Delving Deep Into Music Composition With BioShock’s Composer

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hi there. I’m Garry Schyman, and I work as a film, television and video game music composer. I also teach as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Califonia - Thornton School of Music, and I’ve been there for more than a decade.

For my video game music career, I’m mostly well-known for creating the scores for the BioShock series, which earned multiple awards from BAFTA and DICE. Aside from my work on BioShock, I’ve also composed for other well-known games, like the Destroy All Humans series, Middle-Earth series, Dante’s Inferno, Front Mission Evolved and even DOTA 2!

What’s your favorite game to play?

My favorite games are, and I always say this because it's true, Portal and Portal 2 are my two favorite games of all time. I just think they're brilliant, amazing, absolutely genius. And if there's ever a Portal 3, they'll probably never make it because Steam makes Valve so much money that their incentive to make games is highly diminished, I think. I mean, that's my theory anyway. It's like, “Oh, there's no hurry, we're making time, tons of dough with Steam.” They've made so many really cool games. They’re a great developer, but where are the games now? 

But I'll also say that one of my games, BioShock, is also one of my favorite games, which I've played three times, and not because I want to hear my music for a third time, but because it's that interesting to me and the game is just so much fun. I haven’t been playing any games for the last year or so, to be honest, I just haven't had the time. I've been working and I have taught at USC since 2010. 

I teach in a program there called “screen scoring”—it is a one-year master's class for people who want to become film, TV and game composers. And I teach the game scoring component of that, and have since 2010, and I love it. I really love it. I feel like I've made friends and some of those composers have gone on to wonderful, amazing careers and I'm glad I contributed to their growth.

The insights of the people who finish his teaching course

Most of them come in understanding the basics of scoring the film and television “to picture”, as we say in the business. But gaming, it's about interactivity. And of course, the basic, most simple way to generate interactive music is to just loop your music so that it sort of seamlessly replays forever. I know it sounds too simple, but yeah, it really works. 

Let's say you are playing a game and you're playing it for the first time, and you enter an enchanted forest. Let's say it's an AAA game, so they've spent some money on it. So you're going to want to wander around and see this cool forest. But let's say you're playing it for the third time. You don't give a shit about the forest—you're just going to go straight for the monster and kill it and then move on to the next part of the game.

So that one person takes 30 minutes to explore and the other person takes like two and a half minutes. How do you score that? Well, one way is a loop, of course. That will work for most people because it'll just go on and then fade out. Games have interactive software that knows what the player's doing and can generate audio based on the player’s actions. So if you run into somebody and they start talking to you, the lip sync, it's in sync because the game can sync with the visual imagery. 

Similarly, the game's software controls audio, which includes sound effects, dialogue and music, it knows what you're doing. And so it can start music and crossfade to different types of music based on how you've developed the interactive aspects of the music.

So I teach them these techniques. And also I've been doing this for a long time. So I talk about the aesthetics, I talk about everything about film, TV and games that I've learned for the span of many, many years, and I started in the 80s!

Did your younger self imagine you’d be set on this path?

Not since childhood, like 10, but more like 19 I'd say. After about a year of college, I kind of discovered that music was the only thing I wanted to study and that it made sense. If I wanted to do that, especially if I wanted to be a composer, which is what I wanted to do, the only way you can make money is through mainstream media, unless you want to teach.

I do teach now, but at the time, I think the last thing I wanted to do was teach. I wanted to score things and write music for film and television because games weren't a thing in the 80s. I mean, they kind of were, but the scores for Atari Pong were not terribly interesting. They didn't exist. So yeah, those games were very different from the kind of composing I do. 

And it wasn't until the 90s that I actually scored a game in the early 90s called Voyeur for Philips Interactive. Philips is a big Dutch electronics firm, and they developed their own hardware system that didn't last very long, but it did exist. It was called CD-i, like a CD compact disc. CD Interactive. And basically, it was a real, true video game because they had little filmed vignettes. And based upon your choices, you go this way or that way. And Voyeur was like Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rear Window, which is a cool movie. 

Working on Voyeur

If you like Hitchcock, it's a really cool movie. It's about a man who has got a broken leg and is immobile. And so he's in this apartment in New York, and he's looking. He's spying on people, and he thinks he sees the neighbor kill his wife. Now he's got to find evidence for that. So that's what the premise of Voyeur was. And so you had to determine what really happened, and if you call the police too soon, the police go, “Oh, we can't arrest anybody. You don't have any evidence.” 

So I scored that game, but because it was CD-i, it permitted you to write traditional kind of scoring. I had an orchestra, this was in 1993, and there were no orchestras and video games at that time because it was all like MIDI triggering, like these little synth engines in there. You know, that 8-bit sound that we now honor was because of the minimal technology that was available back then.

But that wasn't interesting to me. And some people wrote some really cool 8-bit music. I'm not denigrating it, I'm just saying it just wasn’t my thing. Then a friend of mine was making this game Voyeur and he hired me. And so I scored that. And I had an orchestra for that, which was cool. And that may be, I don't know for sure, that may be the first video game with an orchestral score ever. So that's that little tiny bit of history made there. If that means anything to anybody, then cool.

What’s your process for musically scoring a video game?

It all starts with the phenomenon of why music attracts people, and nobody's ever explained it. First of all, no one really knows why humans love music so much. How did that help us evolve? We didn't need music to survive. Maybe it did help with evolution, but obviously, there's some mysterious love for this organized sound that we call music. And so that's mysterious, and it affects us emotionally in all kinds of ways, or it may just be that it’s really fun to listen to. It could be any number of things. So that’s our beginning. Humans just love music and it affects us emotionally. 

Now, somebody in the 1920s decided to synchronize music to picture. And by the way, games do have what are called “cinematics” or “cutscenes”, and I'm sure you guys know that. So these are videos, short films, usually, that we see at the end of a level that we're playing. And it's entertaining in some way, but it often gives us some information. 

They often are scored, and we score those just like we would score film or television, where it is a piece of music that is tailored specifically to the exact moments that we are seeing. And yes, sometimes we're catching and changing the music, and sometimes we're just sort of playing through that and just creating a generalized mood. It just depends on the style that you're composing in or the thing you're scoring. 

But with video games, of course, as I articulated earlier, we don't know how long it's going to take. Every player's experience is going to be unique. Even if it's just a few milliseconds off, it can really affect the experience. So someone's got to design the interactivity because the interactivity will inform how you compose the music. 

Now, sometimes that's the composer, but often, especially on bigger, what we call AAA games, almost always they have an in-house audio director and sometimes even an in-house music director, someone who is really making these sorts of decisions, in which case they will hire someone like myself, who is sometimes referred to as a contracted composer. So I'm not like an employee of that company, but I'm hired to provide assets, just like they would hire other companies to provide other game assets that aren't necessarily by the place.

Games are all a little bit different. But, I mean, the first thing you're gonna do, which is, I guess, analogous to what you do in a film or television; what does the music sound like for this game? What does it need? What's the right approach musically? And that sometimes is obvious, and sometimes it's time-consuming, and it's experimentation, and hopefully, they'll give you that time to experiment and make mistakes and try something stupid. That's kind of cool. But really, nobody likes it. I remember Dante's Inferno. It's set, of course, in the time the time of the Crusades.

On contracting third parties to help finish game development

And by the way, right now we are moving more in that direction. A lot of game companies are reducing their development teams and contracting more of what they need. So, because, you know, if you have 100 people working on a game for five years, and you do the math on the salaries, it's a lot of money. So if you can get by with a core of 25 or 30 people and just contract out those parts that you need, it can be very, very cost-effective. I'm used to that model now.

People who are working at game companies who are losing their jobs, I really feel for them because they're paying mortgages and sending kids to school and stuff. So that can be very painful. But I'm used to that because I've always been a contracted composer.

How do you set a music theme for a game?

Well, sometimes the development team has some very specific ideas in mind, and they will actually send you, a whole briefing of what they want, like “Here's what we've been listening to, and here's our favorite music from…” And it could be from any source. It could be from classical music, or it could be from other film or game scores. It could be pop music. It could be really anywhere from ethnic music from some culture that maybe is relevant to what they're doing to techno. And they'll send that to you. 

Other times they go, we don't know what we want. We want you to come up with something really cool. So it will vary from project to project. I liked getting a little bit of sense of what they like. But sometimes, like on BioShock, they didn't know what they wanted musically. And the only direction I had from the audio director, Emily Ridgway, I'll give her credit, she was great. She said it shouldn't sound like any other film, television or game score. So I was like, “Oh.”

So I started experimenting, and I was throwing a lot of ideas at her. We had worked together on Destroy All Humans, so we knew each other. And she really liked my work. So that's why she hired me for BioShock. And so I was trying stuff, and she protected me. She wasn’t like, “Okay, listen to this.” or “Oh, nobody likes that.” She just said, “No, this is the wrong direction.” So I kept trying things.

And then one day I was experimenting. So I was thinking deeply into this. Like, “Okay, this game is dystopian. It's set in a city at the bottom of the sea. It's broken down. There's crazy splicers attacking you left and right. And there are also some kind of interesting things going on philosophically because it was built by Andrew Ryan.”

Delving deeper into BioShock

It's a world built by a guy named Andrew Ryan. An acronym for his name is AR, which is also Ayn Rand's. If you know anything about Ayn Rand. She had a very strong philosophical background. She was a very interesting early mid-20th century philosopher and author who wrote Atlas Shrugged and other books. So she's still influential to this day. So Andrew Ryan had this philosophy which is, like, really cool. 

I mean, I've worked on many games, and there's really not much deep philosophy involved. But this had that at its center. So I thought, “Okay, this is sort of intellectually interesting here.” So there was that aspect of it. It was also the dystopian tragic aspect that humans keep trying to create utopias, and it ends up costing 20 million people their lives, like the Soviet Union or whatever. And then there was also the aspect of water. Water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. You’re literally surrounded by water because there's a city at the bottom of the ocean. It's like New York City under the sea, you know? So that's really fascinating.

And so I just was taking all these ideas and kind of sifting them around, and one day I did come up with an idea that involved creating this sort of dissonance and eeriness. And I added a solo violin to it. Those are all samples, so not live at this point. And I said, “That is really interesting. That sounds really different, too.” Also, I'm getting Emily's request, as that doesn't sound like anything I've heard before. 

And so I created a kind of an interesting cue doing that. I had a very nice sample that sounded really like a really beautiful violin. There was something beautiful about the violin against all this dissonance. That was like, there was something great in that. They were just, in a cool way, creating this contrast. And I sent it to her, and she just said, “That's it. That's the BioShock sound.”  I was like, “Yes! Yes! Now I had something!” And that was the beginning of really finding and fleshing out the full score.

Complexities in creating a full score

The process is sometimes as complex and difficult as BioShock. And other times it's like, “Oh, yeah, this is a “Lord of the Rings game.” Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, the two Mordor games, those I wrote with a composer, in-house composer Nate Grigg, and they said they didn't want it to sound like Howard Shore's. We didn't have to do that because they had, as it had its own unique score.

So, I mean, it's complex. You're drawing on all of your musical references from your whole life that you've had, and hopefully, you have had a wide variety of these and, like, kind of synthesizing them and getting some intuitive thought. Of course, you have experience doing it for many, in my case, decades, so it's like you just go to work and try to sift it out at your own pace.

And actually, as we work on something, that's when ideas start. That's when ideas come to us, you know, like, if you just really think about it and you try things, and then, “Oh, what if I did this?” And all of a sudden you start coming up with something interesting. So you know that the process is to come up with some approach.

And then my joke is, I can write anything I want as long as they like it. Your team, who's hired you, who's paying you s decent amount of money and has, like, $100 million on the line, if the game completely flops, they care. I tell my students this, “If you want to write your own music, go for it and play for your mom. She will love it. Trust me. Your mother will love everything you write. If you're working on something for somebody else, it is a collaboration. You have to, find something that they also really connect to.” 

And they, your client or team, have a disadvantage as they don’t usually understand music the way you would. They can't tell if that should have been D minor in that bar seven there instead of a something. But wait, if you hear that, like, complex music stuff from them, run for the hills. You're in deep doo-doo right there. They're going to dictate the music, so let them write it. 

But no, I almost never hear that. But they know their game. They've been involved with that game since the beginning. And this is true of films, too. Like, a director will have written the script six years ago and has been thinking about this, and it finally got the money a year ago, and it's finally being made. So they have a deep connection that you don't share because you just haven't been involved in it since the very beginning of the process. 

So they often, not always, have inaccurate ideas. Sometimes they are wrong. And they often have really bad ideas. But usually, and I say this more times than not, their insights are appreciated and welcome, but it's not working. And then I used to, when I was much younger, I used to go, “Oh, God, I hate them. They don't like my music!” And I get this physical reaction. 

Now it's like I'm 180 degrees. I'm like, “Tell me more. Tell me how I'm missing the mark. Oh, I get it.” With the second pass, I'm much more on the mark because I missed something before or I didn't understand an emotional connection between two characters or the deeper meaning of something. 

Sometimes I've had projects where they've liked every cue and even the first version of it. You know, we put version numbers on every piece of music. So it’d be version one, version two. So sometimes, the whole thing would be version ones because they all like the first one from the get-go. But really, sometimes, I kind of like some pushback because it can actually make the score better because it can incorporate their deeper understanding. But sometimes you just really are nailing it and other times it's like iterative version after version and subtly changing it, and sometimes it's like major changes. 

So really, I don't know. There’s no be-all solution. It's a long-winded answer.

How do you get feedback for your work within the team you’re working with?

The feedback you're going to get is from the development people you work with because you've signed an NDA. They do not want other people to know what you're working on, what it's about, and what the music's going to sound like.

When I scored BioShock before it came out, I was being interviewed, and it went something like this. I sat at the Hollywood Bowl and I was like, “I think this is an amazing game. And I've used some solo violins and to make some really cool stuff.” And then I got home and I said, “Hey, check this out. I'm getting PR for the game.” They freaked out and said, “You shouldn't have mentioned anything.” And fortunately, I was able to stem the problem. Five people had listened to it and so I was able to get it all stopped. They could take it down from the internet. So they are very sensitive, and these game companies are more sensitive than film and television, I would say. 

They will be very upset talking about anything about that project until it is publicly released and their PR teams have talked about it and done all the prep work, so you have to be cautious. So you can't really do that. 

But I can play the music for a friend or my wife or my son. But more generally, because there's a lot of music, I will play it for the audio director or the music director and get their feedback on it.

What do you do when faced with a musical challenge for a game?

Well, even if you are on a project that has the budget for orchestras, which are very expensive, or all kinds of musicians, you still have to do what we call a mock-up. This would be true of film, TV or video games. And basically, we have these tools now that are been around for, like, 25-30 years. They're not new. They've gotten better, however. And we have synthesizers and percussion instruments and orchestral samples that sound very good. So it's in our computer. We call it “out-of-the-box composing”. So we can, out of our computer, generate some very, very interesting scores.

And some of the scores we hear these days are made through those, where there's not a living musician other than the composer playing it. So I have a keyboard that has a pull out keyboard that comes in and out, and then I have a computer that's got tons of samples, literally. So multiple string libraries and brass and woodwinds and synthesizers and percussion and odd, weird instruments. I've got thousands of sounds that I can choose from. The part of the problem is that, there's so much that you don’t know where to start and how.

As a musical composer, how do you feel about AI in your industry?

At worst, it feels existential, like it's going to end my profession in 20 years. Or maybe it's just another tool that allows us to be more creative. Probably somewhere in between, really. I mean, there's these things called production music libraries, and there are companies that have, like, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of music. 

Now, let's say, you're making a film or documentary and you don't want to hire a composer, you can go and license this music for a modest amount of money. So I think that's called production music, and I think that's in danger right now because AI can generate some pretty interesting stuff. It's just sort of generic sounding because they modeled it on our music, those assholes.

But well, I think we're a long way from being able to replace really innovative scores where it really worked. Like, a computer would never come up with a BioShock score because it's so different. Though maybe now it could by analyzing what I did or something, but it was a hodgepodge of different really crazy techniques, so I doubt it. 

With what I did with BioShock, what I've listened to for my whole life prepared me for it. And things that I did for that score, most people don't even know they even exist. Musique concrète, I used that, which was this technique used post-World War 2 by French composers. And because of the advancements in recording technology after World War 2, it permitted them to record real world sounds and create sound montages. Now, how many people know about musique concrète? Not many, but I did. And I added it in with this crazy sort of hodgepodge, and that's what humans do best.

Though, really, it's pretty amazing. So I don't know what AI is going to do and how it's gonna affect the future. I have no clue, other than it could be concerning. I'm not at the beginning of my career anymore, so I've been doing this for 40 years, so it's not gonna affect me that much, to be honest. If I retire in five years, I'll go and do whatever. Play golf or play music on stage, but if I'm up there with a guitar, it will sound like shit, because I can't play the guitar. But maybe a piano. I've got my piano back there. Maybe a little piano would be fun.

Can you tell us more about your experience as a composer in different places?

I used to conduct an orchestra in Abbey Road. Abbey Road is a great studio. A lot of scores are recorded there, and it's a wonderful studio. London is so blessed because they love classical music. They have, like, three or four major orchestras, so they have a very deep pool of very high-quality musicians. 

And then you have this fabulous studio. Studio One is massive. It's a huge facility. And you could get, like, 100 musicians in there and record them at once. I was there for Dante's Inferno, and I had what's called the Philharmonia Orchestra, which is a first-class orchestra and a very big choir, and I just had a week to record all this music. 

I got to score hell because that's what Dante's Inferno is about. It's about this Dante character that ends up in hell. So you're in hell, and there's incredible imagery. And I got to write wild and performed by some of the best orchestral musicians on earth. So that was just cool. Cool as can be.

I’d wear that as a shirt. “I’m a composer and I scored Hell.” or “My scores sound like Hell.” Damn, that’d be cool.

What advice would you like to give to those who want to learn from your work?

always do your best. You never know what some project that you think isn’t so good might bring. You don't know who's going to hear that, and it's going to be an opportunity for you that will surprise you. So always do your best work. Don't take it for granted. Be literate in the sense that you've read, understood and seen artwork. I mean, if you're, even if you're a composer, like read great books, go to museums and look at great art.

Don't be so hyper focused. You can be influenced by the other arts and creative people, you know? Go to a dance performance, something there could be really, really interesting. And of course, listen to a lot of different styles of music. Don't just listen to what you're comfortable with. Don't ever just do what you're comfortable with. Because I do think that if you don't put yourself out and look for those paradigm shift opportunities, you're going to be limited, you know?

I mean, this is my opinion. There's certainly have been composers who have made careers, and it's just been very narrow. They kind of do the same thing their whole career. I love writing different styles of music wildly, and I've written wildly different styles of music, from pop songs to big orchestral scoring. Dude, I even made a score for hell. I’ve made the most dissonant music, really crazy ones that scare you to beautiful music that hopefully inspires you and makes you feel good.

So I love, I love writing all that. So don't be so narrow that, you know, you can't do anything else but that one thing. I mean, that may be true of some pop musicians. That kind of single-minded dedication to something. I mean, I don't think Bruce Springsteen is going to be listening to Stravinsky. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's listening to all kinds of music from all over any place, but you get the point.

Being open to paradigm shifts

But in any event, I think, especially for people who score things, you're going to be asked to record and write music in many different styles. And I think you should love that, too. And I do. I really do enjoy that very much. So be open to paradigm shifts. And one of the things I do in my class before I give an assignment that I think requires that sort of thinking is I say, “Everybody, go sit in a completely different spot.” 

Because there are people who aren’t comfortable with change, like, have you ever been in a class where everyone kind of always sits in the same seat every week, even though there's no assigned seat, they kind of sit in the same place? Yeah, that’s what we want to poke and try to coax change out of.

That's a tiny little paradigm shift, and that's what you should be doing with your music; feeling a little uncomfortable and doing something different. And I've never done this before, you know, and that's really cool. So I think that's maybe good advice. You know, because I think it's not an easy profession. The creative arts are not an easy way to earn a living. So you have to be flexible.

And also, you have to ask yourself the question, “Is this what I really want to do? Am I really passionate about this thing and willing to put in the years and maybe sometimes experience a lot of frustration to do this because I'm so passionate about it?” 

I like to analogize this with a historical thing where this Greek general landed his troops on these boats on the shore to go fight the enemy. And then he burned the ships. He goes, “There's one way to live. Defeat the enemy, or be defeated.” There’s an intense incentive there. So I kind of burned my ships. I can't do anything else, music and composing is what I’ve set myself to. 

You know, I can wash the dishes. Maybe I could be a dishwasher. I don't know. But I don't really have any other skills, so I kind of had to find a way. Then all of a sudden, you're being very creative, and you're putting yourself out there to meet people because ultimately, you get hired for the quality of your music, and also your ability to reach out and connect to people and have conversations.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your performances?

Well, they can go to my website. Everybody is welcome to go to my website. And if you want to send me an email, there's a contact page. You can reach out to me and I respond to everybody who reaches out to me and I’m happy to reach back. Sometimes they have questions, sometimes they just want to say, “I really like something you did!” or whatever, you know, I'm happy to do that as long as it's not time-consuming or lending you money.

Please don’t go saying, “Mr. Schyman, I really love your music. Could you please send me $10,000?” No, I can't do that.