作者：Charlie Hall

通常情况下，拍摄电影的艰难工作会在导演雇佣到作曲家的时候得到落实。对Stephen Barton来说，这意味着他能够从许多之前完成的场景中去构思自己的音乐。

Barton说道：“当你在早晨醒过来的时候，你会说，‘今天我将创造相对应的音乐——电影中的第一个提示或者第四卷的结尾。”

“你拥有了相对的场景。除非他们允许你编辑并改变它，否则它就应该保持2分钟半的长度。”

Barton第一次承包电子游戏音乐制作的经历与这种情况非常相似。2006年，他和自己的导师，也就是作曲家Harry Gregson-Williams受邀为《使命召唤4：现代战争》创造音乐。但比起获得一系列电影场景，他们只看到游戏内部过场动画以及游戏玩法的时间剖面。

他说道：“还有很多部分仍处于制作过程中。如果你失败了，你将回到某个特定点上。”

“《泰坦天降》是基于完全不同的方式。”

当《现代战争》背后的一些团队离开并组建了Respawn Entertainment时，它便着眼于抛弃传统的单人玩家和基于故事的元素，而专注于创造基于团队的多人游戏。

Respawn的团队从根本上抛弃了Barton之前为其创造音乐的所有熟悉的叙述元素。

但是Respawn仍然希望Barton能够为自己的游戏创造音乐。这都是取决于他去思考该如何做。

少年歌者

Barton出生在英格兰。当他还是个学步的小孩时，有一次父母带他去参加宴会，但却发现他走散了。当他们找到他时，他正坐在主人的钢琴前。但与大多数乱敲键盘的小孩不同的是，他认真地听着每个音符，并遵循着正确的音符。

三年过后，也就是在他8岁的时候，他成为了温彻斯特大教堂唱诗班的一员，这是从Pilgrims’ School中选出的22个男孩所组成的唱诗班。在9岁的时候，他曾2次前往美国和澳大利亚表演。即在10岁以前他就已然成为一名专业的音乐家了。

他前往了萨默赛特，并选择在Wells Cathedral School学习音乐会钢琴演奏。

Barton说到：“我并不想说这是件非常孤独的事，但是你需要为此花费1天7至8个小时而待在练习室里。我从未真正对此感兴趣过。我从未真正地去练习。我对做其它事更感兴趣，如与其他未被隔离的人一起玩。”

在90年代末，Wells在校园中新建了一个音乐技术工作室。Barton表示教员们一开始根本不知道该如何面对它，只知道在此录音并举办学校音乐会。但Barton却恋上了这里。

Barton说到：“它们拥有以下设备，主要是我在今天用于现场表演时所使用的工具，我们会给予某种方式行程一种较小的版本。我真的对此深深着迷。我尝试着自学，并掌握如何混合编程技能与制作技能。”

很快地，Barton便开始自己写音乐，他是第一代在数字工作室中学习如何原生创造的作曲家之一。比起模拟大钢琴，他的新乐器是所谓的音乐定序器。当他按压键盘上的一个按键时，他便能够使用自己想要的任何乐器，即源自样本音调中的一个巨大的数字库。他的钢琴也可以是双簧管，就像他的妈妈所演奏的那样。或者也可以变成长笛或小提琴。

很快地他便开始为Wells的其它音乐专业学生编写音乐。他表示在与世隔绝的钢琴练习室外面，他能获得更多自由。他再次感受到之前在唱诗班的那种舒适感，而不再像是一个独奏者。

离开学校后，他继续为BBC的Channel 4编写音乐。但他表示在英国能够得到的机遇非常有限。通过熟人的介绍，Barton于2001年认识了Harry Gregson-Williams。在LA大获成功的作曲家的Gregson-Williams已经参与了多部电影的音乐制作。他同样也为《合金装备》系列游戏编写了音乐。最重要的是，他和Barton都是来自英国的唱诗班。这两个人发现了彼此在音乐上的共同语言，Gregson-Williams还邀请Barton到LA与其共事。

他便立刻过度到LA这个国际大舞台上。

Barton说到：“我购买了一张单程机票，因为那时候的我不能支付双程机票。一开始我只打算去那待个3周，但在12，13年过后，我仍然还在这里。”

他的第一份工作是再Gregson-Williams所参与的Dreamworks的《Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas》中担任作曲家。在那之后他还参与了《怒火救援》，《怪物史莱克》以及《纳尼亚传奇》等电影的编曲。而《现代战争》则是他参与的第一个电子游戏项目。

Barton害羞地说：“在LA这座城市的内部，你将获得币想象中更棒的训练。当凌晨3点时你接到必须在早上9点将音乐呈现在导演面前的任务时，你能做的便只是集中注意力。这是一个非常棒的试验场。”

6年之后，他已经能够独自为新游戏编写新音乐了。

基于不同的游戏风格，音乐在电子游戏中所扮演的角色也不同。如果是一款第一人称游戏，即玩家在游戏中的目标是逃离一座高层建筑。那么当玩家穿越前面几层楼时，他们可能需要通过潜行去避开敌人的探测。

在这里，安静的声际将能够突出玩家孤身一人穿越黑暗前往下一个目标的感觉。但是一旦玩家被发现了，情况将变得危险起来。音乐也需要发送改变去突出这种危险，并最终引向高潮序列，即玩家到达最顶端并努力朝安全区域奋进。

但如果是一款平台游戏，要求玩家从一个楼层跳到另一个楼层去躲避卡通敌人的话，情况又不同。更好的编曲方法便是在玩家跳跃时去模仿他们的声音，并在玩家输入内容时同步音乐去突显时机。

简单地来说，游戏的编曲需要适应游戏设计师的去求。

Barton说道：“作为一名作曲家，你需要尝试着成为一个善变的人。”

“有时候你需要改变颜色并融入不同的场景中。也有时候当编曲中的某些内容特别突出时，你便回发现音乐变成了一个独立的个体。如此将破坏玩家的体验。所以这一切都是取决于你所面对的不同项目。”

《现代战争》的开发团队秉承着好莱坞导演在创造大预算行动电影的精神在开发这款游戏。尽管游戏带有多人游戏模式，但其编曲主要是为了支持单人玩家活动，即带有开始，发展与结局的内容。Barton表示他和Gregson-Williams在编写这款游戏的音乐时比为电影编写音乐更费力。

Gregson-Williams之前为《合金装备》系列游戏编写音乐时也采取了同样的方法。在致力于那一项目时，他概念化了Barton所谓的“游戏外壳”，或环绕着游戏本身的音乐—-菜单和加载屏幕。基于此，他们为《现代战争》中的电影画面般的事件编写了一个传统的电影般的音乐。

例如Captain Price，《现代战争》中叼着雪茄的英国特种部队指挥员，便拥有自己的主题。音乐会在Chernobyl的倒叙序列中响起，并在游戏最后，也就是他被击中的时候再次响起。如此去支持游戏开发者希望玩家在这些场景中所感受到的情感，从而与玩家的心境联系在一起。

Barton说道：“你尝试着去创造这些小小的导航点。但你不需要因为它们创造一个完整的结果。这真的只是基于游戏而言。这在某些游戏中是有效的。但有时候当你倾向于类似的旋律时，却只会让人分心。”

但是《泰坦降落》却与单人玩家直线模式相违背。游戏中的微妙故事元素处于动态多人游戏玩法之下—-游戏玩法是无止境的发展着。Barton是独自面对着这些对自己来说还是陌生的游戏玩法。他从导师Gregson-Williams那学到的技巧在这里并不能派上用场。

一个不同的鼓手

Respawn在2013年6月的电子娱乐展上首次揭开了《泰坦降落》的面纱。Barton是唯一在4周前便受到邀请的人。

就像在经历《现代战争》的第一次筛选时一样，Barton说到：“我前往他们的办公室并且只是坐在那里。”

“这真的很有趣，因为他们说非常非常的艰难。然后他们为我演示了E3序列内容，我才意识到原来他们对于艰难的定义和我不同。”

游戏混合了快节奏的步兵战斗和名为泰坦的系统化机器人，它们在此相互抗衡着。玩家可以从一栋建筑跳到另一栋建筑，在飞行器的帮助下穿越地图追踪复杂的路线。随着对抗的进行，他们可以召唤自己的泰坦。游戏的声音很大且非常疯狂，与《现代战争》不同，完全缺少传统的单人玩家模式。

没有传统的故事，没有自己熟悉的电影般的过场动画，Barton不得不重新思考如何创造音乐。他所创造的音乐必须存在于游戏中的多人玩家部分。他所面临的首个挑战便是找到一个在混杂着泰坦的脚步声时还能被听到的声音。

Barton在提到创作前几周时说道：“你必须删掉那些无价值的内容。我不得不专注于穿越炮火和巨大的机器人之间的声音。例如在配音中没有木管乐器。我们并没有一个单独的长笛演奏者。”

“单簧管？这是一个很棒的乐器，但却不能越过泰坦所发射的导弹而让人们所听到。”

“问题在于如果你拥有这样的元素，所有的一切都会失去价值。所以寻找调色板真的是一个大挑战。”

Barton拿到了关于游戏玩法的一个短视频，他在自己的工作区域中添加了一个圈圈。然后他关掉了游戏的音效，并创造了许多较短的音乐片段作为测试。只有偶然情况下他会注意到游戏的环境声去判断着是否与自己的音乐相吻合。他花费了好几个月的世界去找到最适当的混合。

Barton说到：“我总是喜欢将其比作酿造威士忌。这就是一种蒸馏。你将摆脱不需要的杂质，然后真正专注于可行的内容，这边是这一预言的一部分。”

他致力于区分游戏中的不同派系，强大的星际矿业公司和下层社会反政府武装。他们都演变成一种角色，就像《现代战争》中的Captain Price。

星际矿业公司是一家尝试着将乌托邦理念带向人类文明前言的公司。为了支持这是一家大型且强大的组织的事实，Barton编写了88个不同的部分到管弦乐中，并从中提取了少数几种乐器。基于如此多相似的声音，他表示星际矿业公司的配乐将会非常宏大，甚至会冲散着其他游戏行动的寂静。

Barton说道：“这里所存在的理念在于，星际矿业公司将会是一堵巨大且模糊的扭曲之墙。不是一种愤怒的扭曲，而是伴随着更多的嗡嗡声。就好似盒子里藏着一个声音，但却释放不出来—-这对于盒子来说太大了，并且随时都有可能爆发。”

像小提琴和喇叭等传统乐器在经过一系列计算机效果处理并混合最终的声际后都会拥有自己的声音。当玩家听到这些声际时，他会希望能够辨认出自己所熟悉的旋律，他们也将注意到自己是如何组成那些接近不熟悉的声音。

民兵组织的背后故事就注定他们就是一个小型且更加多样化的力量。如果是为他们创造音乐的话，Barton只需要为管弦乐编写一半的内容便可，然后在各种不同的乐器间传播。最终将创造出在生理上让玩家更觉得亲切的声音。

民兵组织的声音核心是一连串的打鼓和韩国架鼓。为了做到这点Barton添加了许多不同的吉他声而不是传统的弦乐器。独奏者Paul Cartwright（游戏邦注：曾经参与过《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》和《行尸走肉》的创造）用特殊的电子小提琴演奏而创造出了许多主要的旋律。因为《泰坦降落》的故事是发生在400年以后，所以Barton可以自在地结合任何适合的声音。他并不需要一定采用亚洲的乐器去演奏来自西方的旋律。他可以将乐器和旋律融合到未来中去创造民兵组织的文化历史。

为了匹配动态多人游戏，他所编写的音乐比往常更短。它们可以经过重新排列去匹配游戏流和特定多人游戏回合的结果。

Barton说道：“我们重新思考了一切（结构），我尝试着基于不同的紧张程度去编写模块。我们可能拥有像所谓的‘快速巨人行动，’或‘快速飞行员行动，’或将出现‘中等的飞行员行动。’”

在某种程度上，Barton将整体配乐的控制权转交给了玩家。他曾经参与的每一个项目都提供给了他绝对的控制权，即关于何时以及如何呈现音乐。但在《泰坦降落》中，游戏引擎是基于玩家如何表现而编写整体的音乐。Barton只能填补一些原材料。

在完成编曲后，Barton其实只完成了部分工作。在LA工作室待了8个月后，他要走的最后一步便是回到英国。在那里他找到了一个足够大的设备能够呈现出星际矿业公司所需要的巨大声音，并且也适合较小的民兵组织。

Abbey Road Studios是音乐家心中的圣地。从披头士的专辑到Pink Floyd（游戏邦注：英国前卫腰鼓乐团）的《迷墙》，这个地方因为诞生了世界上最棒的摇滚乐队而出名。作曲家John Williams便为了创造自己的管弦乐多次使用了这一录音室，Barton也是如此。他便是在此为《天国王朝》和《纳尼亚传奇：贾思潘王子》制作音乐。甚至立案《现代战争》的许多音乐创造也是在此完成的。

如今，《泰坦降落》的录音工作再次来到了这里。Barton表示在那里，所有的一切都将得到完善。

他说道：“即使只有一个声音，它也能呈现出非常温暖且丰富的音调。即便麦克风戴错边了，效果也是非常棒的。”

“这真的是一个非常有魔力的地方。”

因为《泰坦降落》的两个独立的管弦乐需要在伦敦完成配置，所以Barton使用了Abbey Road的更大的Studio 1去完成星际矿业公司的配乐，并使用了铜管乐器进行分别记录，从而确保它们不会压制了弦乐器的声音。然后在Studio 2，他集中了民兵组织的所有音乐家进行一次对话。

这个将自己当成变色龙的作曲家添加了更多颜色和调色盘到自己关于《泰坦降落》的任务中。较小的音乐部分和非传统的乐器被混合在一起去创造一个与他之前所创造的完全不同的配乐。这是他很想再次尝试的体验。尽管Barton的大部分工作仍然是在好莱坞，但是它还是非常喜欢与游戏开发者共事的氛围。对于他来说这比单独待在练习室练琴好太多了。

他说道：“这是工作的有效方式。就像当你在早晨醒过来却想不出一个好想法时，你可以反复推敲各种想法。”

“《泰坦降落》是一个更具试验性的过程。让我们进行各种尝试。毕竟实践才是真正的检验方式。”

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

HOW TITANFALL’S COMPOSER WENT FROM CHOIRBOY TO CHAMELEON

By Charlie Hall

More often than not, the hard work of shooting a film is mostly done by the time a director hires a composer. For Stephen Barton, that usually means he has a lot of nearly finished scenes to inspire his music, and not the other way around.

“You sort of get up in the morning,” Barton says, “And you say, ‘OK! I’m going to write one-and-one today’ — the first cue in the movie — or ‘I’m going to write the end of reel four.’

“You’ve got the [scenes] right there. … And unless they screw you in the edit and change it, it’s going to stay two and a half minutes long.”

Barton’s first experience being contracted for video games was oddly similar, he says. In 2006 he and his mentor, composer Harry Gregson-Williams, were invited to create the score for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. But instead of a collection of movie scenes, they were given in-game cutscenes and timed sections of gameplay to compose for.

“There were a lot of sections that were on rails,” he says. “And if you die, it just jumps you back to a certain point.

“Titanfall has gone a completely different way.”

When some of the team behind Modern Warfare left to form Respawn Entertainment, it set out to make a game that abandoned many of the traditional single-player and story-based elements, focusing exclusively on team-based multiplayer.

The Respawn team essentially abandoned all the familiar narrative elements that Barton had spent his entire career making music for.

But Respawn still wanted Barton to compose its score. It was up to him to figure out how.

Barton directing the brass instrumentation for Titanfall

CHOIRBOY

Barton was born in England. When he was a toddler, his parents noticed him wander off at a dinner party. When they found him he was sitting at the host’s piano. But instead of banging on the keys as most children would, he was delicately plinking out a tune, listening to each note and searching for the right one to follow.

Three years later, at the age of eight, he was a member of the elite Winchester Cathedral Choir, one of 22 boys plucked from the ranks of The Pilgrims’ School in the south of England. By the age of nine he had toured America and been to Australia twice. He was a professional musician before he was even 10 years old.

He went on to Somerset, England where he chose to study concert piano at Wells Cathedral School.

“I don’t want to say it’s a very lonely kind of thing,” Barton says, “but you spend seven or eight hours in a practice room a day. I was never really that interested in doing that. I would never practice anywhere near enough. I was much more interested in doing other things, playing with other people without being sequestered away.”

In the late ’90s Wells built an addition to its campus in the form of a music technology studio. Barton says the faculty didn’t quite know what to do with it at first, other than record and mix school concerts. But Barton dove in.

“They had some [equipment]; essentially all the gear that I use today for a living, we had in some way, shape or form in a shrunken-down, smaller version,” Barton says. “And I just got really into it. I taught myself a way around it and sort of learned how to mix the programming skills, the production skills.”

Barton began writing his own music soon after, and he is among the first generation of composers to learn how to work natively in a digital studio. Instead of an analogue grand piano, his new instrument was something called a music sequencer. When he hit a key on the keyboard he could play any instrument he wanted, drawing from a vast digital library of sample tones. His piano could be an oboe, like his mother played. Or it could be a flute, or a violin.

He soon began composing for other music students at Wells. He says that he felt free outside of the cloistered piano practice room, that he learned to feed off the creative energy of others. He felt comfortable being in a kind of choir again, rather than playing the part of a soloist up front.

After school he went on to write scores for BBC’s Channel 4. But he says that opportunities were limited in England. Through an acquaintance, Barton met Harry Gregson-Williams in 2001. Already a successful composer in LA, Gregson-Williams had worked on many movies. He had also composed the score for some of the Metal Gear Solid games. Most importantly, he and Barton shared a background in the English choral tradition. The pair found that they spoke the same musical language, and Gregson-Williams invited Barton to come to LA and work with him.

He was instantly transported from doing provincial work for the BBC to the pressure cooker of Los Angeles and a global stage.

“I bought a one-way plane ticket,” Barton says, “because I couldn’t afford a two-way ticket at the time. … I just came out for three weeks and 12, 13 years later I’m still here.”

His first gig was as an arranger for Gregson-Williams on Dreamworks’ Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Since then he’s had credits on Man on Fire, the Shrek movies and The Chronicles of Narnia. But Modern Warfare was his first video game.

“Being thrown in at the deep end in LA,” Barton says bashfully, “that was better training than you could possibly hope for really. When it’s 3 in the morning and the [piece] has to be played to the director at 9 a.m., it sort of concentrates the mind. It’s a very good sort of proving ground.”

Six years later he would be on his own, writing new music for a new game franchise.

Barton with his sequencer in LA. He composes primarily on PC.

The role that music plays in video games changes depending on the style of gameplay. Consider a first-person game in which the goal is to escape from a high-rise building. As players move up through the first few floors, they might need to rely on stealth to avoid detection.

Here a quiet track could emphasize the feeling of being alone, creeping through darkness toward the next objective. But when the player is discovered, the situation becomes more dangerous. The music could change to heighten that sense of danger, ultimately leading to a climactic sequence where the player finally reaches the roof and struggles toward safety.

But say that same game were a platformer, asking players to jump from floor to floor dodging cartoonish enemies. A better approach to scoring that game might be to mimic the sounds players make when they jump, and to synchronize the music with the player’s inputs in subtle ways to emphasize the timing.

Put simply, a game’s score needs to adapt to the needs of the game designer.

“As a composer,” Barton says, “you’re trying to be a chameleon.”

“Sometimes you want to change color and blend in with what’s on screen. There’s other times when things [in a score] are standing out, when you can really hear the music as a separate entity. But conversely that can take you out of the experience. It depends on the project, really.”

The development team made Modern Warfare like a Hollywood director might make a big-budget action movie. Though the game had a multiplayer mode, the musical score served first and foremost to support the single-player campaign, a campaign that had a beginning, a middle and an end. Barton says that he and Gregson-Williams wrote that music much the way they would write for a movie.

Gregson-Williams had taken the same approach to his work scoring for the Metal Gear Solid series previously. Working on that project he conceptualized what Barton calls the ‘game shell,’ or the music that surrounds the experience of the game itself — the menus and the loading screens. With that established they composed a traditional thematic movie score for the cinematic, scripted events in Modern Warfare.

For instance Captain Price, Modern Warfare’s cigar-chomping British special forces operator, had his own theme. It played during a flashback sequence in Chernobyl, and again near the end of the game when he was shot. It was there to support the emotions that the game developers wanted players to feel during those scenes, to link them in the player’s mind.

“You do try to establish these little waypoints,” Barton says. “But [you don't] necessarily build the whole structure out of them. And so that just depends on the game really. Some games can take that, and that’s useful. But other times when you even go toward the semblance of a melody it’s distracting.”

But Titanfall is a departure from the single-player first linear model. What subtle story elements there are in the game take a backseat to kinetic multiplayer gameplay — gameplay that is virtually unending. Barton was on his own, working with a style of gameplay that was new to him. And the tricks he learned from his mentor Gregson-Williams wouldn’t help him here.

A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

Respawn pulled back the veil on Titanfall for the first time at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June of 2013. Barton was only introduced to it four weeks earlier.

“I went over to their office and just sort of sat down,” Barton says, just like he did for his first screening of Modern Warfare.

“It’s really funny, because they said it was very, very rough,” says Barton. “Then they played the [E3] sequence for me, and I realized that their definition of rough was clearly very different from mine.”

The game blends fast-paced infantry combat with methodical, tank-like robots called Titans pounding away on each other. Players can leap from building to building, tracing acrobatic paths across the map with the help of a jetpack. As a match progresses they can call in their Titan, which screams down from orbit to join the fight. The game is loud, frenetic and, unlike Modern Warfare, entirely lacking a traditional single-player mode.

Without that traditional story, without the cutscenes that were so movie-like and familiar to him, Barton had to rethink how he composed music. All of his work had to exist in the multiplayer portion of the game. His first challenge was finding a sound that could even be heard above the footsteps of a Titan.

“You had to cut away the chaff,” Barton says of those first few weeks with the game. “I had to focus on what sounds actually cut through the gunfire and the [giant robots]. For example there [are] no woodwinds in the score. We didn’t have a single flute player.

“Clarinets?” Barton makes an indelicate noise. “Great instrument, but just not going to be heard over a Titan unleashing a barrage of missiles or something else. It’s lost.

“The problem is that if you have elements like that, all it ends up being is mud, a sort of sheen over the top of everything. So it was really challenging trying to find a palette.”

Barton was given a short clip of gameplay, which he put on a loop above his work space. Then he turned down the game’s sound effects, and composed many short segments of music as a test. Only occasionally would he turn up the ambient sound of the game to see how it meshed with his music. It took him months to find the right blend.

“I always likened it to making whiskey,” Barton says. “It was a distillation. You’re getting rid of the shit you don’t need and then coming in and really focusing on what does work, what really is part of this language.”

He focused his energy on differentiating between the game’s factions, the powerful Interstellar Mining Corporation and the rag-tag rebels in the Militia. They each became a character, much like Captain Price was in Modern Warfare.

The backstory for the IMC is that it is a large corporation trying to bring utopian order to a frontier on the edge of human civilization. To support the feeling that it is a large, superior force, Barton wrote 80 different parts into the orchestration, drawing from a small number of instruments. With so many similar sounds, he says the IMC’s score becomes like one gigantic voice, always expanding to fill the silences around the game’s action.

“The idea was that the IMC would be this big fuzzy wall of distortion,” Barton says. “Not an angry distortion, but more of a buzz. It has this feeling that there’s a sound in a box and it can’t quite get out — it’s too big for the box, and it might burst at any point.”

Traditional instruments, like violins and trumpets, would eventually have their sound processed by a series of computer effects that Barton applied while mixing the final track. When players hear those tracks he hopes that they can pick out melodies that are familiar, and that they will notice how they’re comprised of sounds that verge on the unfamiliar.

The fiction behind the Militia paints them as a smaller, more diverse force. For its score Barton wrote only half as many parts for the orchestra, and then spread them across a wider variety of instruments. The result is a more intimate sound that feels physically closer to the player.

The backbone of the Militia’s sound is a battery of taiko and Korean frame drums. To that Barton added many different kinds of guitar instead of traditional stringed instruments. Many lead melodies are created with an unusual electric violin, expertly played by soloist Paul Cartwright whose credits include Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. Since Titanfall’s story takes place 400 years in the future, Barton says he felt free to mix and match sounds as he saw fit. He didn’t have to take an Asian instrument, for instance, and use it to play a Western melody. He could bring the instrument, and the melody, into the future with him and create in his score a kind of expansion of the Militia’s cultural lore.

To match the dynamic multiplayer, the pieces he wrote were much shorter than usual. They could be rearranged to match the flow and the outcome of a given multiplayer round.

“We had to kind of rethink [the structure of] everything a little bit,” Barton says. “I was trying to write modules with different kinds of tension levels. We might have something we called a ‘Fast Titan Action,’ or a ‘Fast Pilot Action,’ or there would be a ‘Medium Pilot Action.’

“We didn’t actually go lower than medium. There was no slow.”

In a way, Barton ceded control of the overall score to the player. Every project that he had ever worked on before gave him almost complete control of when and how his music was experienced. But for Titanfall, it is the game engine that composes the entire piece of music based on how a player is performing. Barton could only feed it the raw materials.

In finishing the composition Barton had only completed part of the job. After eight months in his LA studio, the final step was to travel back to his native England. There he had found a single facility big enough to hold the giant sound of the IMC, yet small enough that the tiny Militia wouldn’t be lost.

Abbey Road Studios is practically a shrine for musicians. From Beatles albums to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, it has developed a reputation for bringing the best out of rock bands. Composer John Williams used it many times for his orchestration, and so too has Barton. He’s recorded music for Kingdom of Heaven there, and for the second Narnia movie, Prince Caspian. Even the majority of the work for Modern Warfare was done inside its walls.

And now Titanfall has been recorded at Abbey Road as well. Barton says that everything was improved by being there.

“It’s just got a sound,” he says. “And it’s something you can’t necessarily stick your finger on, but it’s just got a really warm, rich tone. You can pretty much put the microphones the wrong way around and I think it would still sound pretty good.

“It’s a pretty magical little place. For sure.”

For Titanfall two separate orchestras had to be assembled in London, one for each faction. Barton used Abbey Road’s larger Studio 1 for the IMC, inviting the brass to record separately so they wouldn’t overpower the strings. Then in Studio 2, he brought together all of the musicians for the Militia in one place for a single session.

The composer who sees himself as a chameleon added a few more colors and patterns to his repertoire for Titanfall. Smaller musical phrases and non-traditional instrumentation all mixed together to create a score unlike any he’s made before. It’s an experience he’s excited to try again. Even though the bulk of Barton’s work is still in Hollywood, he likes the collaborative atmosphere of working with game developers. It’s so much better for him than a life spent practicing piano alone in a practice room.

“It’s a great way to work,” he says. “It’s one of those things where, if you get stuck and you wake up in the morning and you really don’t have a good idea, you can sort of bounce ideas back and forth.”

In the end, it will be the players who decide if he was successful or not.

“Titanfall was definitely much more of a process of experimentation. Let’s try this out, let’s try that. And the proof will be in the pudding.” (source:polygon)