 2016 - The Gothic Horror Music of 'Bloodborne'

Source ❘ Edit ❘ Sitemap ❘ License page revision: 55, last edited: 01 July 2017

Table of Contents

Basic Information

Transcript - Peter Scaturro Begins

Transcript - Penka Kouneva Continues

Transcript - Jim Fowler Continues

Transcript - Peter Scaturro Starts Q&A

Transcript - Q&A

References

Basic Information

GDC 2016 (Game Developers Conference) hosts Peter Scaturro, Jim Fowler, and Penka Kouneva as they examine the musical style and orchestral approaches in Bloodborne's gothic score. Bloodborne is a 2015 horror-action RPG directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki (Demon's Soul and Dark Souls), developed by From Software (Japan) and published exclusively on PS4. The game music has received broad critical acclaim for its singular, intense Gothic horror sound performed by large orchestra, choir, soloists, percussion and utilizing extended orchestral techniques. This lecture will examine the musical style and orchestral approaches in the score. We will discuss the dissonant harmony, the horror-inspired melodic gestures, the "wall of sound" approaches and the blood-curdling action music. We will show how the challenging choral writing and the extended orchestral techniques evoked the desperate, disease-plagued City of Yharnam. We will also discuss how the orchestration helped unify the "sound" and aesthetics while working with a multi-cultural creative team (three Japanese staff composers at From Software, and three US guest composers). Additionally, the lecture will examine the communication and logistical challenges inherent with teams based across three continents, and strategies to promote successful musical productions.

[Video] GDC - The Gothic Horror Music of 'Bloodborne'

[Presentation PDF] GDC 2016 - Scaturro Presentation

[Speaker] Peter Scaturro – Senior Music Producer for Sony Computer Entertainment America

[Speaker] Penka Kouneva – Composer and Orchestrator for Kouneva Studios

[Speaker] Jim Fowler – Music Production Supervisor for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Transcript - Peter Scaturro Begins

Peter Scaturro – Senior Music Producer for Sony Computer Entertainment America:

Good morning everyone. It’s so nice to see you. Thanks so much for coming. So we’re going to talk about the music for Bloodborne. My name is Peter and I was one of the music producers on this project. And to my right, this is Penka, and this is Jim, and both Penka and Jim did the orchestration for both the main game and the DLC. So they will talk about the specifics of the music, but I thought what I might be able to do for you – and I hope it’s interesting for you – is to do a little bit of a behind the scenes discussion to let you know how this project wound up coming to be, and I’ll let you know about the team that was assembled to realize Hidetaka Miyazaki’s vision for the score, ultimately. This is a team of six composers writing one-hundred thirty minutes of music, spanned three continents, was two and a half years in the making, and involved collaborations between five separate Sony campuses. I just thought those were impressive statistics because this became a big production, but it didn’t start out that way.

So initially, this project started out of discussions between From Software and Japan Studio, and at this point, our colleagues in Japan sat down with Miyazaki-san and the From Software staff composers to discuss their thoughts about the score. So this is my colleague in Japan, I’m very fond of him. This is Kei (Keiichi Kitahara) and he’s the audio director for Japan Studio. He initially sat down with the folks from From Software and Miyazaki and asked if they had any goals for the score.

Unfortunately, Kei couldn’t be here he had to take a flight back to Japan, but he had this to say: “Since From Software had their own in-house composers, naturally we could have just used them, but since this was a new challenge for us – for the new game, for the new PS4 hardware – their composers thought they needed something new and different to work with, especially when it came to music that would match the game’s atmosphere and the type of musical expressions they wanted to aim for and a quality that could be accepted worldwide,” which was an important point.

Kei continues: “As Miyazaki-san gathered some video materials to give us an idea about the kind of music he wanted, the music that he brought to them was from this album.” This is City of the Fallen and this was composed by an American composer than you might know, Ryan Amon, and, Ryan had done the music for the Sony film Elysium, of which he collaborated with Penka on that. When Miyazaki-san had presented this material to Kei and our folks, our colleagues in Japan, they reached out to the director of our music studio here in America – and that’s Chuck Dowd – and they were wondering if we could get in touch with Ryan. It’s funny how things work out because as luck would have it, we were in LA at the time. It was myself and Chuck – and Ryan happened to be in LA as well – and [we] literally just swung by our Sony campus in Los Angeles and we started to talk and discuss the project. Ryan was fantastic; he is a brilliant composer and he was really excited to get involved in the project. Initially, our task was to create the music for a trailer that was going be the debut trailer for Bloodborne at E3, and what we did – as the American team – is provide a creative direction to Ryan, and the Japan Studio facilitated communication between their music team and From Software.

Now I bring this story up today because, to me, I feel like there is – for those of who may not have a window into this process, that it’s a really compelling story because what’s happened with Ryan is that he’s done a self-published trailer record that he distributed on iTunes and I’m sure other methods of distribution, and this wound up weaving its way all the way back to – and I’m going to get into some more details about the story as it [was] told to me – some fans of the Dark Souls series would pair this music up with some footage of Dark Souls and that’s what was presented to Miyazaki-san, and that’s what really grabbed him. So the point here, folks, is that the world is listening, and if any of you have felt as I have felt in the past as a former-composer-and-now-producer thinking, “Hmm, how do I meet the right people? How do I get the projects that I would really like to be working on?” I would give you this advice, having had a window now into this process: the best thing to do is to focus on the music. Just do some great work, as I’m sure you’ll all do, and put it out there because folks really are listening, and I think, now, in the world that we have with these types of communication tools, now more than ever. I felt some despair in the past thinking, “Hmm, how do I move forward here?” That really is the way to do it and I encourage you all to just [sic] focus on your art, for those composers that are here in the room. It will get heard, I promise you.

Moving on back to Bloodborne, ultimately, what wound up happening with the score is that it was written by three in-house Japanese composers from From Software – and they are absolutely brilliant – and we had three American composers that we wound up recommending in contributing. The challenge for us at this point was, “with six composers, how do we achieve a consistent sound?” And before that – sorry I’m jumping you ahead a little bit – what we had to do first was define the sound: what was going to be “something” that was going to be the element that really captured what Bloodborne was about.

We had some further discussions with our colleagues in Japan Studio and From Software and we talked to them of what they wanted to achieve with the score. Then we did a little bit of research, and what we wound up doing was to create something that we call a style guide. What this is is a research project that we do: we find other scores that have been produced that we think have elements that help to define the sound that the creative team is looking to achieve and then we present that and then we talk about it and figure out what are elements that we feel are going to work for Bloodborne and maybe what elements are not applicable to that. We wound up presenting, in the end, maybe about twenty scores – we found tracks from various scores that we thought really helped define the sound. We had a lot of help with that, particularly from Daniel Schweiger from the Formosa group who is in LA, who happens to be Penka’s husband – he’s an absolutely brilliant guy – and of course our own in-house Sony team, we do this kind of work as well.

The Gothic Victorian sound: this was something that was very interesting to me because what we found is that people generally – and by people, I mean us collectively – associate this Victorian sound as being “featured solo strings and string quartet,” primarily. What was interesting to me is that if you do the research – the historical research – it actually has nothing to do with what music that was popular in that era in Europe in the Victorian times, so it’s interesting how our perceptions change over time. For the Gothic part, we asked the composers to integrate a quasi-classical approach to the compositions. I just listed here some of the main elements of the orchestra and other musical elements that we used that eventually made up what the Victorian sound is.

Next was how we were going to achieve a consistent sound with six composers. This was an idea that we brought to our colleagues and brought to From Software, and I’m very proud to say that, in the end, we felt that this was really successful. What we did was we defined what the primary orchestral line-up was going to be for the musicians, and you can see it up here; what we asked the composers to do is just compose the music with this template in mind. Now initially, I have to say this was met with a little bit of resistance because the conventional wisdom, at least amongst some of the composers, was “I want to have all the colors that are available to me in the orchestra.” What we pointed out is that it doesn’t necessarily work the same with artwork: what you do on colors for games [is] sometimes you reduce that to a palette that really applies to the game and we can do that with the music as well. As that point was presented, I have to say, it was embraced by all of the composers, and the net result to that is that when you listen to Bloodborne’s score, it doesn’t sound widely different from track-to-track although we have a lot different composers there. This worked for us.

Here’s [sic] a couple of pictures of the recording. We did quite a lot of the recording at AIR Studios in London. As you can see, there’s the string and brass line-up there; we did the choir separately. Here’s something similar at Abbey Road. We wound up recording there as well – excellent facilities to record.

Ok, I’m going to bring up Penka right now; she’s going to talk and give an analysis of some of the music, [and] so is Jim, then I’ll come back at the end and talk a little bit about how the production continued.

Transcript - Penka Kouneva Continues

Penka Kouneva – Composer and Orchestrator for Kouneva Studios:

Good morning again. I will discuss the style, form, harmony, and orchestration of the score. We know Bloodborne follows the Hunter through the fictional [sic], decrepit, Gothic city of Yharnam. Its inhabitants have been afflicted with a blood borne disease, like a plague, that turns them into hideous monsters. The overall aesthetics, as Pete pointed out, is Victorian Gothic horror music for mutant monsters in the scoring traditions of Dracula. All of us are familiar with the Dracula vernacular and that was our style guide.

How is the music used in game play? Music plays during the downloading of the game. The track is called – on the soundtrack – The Night Unfurls, and if you stay on the title screen, it would [go] longer. Also, the E3 trailer will play; it’s titled Omen. I’ll take a close look in just a moment. Music also plays during the boss battles. It is always fast, intense, very dramatic and relentless. Music is also heard in the hub where the player rests and stocks up on weapons. It is called The Hunter’s Dream, composed by Ryan Amon. The Hunter’s Dream is a dark and contemplative piece featuring the solo viola. The viola was selected to express the subdued feelings in the hub. Many online score reviewers said “solo cello,” but, actually, it’s viola, not cello. Viola has a different tone: it’s not as expressive, it’s more nasal, and it’s more subdued, not as rich and beefy as the cello; again, that was a very purposeful choice. The haunting soloist adds a special quality to the score and makes it a distinctive characteristic of the music.

I would like to play an excerpt from the track called Hunter’s Dream, which we hear when we’re in the hub.

[Excerpt: The Hunter’s Dream]

That was the music for the hub.

I wanted to mention that many level campaigns are mostly without background music, but with creepy and evocative sound design instead. This contrast between the sound design for walkthroughs and intense music for the boss battles creates an atmosphere of dread and fear. When the silence breaks with an ominous chant or a pounding rhythm, you know you’re in a boss battle. This was a very specific creative aesthetical choice made by the game makers; this was not random, this was the aesthetical choice.

The orchestral music employs a variety of what we call extended orchestral techniques, also known as orchestral sound effects, which are inspired by twentieth century modernism. I’m going to mention a number of names of modernist composers. For instance, Ligeti, the composer of a fantastic variety of music, but he’s mostly known as the composer of the core music used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you remember the monolith and the moon cube, that’s what Ligeti sounds like. Also, expressionism; expressionism is early twentieth century music. Alban Berg was the composer of twentieth century operas Wozzeck and Lulu; that very intense musical style is an inspiration for the horror convention. Of course, the modern horror soundtrack’s entire vernacular of horror [is comprised] with clusters, aleatoric techniques, tremolos, layered dissonant textures – essentially a kind of wall of sound approach where you have layered dissonances, and I’ll go into detail later – rhythmic ostinatos, and soaring melodic lines. These are all the tropes of horror scoring that were employed in the Gothic score for Bloodborne.

[15:46] (One nice image that might inspire you.) And one more.

I would like to go into greater detail and talk about the main title Omen, which was used in the E3 trailer. It’s also the opening track on the soundtrack. It’s composed by Ryan Amon. It features a dark, low cello solo in C minor with a three-note motif. The three-note motif sounds melancholy and desolate. This is the cello motif, and you’ll hear it. After the cello theme, we hear a signature pounding stab. It’s played by a South American instrument called berimbau. It plays a repeated low C, pounded, and that’s a fresh color that Ryan Amon brought because he also has researched the South American music very extensively in his travel. That’s the picture of this instrument, the berimbau; you strike it. [16:46] (It’s doubled with contrivances) and tympani. After that stab, another signature color comes in. It’s a cluster in the women’s choir, a very specific cluster, very dissonant. Later on, the same cello motif is sung by the soprano soloist, first softly, and then an octave higher, more loudly.

I would like to play this music now, so listen to it.

[Excerpt: Omen]

We recorded the strings in two separate passes, also known as striping. All the melodic lines were recorded in one separate pass, and then all the rhythmic ostinatos were recorded as a second pass. This approach gives us more precision in the mixing and also gives us much more flexibility in implementation. Also, because it’s a horror game with heavy sound design, very elaborate sound design [from] weapons and foley, the low brass is reinforced with contrabass trombone and cimbasso in order to balance the heavy low end in the sonic spectrum. This approach of beefing up the low string and low brass is actually a very typical approach in orchestrating fantasy, horror, and science fiction games and Hollywood movies.

For the purpose of maximizing our time at the scoring sessions at AIR Studios, which is obviously very expensive, we made the strategic choice to keep all the orchestral effects on samples, and by orchestral effects, I mean clusters, aleatoric textures, stabs, usually. There is a sample I recall: Symphobia: raise your hand if you are using Symphobia in any of your music. It’s the kind of library that you use for sound effects for genre films. So we made a choice to keep these elements on samples, not recreate them again because they are already mixed and treated, but I want to tell you could also make a choice to rerecord them; for instance you could rerecord the risers. That’s a choice you make as a creative artist, as a composer, as a music producer: it can go either way.

One more nice image that we saw before.

I wanted to talk about the characteristics of the choir because the choir is, obviously, a very big part of the sound. It’s extremely important. The choral writing is some of the most technically and dramatically challenging writing that I’ve laid my eyes [on] in recent scores. The choir is unrelentingly dissonant; has a very broad emotional palate; it’s somber, soaring, nightmarish, tormented; very often, very loud. The choir becomes the signature of the battles with the monstrous bosses, yet each boss has its own musical personality. The singers are asked to sing in extreme ranges: highest notes for the women, lowest and highest notes for men. They also sing effects (clusters, slides, monastic chants, murmurs). The thirty-two person choir sings not only conventional four-note chords – one note for soprano alto tenor and bass – but is also divided in up to eight voices.

I wanted to take a close look at two level-plays with the music that goes for [sic] it: I’m going to look at Ebrietas, one of my favorite pieces. It’s composed by Yuka Kitamura. It really is a hard to beat boss: Pete has beaten her twice but she’s difficult every time. She can be found in the Upper Cathedral Ward; she is a giant, monstrous creature with squid-like tentacles in her back; she is a celestial child, has a set of skeletal wings, and is the conduit between the Church and the Great Bosses [sic]; she resembles Cthulu and is inspired by the cosmic mythology of H.P. Lovecraft. The piece that accompanies that level has very distinct features: through-composed form. “Through-composed form” means that unlike, for instance, in a pop song where you have verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge, in a through-composed form you have different sections that flow into each other and nothing is reprised, nothing returns; you don’t have a motif that keeps coming back but everything is kind of new. That’s through-composed form. The reason why most of the music is in through-composed form throughout the game is because different sections are looped so you’ll get to hear them again and again. The choir is very prominent: it’s the kind of choir you hear in requiem or oratorio: kind of [sic] very loud [and] dramatic. The harmonies are very dissonant throughout, and I’ll discuss in detail: The harmonic language starts from tonal, then goes through modal – incorporating modal chords; modality as in Lydian or Phrygian or Mixolydian; there are also polychords – polychords are harmonies stacked together like you would stack Legos – you’re stacking chords and the sound becomes rich and dissonant and very intense; there is also even impressionist harmony – the impressionistic harmonies is [sic] what Debussy would use in his music – Debussy is the composer of Clair de lune and three Nocturnes – a great impressionist composer; expressionist harmony – that’s the early twentieth century harmony that Schoenberg [and] Alban Berg used in their music, and what is interesting about that expressionist harmony is these interlocking sevens, which I’m going to look [at] in just one second; and finally the piece has many climaxes throughout – it kind of goes through climax and sustains level then goes to a higher climax – that’s also typical.

I wanted to take a close look at the harmony, and I want to encourage all composers in this room to do similar exercises because I have found this to be exceptionally useful and powerful. What I want to point [out] here [is] an excerpt from one of the climaxes in the piece at two minutes, fourteen seconds (2:14) – what you have here is [these] interlocking sevens; if you, for a moment, focus on the mezzo-soprano – that’s the second line, second bar – you have that D against the sharp diminished octave minor seventh.

[Excerpt: Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos]

[Cont’d] That’s the harmony into interlocking sevens. I’m only showing you the choir, but the orchestral texture also had a lot of sevens embedded in it. You see how in this particular case you have E against F natural and again, E against F natural and the D against C sharp; that’s how the harmony was conceived to be dissonant. As my friend Jim says, it not like you’re mashing the keys with your elbow – this is [a] more elevated approach to dissonance.

This is one thing I enjoy doing as a composer and orchestrator. I’m always very aware of the form, and what I did here is I took the piece as it is in the soundtrack, noting game play, because in game play this is implemented with looping different section. I made this flowchart: its one continuous line, but I fit it in two lines. What I did here is indicate the different thematic sections: each one has a tonal center, so the music is never [totally] a-tonal – never quite a-tonal – it’s very dissonant, very wall-of-sound with stacked dissonances, but there is a clear tonal center. This is the kind of chart I enjoy doing; it teaches me about the form. I would encourage you do that. It really is very informative when you want to learn the form of a musical piece.

I would like to play the game play of the game. Keep in mind that the music has been looped. Obviously, the game play is much longer than three minutes. Enjoy.

[Video: GDC1 Bloodborne – Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos]

Gameplay continues.

My next example is a piece called Watchdog of the Old Lords – that’s the name of the gameplay – and the soundtrack is called Terror by Cris Velasco.

(Image of Watchdog of the Old Lords) [Watchdog:] A warm, fuzzy, cutie.

This theme is used for the Chalice Dungeon bosses. What’s interesting is how this piece was implemented. For instance, the track as it was composed and as it is in the soundtrack, opens with a four-note violin gesture; then there’s this rhythmic riff, which becomes the thematic riff for the rest of the music; later, the choir comes in and the brass picks up on that rhythmic idea; from that, the figurative whole memorable riff is derived. [The] way the music was implemented is [that] game play begins with that memorable riff, which we are going to see here (indicating to slide). That’s the brass, and then the choir has sustains. That’s how the game play begins, but in the music, as you can see, it’s bar forty-three.

Here is another great example of the choir and strings playing a memorable two-note motif with highest intensity in the most extreme high ranges – look how high the sopranos are. In classical operas, since the eighteenth century, a falling motif like this was called a motif of the sigh. Here, it’s falling and rising and falling again, but that’s the operatic trope where this idea comes from. Throughout the track these thematic sections are interspersed with clusters, orchestral risers and choir effects to create an overall feeling of desperation and life-and-death stakes, (31:04) [which this cue is]. The orchestration is not thick at all: it’s not thick and busy, it’s not like a wall of sound, [which is] what we just saw before; instead, each motif is doubled at two octaves, and sometimes these motifs are doubled at three octaves, so you have that layer of three octaves playing the same motif. They are doubled in choir, violins and brass while the rhythmic propulsion – the propulsive pattern – is in low strings. Then we also have impact hits – low, percussive hits – and occasional high clusters in the violins, which is an orchestral effect. In this piece we have such clarity in each thematic layer and [clarity] in the spectrum of frequencies; for a moment, [think:] you hear sound effects, you hear music – you have this spectrum of frequencies, but what we have is clarity. That clarity gives enormous and energy and dramatic impact to each layer. That approach is opposite to what we just heard [before:] the wall of sound [–] stacked dissonances – in Ebrietas. Both these two approaches are wonderful examples of horror genre scoring. Let’s now listen to the music.

[Video: GDC2 Bloodborne – Watchdog of the Old Lords]

In closing, I want to say Bloodborne was one of the happiest collaborations and most [musically challenging] jobs for me. Teamwork between freelancers, such as myself, and the wonderful Sony campuses was fantastic. Listening closely to feedback – I had to listen very closely – forget everything I know and listen closely – asking questions, when in doubt, and extreme attention to the work flow were vital. I was getting feedback on the scores from my fantastic supervisors, Pete Scaturro and Keith Leary, and from all six composers. The Sony producer Monty Mudd was in charge of reviewing the scores and providing feedback as well. Attention to detail, meticulous file archiving and communication were crucial as files were flying across the globe and across time zones. Working on Bloodborne was one of my proudest accomplishments.

And now I’ll let Jim talk about the orchestration.

Transcript - Jim Fowler Continues

Jim Fowler – Music Production Supervisor for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe:

Hello. I want to talk to you a little bit about music for the DLC, The Old Hunters; in particular, I’m going to have a look at Tsukasa Saitoh’s cue, The Orphan of Kos. I’m going to touch briefly on the differences between the recording sessions for the main game and the DLC and on maintaining the established orchestral sound before getting into detail about the way that Saitoh’s sound cue was orchestrated. Penka’s already covered the harmonic language of Bloodborne and the way the orchestra was used, so I’m going to look instead at the way the cue appeared in the original MIDI and the way that it was and wasn’t changed to create the orchestration for live performance. Then we’ll try to squeeze in a summary – why not.

Although the choir and the orchestra were the same size, the number of sessions weren’t. Originally we had eight sessions: that was twenty seven hours of recording. For the DLC, we just had two sessions: one for the orchestra and one for the choir. Overdubbing rules means we weren’t able to replicate that reinforced orchestra sound that Penka used to create Bloodborne’s dense orchestrations, but the music still had to have the same sound as the original score; it had to be a continuation of Bloodborne’s story in the same way that the DLC is. That was the first problem to solve, and the way that we decided to go about that was to think about each cue’s orchestration’s foreground, middleground [and] background.

For each cue it was generally those three elements. There’s foreground, which would be melodic, thematic material, or, as is often the case in Bloodborne, it’s that kind of driving, riffy, ostinato tunes. The middleground is going to be counter melodies, other elements that are of secondary melodic or thematic importance; for instance, accompanying artists. Finally, the background, which is [sic] harmonic support or effects that fill out the orchestral sound. To help with the sense of scale, it was important in The Old Hunters’s music to give each orchestrational [sic] element its own space; this allowed it to be played as forcefully as possible without overpowering the other sections. To achieve this, we made sure each element was represented by distinct sections of the orchestra playing in its most effective range while ensuring that the original orchestral sound envisaged by the composer was retained – if a foreground element was in the strings, it remained in the strings rather than be moved into the brass and to the choir. To have a listen to some of those elements in The Orphan of Kos, we’re going to jump in about halfway into the cue where the large five-four ostinato really kicks in.

[Excerpt: The Orphan of Kos]

Here, the main part of interest is the ostinato – that driving, riffy thing. It’s given in the strings, which means that it can be played without breaking for breath, giving the whole music a relentless drive forward, which is further given an uncomfortable off-kilter feel by the five-four time signature so that the whole cue begins to feel quite anxiety provoking. It’s fairly straightforward: you got that nice, big, chunky string thing, from an orchestrational [sic] stand point; but if we look at the MIDI provided by Saitoh-san, we begin to see some problems and difficulties, indirectly representing what was written.

This is just a quick snapshot of the piano roll: you see there is quite a nice balance spread from high to low; every little bit got its own space there. We’ll just zoom out and look at the tracks: you can see it’s actually kind of unbalanced. There’s a lot of divisi; some sections aren’t really being used at all – basses and the first violins, for instance, to just sort of show you that in its MIDI form. To make it vaguely more musical, here it is pulled into a score. Obviously, this is pretty cluttered; I just want you to get a sense of the shape of what’s going on. You can see that the ostinato appears in the [cello] and the violas an octave divisi with accents in the basses, and as the phrase progresses, more high strings are added, expanding the (40:04) [unidentified] and growing the sound. This is, as you all see, kind of clustered, so we’ll zoom in a bit on a smaller section just so it’s a bit more obvious what’s going on. Cello and violas are covering a four-octave pattern; the basses have octave unison accents; everyone is divisi and they’re all sitting in somewhat uncomfortable ranges: the top bass and viola voice is very high; [and] low cellos – really about as far low as they can be able to go. This is a common sight when you’re orchestrating for MIDI mockups. The composers use their sample libraries in the most effective way to create the sounds they want to hit. Here, it’s the use of viola and [cello] samples to create a low, full-bodied sound, but if we were to take this as gospel, then the ostinato is going to be very unbalanced: the low [cello] and high violas in particular won’t blend together, and rather than standing as a solid mass, the sound will be somewhat disjointed; rather than standing as solid accents, the bass is going to sound quite strange all the way up there. I should stress that this isn’t a fault of the composition or in the programming; it’s just a symptom of making the MIDI mockup sound as effective as possible. Another thing to bear in mind is that with sampled instrumental sections, when we add another note in the [MIDI] string section, we’re essentially adding another ten, fourteen, sixteen players, and that’s really beefing up the sound – with real orchestra, of course; when you ask them to divide, you’re halving the number of people on each note. Although it can sometimes seem counterintuitive coming from MIDI, divisi can actually make a string section more delicate and airy, especially at low dynamics (not that that was a thing that happened that much in Bloodborne). In this situation, the orchestrator needs to rely on their ears as much as on the provided MIDI. The composer’s demos can be essential in deciding what sound they’re after and in helping you decide how to orchestrate for live players.

Let’s have a listen to a similar section, but this time from the original demo that Tsukasa Saito provided.

[Excerpt: The Orphan of Kos (Demo)]

So that ostinato is in there and you get the sense that that needs to be aggressive and large and the dominant foreground element to the cue. The low line may be a bit more prevalent than the upper viola line, at least given this. To get that kind of thick sound, we’re going to need the basses, [cello], violas, [and] violins: all around, stacked, octave unison, on their separate lines with undivided sections rather than divisi. That’s going to allow the full force of the players really digging their bows in to add punch and body to the sound. Here’s how that final orchestration looked. You see that the second violin stabs have been moved up into the first, allowing the seconds to take over the upper viola line when that comes in. Once the idea that the high stabs is established, the firsts are free to move to their original sustained line and join the ostinato at the climax, so that kind of expanding range of the riff is retained as it was originally composed. Of course, by having the basses play the lower voice of the repeated pattern, we’ve lost the bass stabs, but all is not lost because we had a big brass section to play with. Listening to the brass’s role at this point in the cue, you can see they’re punctuating that ostinato [with] really forceful, kind of percussive stabs, and that’s the middleground of the orchestration: it’s an accompanying figure; it helps to shape the ostinato, and it needs to be the perceived by the listener that it shouldn’t dominate the foreground material. The brasses that appeared in the original MIDI looked like this – not super exciting – sounds good, though; or in score form, there. You can see that [only] three of the trombones have been given anything here and that’s leaving us eight players with nothing to do. We could bolster that trombone chord: I would put two bass trombones on the low E flat; I would put two tenors on the air, four of the horns on the high E flat; have the tuba player switch to cimbasso; add an E flat an octave below the bass trombones. That’s going to give us a really big, aggressive, in-your-face chord, and when it’s played at triple F, it can be pretty overpowering, but it’s going to be too big; it’ll completely overpower the strings whenever we hear it and it leaves nowhere for the brass to go as the music builds towards the end of the cue, not to mention our left over double bass stabs, and there’s that horn effect to consider as well. We could stick with the samples, as Penka suggested, but here, where that sample is repeated several times through the cue, it’d be much nicer, if we can, to get it live with some variations. The solution here was to treat those two stab motifs, the original trombone part and the original contrabass part, as the middleground material and give both to the low brass, so keeping the areas of orchestration in the same section. This connected the two patterns together as a single orchestrational [sic] idea and kept them both powerful, but still balanced with the strings. It also meant that the horns could play their effect live, adding drive each time you hear it. That’s how that ended up looking.

The horn effects [make] up part of the background along with the percussion, the [timpanis], and symbols, and the sustained first violins when they appear. The background fills out the orchestration harmonically. Although part of it is performed by the brass instruments, the horns’ different timbre and their different specialization [sic] delineates it from the low brass accompaniment. I should be able to make out on that bigger screen the accents that have been added to just slightly give it a different shape. [There are] two new tones on the tuba and second bass trombone: they’re taking the original contrabass line; there’s a mark staccato on the other guys.

To achieve the large sounds Penka had established in the original soundtrack, it was necessary to decode the composer’s intention, converting the MIDI mockups into live orchestrations that effectively use the resources available. The aim was always to keep the orchestra sounding vast, and this was generally achieved by making sure instruments were always playing in strong full-sounding ranges that balanced well with their rest of the section and the orchestra in general. In this way, it was possible for musicians to play forcefully without fear of becoming unbalanced. The key here when orchestrating is to listen as well as look: that way you can best represent that composer’s intentions, even if that composer is you, and then arrange, within the reason, to achieve the desired sound. There may be some areas where you thin the MIDI out, but you should always be seeking to represent every pitch that the composer wrote, even if some instances of those pitches are dropped for balance for the voicing. Although, in Bloodborne, this generally meant keeping orchestrational [sic] ideas within instrumental families, it was still important to think about the orchestra and orchestration as a whole: a change made in the strings leave some musical materials that needs to be covered by the brass, but that may leave the existing brass passages understaffed; the choir could add body to a high string line, but is that going to diminish their impact when they enter later in the cue? By having a view of the whole cue at all times both horizontally and vertically, you can be aware of how arrangements in one family or passage are affecting another. I guess what I’m getting at is that although it’s helpful to think by family and in terms of foreground, middleground, and background, ultimately the orchestra is a single sound-making entity: it’s a single instrument and you get the most out of it when you think of it as a whole rather than as a selection of ensembles that come together to perform a cue. Taking a MIDI orchestration that sounds great and converting it into a score playable by an orchestra which matches that sound is a common task for orchestrators. Hopefully, by looking briefly at a section of how The Orphan of Kos was orchestrated, how it originally arrived as MIDI, and what the thought processes were in going from one to the other, you have some ideas for the next time you’re orchestrating your own or another composer’s music.

Thank you very much, and I will hand you back to Pete.

Transcript - Peter Scaturro Starts Q&A

Peter Scaturro – Senior Music Producer for Sony Computer Entertainment America:

Folks, just a few final words. As I mentioned earlier, we started this project with the intention of providing some music for an E3 trailer, but it really wound up growing organically as we continued our discussions and our work with our colleagues in Japan. Eventually, as I said in the beginning, the production was spread out over the three continents. This had a very interesting effect when it came to the crunch because we had a couple of crunches, one with the game score and also with the DLC. That is, [Jim] could be working in the UK and we can take advantage of the time difference, so if you’d work all day, send us some stuff – the J Studio folks, of course, were ahead sixteen/seventeen hours from us in the US – so if you think about it as far as managing the work flow from region to region, it was actually something that worked quite well and made the crunch much more manageable than it sometimes is, as I’m sure many of you know. When you do a project like this, communication is really the key and it really helps. There is an unsung hero, I think, in this whole collaboration, and that was, in this case, June Miki who is our business development manager for Sony Japan Studio. June was tasked with not only doing the translation with us, but she really helped us – her role in this is much more nuanced and subtle because it’s not about just translating what you’re saying, but it’s also the cultural nuances and really trying to express [them], particularly with music where language sometimes is very difficult for us to use; we don’t have the words in our language to really express what we want emotionally out of music. [June] was really crucial to making this collaboration happen and be smooth. Also, I have to say – well, here, I’ll end with this picture. This just shows some of our team while we were recording the DLC and recording the main game score and some of us at Abbey Road. Of course there were a lot more people involved than just what you see on the screen there. I really want to thank Miyazaki-san and the From composers – they were absolutely brilliant; there’s all of our colleagues at J Studio, particularly Kei, Osamu from the audio department in J Studio, Allan Becker, who is the director of Japan Studio [and was] very supportive; of course, the producers of Bloodborne, in particular Toriyama-san and Masaaki; really appreciate their help and support with this.

I’m going to end with just one final thought, and that is that something happened in this production that was really profound. We’re working on the music and, forgive me if I bust a feeling here, there was something bigger here that happened, and you really start to see the effect of music. “What are we doing here?” it’s not about the notes after a certain point: it’s about the communication, it’s about the relationships that we’re able to forge, and you particularly notice this when there is a language barrier between yourselves and the other members of your production team and this is the thing that winds up binding us and really make this a fulfilling thing to do. I want to leave you with that thought.

We have some time for a few questions, so we’ll open it up to the floor if anyone wants to ask us a question, please raise your hand.

Transcript - Q&A

Audience Member 1: Hi there, thank you so much for this talk, it was really informative. I have a quick question for Penka. I noticed on one of the formal examples that you gave that you noted Lydian mode was used; were there other modes besides Lydian that found their place in the music, in particular? Penka: The only cue that used modes extensively was Ebrietas; all the other cues used Phrygian and Minor, a typical for genre scoring. Audience Member 1: Great, thank you. Audience Member 2: Hey guys and gal. First of all I want to say thanks to Penka and Jim for really getting this nuts and bolts stuff with the music. It can be a little rare that people are willing to talk about things like divisi and fortissimo for fear of alienating people so it’s nice to hear the real musical language, but this question is actually more for Pete, I think. This was a really big project obviously: multiple continents, multiple studios, and highly anticipated. There was sort of a guarantee that it will sell really well, hopefully – fingers crossed, but I’m guessing that at some point during production, you, maybe, hit that ceiling with what you thought the original budget would and had to go to somebody and say, “Hey, we’re short,” or, “We need more money.” I’m curious: when or if that conversation has happened, on this game or another game, how do you convince somebody that is going to write the check that it’s really, really, important that we do this to the best of our abilities and not compromise with the full scope that we originally set out to complete. Pete: That’s a really good question. Let me give you some insight to that. One, I should say that when it comes to managing production budget for music, that is something that is quite manageable and we found that its – well, I shouldn’t say easy, but it’s very possible to stick within the scope that you originally set out: the money that you have available, what you want to accomplish with that. What was a little bit more difficult to manage in terms of budget sometimes has to do when your work where, we’re doing implementation work, for example, [is] dependent on the performance of other aspects of the development team; that’s when the labor there can sometimes be an unknown. Managing the external budget is what we call “fairly straight-forward.” That’s not to say the scenario you’re describing doesn’t happen, because it does. However, it’s usually not something we get blindsided by. We are, of course, in communication all the time with the other producers that are on the game, so when it comes to decisions that might be made in terms of quality or expanding the number of minutes of music that we’re going to produce for the game, that’s something that usually has some lead up to a major decision, that major decision maybe being “We want to spend some more money because we know we’re going to get this benefit.” Audience Member 2: Great, thank you. Audience Member 3: Hi. I actually had two questions for Penka: the first of which [is] for Ebrietas, I found it super interesting that you put [it] in Lydian in the middle because it’s a horror soundtrack – it’s suppose to be so dark and foreboding, but Lydian, I personally feel, is [a more] happier and beautiful kind of scale. I was wondering what [your] thought process when you decided this section is going to have the Lydian modal scale in it. Penka: You have to remember my job was to translate the composer’s vision, so I kept all the notes, but also remember who is this boss: she’s a celestial child, so it’s okay to have that very of cosmic sound. I haven’t changed any notes. I did have to do some refinement of the arrangement, but my job was to translate the vision. It totally worked for me because I thought of her as [a] cosmic, H.P. Lovecraft [idea]. [There is] Lydian but you also have the low bass, so it’s Lydian plus something else going on – that’s very dissonant. Audience Member 3: Just one more question, for maybe all three of you: do you have any composers that you suggestion to study for this kind of grand scale of orchestration with the horror, dissonant feel. Penka: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the soundtrack. Expression… Pete: Kilar, right? Penka: Yeah, Wojciech Kilar. Twentieth century music; Strauss, Richard Strauss; Schoenberg, Alban Berg; horror soundtracks, there is a fantastic vernacular of sci-fi horror music out there of the twenty-first century/twentieth century. I would encourage you strongly to study soundtracks, and if you can lay your hands on scores and dissect the scores the way Jim and I did today, it will be tremendously beneficial; I strongly encourage that. Jim: They’re not horror, but as you say, Richard Strauss and Wagner; you can’t go wrong studying them for orchestration. Audience Member 3: Thank you so much. Audience Member 4: What are some of the challenges that you faced doing orchestration for six different composers? I do a little orchestration and everyone I’ve worked with has a totally different approach and it kind of changes my workflow, so maybe you two could talk a little about that. Penka: I was brought in very early. We had a number of conversations with Pete and Keith and I understood my job was to unify the vision – that was my primary job. It took certain questions and addressing things and refining, but I had to unify. Through the orchestration, through translating the ideas of the composers, trying to understand the intent, as Jim spoke about, it was that choice of instruments and that choice of beefing up the low strings or low brass that is part of the horror scoring that added unified sound. I was privy to the design documents that was given to the composers and the notes and feedback that was given, so I saw the notes that Miyazaki-san gave to the composers and was able to incorporate that thought process in my orchestration. Jim: To be honest, it was relatively easy for me because Penka had already done all that work. [laughter] Audience Member 4: Thank you.

Audience Member 5: Hi. What were the compositional and other musical elements of the Cleric Beast theme? Jim: Sorry, could you repeat the question, there? Audience Member 5: Sure. What were the compositional and other musical elements that define the sound of the Cleric Beast theme? Penka: Which beast? Audience Member 5: Cleric Beast. Penka: Oh, Cleric Beast. It’s double strings, so short strings and low strings, brass, choir, and orchestral effects that came from the samples. Pete: Yeah. Penka: Yeah. It’s the same orchestration [of] what you saw here. The strings were in two passes: you have the melodic strings (impersonate melody); you have the low strings [doing the] ostinato. Audience Member 5: Thanks. Was there a particular rhythmic device or something? It’s very intense and I was just wondering what led to that. Penka: The whole orchestra and strings, two passes; and samples; and percussion. Audience Member 5: Thank you. Audience Member 6: Hi guys, great talk, thanks a lot. I have a quick question for workflow: [Penka,] did you start working straight [sic] under the sequencer software and start removing key switches and doing some cleanup? How did that go about? Penka: Normally as a matter of routine, I receive MIDI files – both Jim and I receive MIDI files – which have all the MIDI instruments. We also receive a full mix and stems: string, brass, [and] effect strings, everything separated so we can hear distinctly. Then we go through our protocol: we have to clean up the MIDI… Our first job is to understand the composer’s intention; that’s the most important job, so we listen. We recreate the sequence and we listen very closely many times, mute and solo different stems. Once that musical picture is clear in my mind, then I begin orchestrating [and] begin crafting the score. [There are] levels of refining, [but,] as Jim explained brilliantly, the composer gives you the MIDI but it’s our job to translate and refine and polish that MIDI, and most importantly translate it to this orchestral ensemble. Once you play it on the stage, that same power, that same impact, that same orchestral mass has to translate from how the MIDI sounds and of course, it has to sound one hundred times better but it’s our job to take that composer’s vision and translate for the live performance of the recording session. Audience Member 6: Thanks for reminding everybody [of] the importance of the orchestration and the orchestrator’s job. Penka: …but it’s the composer’s vision. We just translate it for the orchestra. Our job is to be dutiful and honor the notes. Audience Member 7: Great talk. [To get] some perspective, [for the composers] how [much] stuff do they get before they start to work, like [for instance] design documents [or] concept art? How much information do they get about the boss before they start working? Pete: What was the question? Penka: The question is what did the composers receive before composing, correct? Audience Member 7: Yes. Pete: Oh, okay. Concept art, generally; we discussed it. Of course, a lot of that I think was covered in the beginning of the talk in terms of what the template is going to be: sometimes, where is this going to appear in the game. I didn’t have much, to be honest with you. I have to say the composers did, particularly on the American composed…

References

Bloodborne. Original Soundtrack. Various Artists. Sony Computer Entertainment. 2015.

Miyazaki Hidetaka. Bloodborne. FromSoftware. Sony Computer Entertainment. 2015.