I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the University of Utah on October 19th, 2024 about concept art, from the perspective of someone who creates music and sound.
Transcript
The Art of the Rolling Start
A Talk About Concept Art Music
September 19th, 2024
Introduction
Concepting is a technique in and of itself, and a separate one in some ways from creating final work. In the visual realm, concept art is a known and useful skill, sometimes a specialized job. In audio this is basically not the case, and yet it is equally important.
I'll be talking a bit about my experiences with concepting audio and music, and what methods I've found that work well. My hope is that this information can be useful across disciplines - as a result i'll probably jump in and out of ideas both generic and specific to audio.
Act 1 : How to Start
r&d, inputs, gathering intel
What can you do before you even start?
It's enticing to dive right in and start making stuff, and truly there's nothing wrong with that approach. But consider taking some time for research - explore new topics or techniques that you could deploy to make your project more interesting and effective.
Consider the things you consume as input, and the things you make as output. theres a balance to be found. Too much input and you may feel overwhelmed, unsure of where to start, and exhausted. Too much output and you may spend more time and effort than is necessary, burn yourself out, unsure of which path to go down next. There is a rhythm and a ratio to it that you'll figure out.
Here are some methods and ideas to consider as you begin concepting.
References
A classic, well understood way to work is to use reference material.
Placeholders
good for stakeholders, good for you
Placeholders are great for communicating with stakeholders, and are quite common in games & all media. This includes things like music, sprites, and backgrounds. In game music, this is actually a little less common.
Placeholders can also be great when you want to focus your attention elsewhere and just need a stand-in (ie. think the lowest effort version of "programmer art"). Sometimes, these may not be indicative of anything, but can also be a bridge in the right direction.
In the context of music, placeholders can give a solid example of where things could ultimately go.
Cross-Disciplinary Reference
If you're making music, there's no rule that says you have to reference other music. Sometimes inspiration can come from outside music, from things like books, films, experiences, faith, family and so forth.
When I worked on #Hyper Light Drifter, I was heavily inspired by the worlbuilding in the manga "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" by Hayao Miyazaki. Sometimes in the moment, external sources can be more inspiring than the project itself.
It doesn't always seem obvious, but you have a wellspring of experiences you can draw from. It's worth a think!
Distillation
Try to distill a source of inspiration down to its components. Things like mood, setting, period, genre, tempo, arrangement, instrumentation, production, staging, rhythm, chords, harmony, melody, dynamics, implementation, structure...
Are any of these axes on their own inspiring? For instance, maybe you like the mood of one reference, the chords of another, etc.
Build a Palette
colors and brushes
It can be helpful to build a repertoire, specific to the project you're beginning, and before you really dive into the creation phase.
Collect
Take time to collect useful things like sounds, progressions, melodies, and other types of ideas. There may also be elements you can build that aren't really full concepts, just fragments that you could use. For instance, creating a synth patch.
While working on #Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, I knew I wanted to pay tribute to the music of Koji Kondo, and one way in which I sought to do this was to build out a sound reminiscent of 90's Nintendo games.
I had theories about what this meant - for instance, generally using one sample for each instrument, and removing bass frequencies from the sounds to make things feel thin and light.
In the few days I spent collecting sounds and building a sound library, I basically figured out a concept for the music of the entire game. I think this example is instructive in that solving the sound of the game came through building a palette, and NOT writing!
In With the Old
When it comes to making stuff, developing a lifelong stewardship of your ideas will pay you back in spades. Here are some ways you can benefit from that.
Pollenation
using dormant concepts
Many of my projects contain ideas that were old and unused. I simply spruced them up! This includes projects like #FEZ, #Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, both of which are probably comprised of 50% or more reused material.
Re-pollenation
using previously successful concepts
Some concepts are so successful that they can be reused. For art, or the sonic equivalent, like a song, this may be inappropriate, for practical or legal reasons - but for things that are more general, like systems, this can be great.
Example: I helped design and build a point source environmental audio system for #Solar Ash, and then used this idea again to build something similar for #Paradise Marsh.
Just Do It
like the shoe company says
I can't understate the value of not overthinking it. Sometimes, just sitting in front of the empty canvas and giving it your best shot, is in fact the best shot you have at making something great.
The caveat with this approach is that you need to find the confidence to go for it. Assuming you can muster up that courage, here are some ways you can throw caution to the wind and dive headfirst into it.
First Impression
Sometimes your very first impression of a project is charged by your excitement, and can yield highly inspired material.
My way in to #FEZ and #Hyper Light Drifter was to just sit down and make something as soon as I could. For the former, it was the song ♫Adventure, which we ultimately found a use for in the game's credits. For the latter, it was the track ♫The Abyss, originally written for the Kickstarter which then evolved into the music that plays as you descend to the final boss. In both cases, the first thing I wrote ended up being a big part of the final product.
Improvisation
Think of your go-to instrument for making things. Is it a guitar, or a piano? Your voice? This may sound unique and specific to music, but if you're focused on another discipline, think of a tool you find most immediate, that you have proficiency in. Having an instrument you can just sit down and noodle on can yield very useful concepts.
For me, the piano has become my go-to. Piano lets me accompany myself as I try to identify tone and mood in rhythm, harmony and melody.
I find that with enough noodling I can improvise my way to the emotion I'm trying to convey. At that point, when I land on something good, I'll record it as a voice memo. Or sometimes, as in the case of the song ♫Verdigris, I'll record it as MIDI. (I've outfitted my piano to be a MIDI controller too, so that I can capture the music at a more granular level!).
A lot of times, I may not directly utilize the material that comes out of this practice, and that's okay. It's mostly useful as a part of my ideation process.
Cart Before Horse is OK?
sometimes, the concept comes after
Sparingly, it can be okay to work backwards:
- First, attempt to make something polished and final.
- Then, analyze it afterwards, trying to devise conceptual framework(s) for it that you can use going forward.
There is a risk/reward element to this approach, since making polished work takes a LOT of time. Be forewarned!
Or Maybe Just Wait
There are reasons why all of those juicy ideas above may not be appropriate, and ultimately it's up to you to develop an intuition about how you navigate this process. Sometimes, it's actually best to do nothing at all.
Ask yourself this question: is the project even ready for your concepts?
Speaking from experience, working on something that has not yet developed a strong identity can be frustrating, and while not all bad, tends to be an intensive endeavor.
Lucky for you, things may become clearer soon, which would make your job easier. It's always nice to have a "feel" for the project. When the project doesn't have a feel for itself, it's unlikely that you will have a feel for it either. So maybe just wait !
Be Opportunistic
This goes hand in hand with waiting. Useful moments may arise that would be perfect opportunities to dive in. Seize them! Here are some choice examples.
Using Promo Material as a Catapault
Trailers and teasers can sometimes be a bit of a bother. In other departments especially, it can take personnel off of creating in-game assets and reassign them to creating material that is exclusive to marketing. But there is a mindset element to this conundrum, and an opportunity to capitalize on the opportunity of creating public-facing work about your project before it's done.
Maybe you haven't written a lick of music yet. Or very little. Then the work you do on a trailer might be extremely informative for you and the whole team, influencing the project's musical direction. It's an opportunity to explore sounds and themes, as well as have important creative discussions with your colleagues.
This has been a great help many times in my career, on projects like #Hyper Light Drifter, and #Solar Ash. For #Paradise Marsh, I took the time to synthesize dozens of sound effects for the trailer, many of which ended up in the final game.
Waiting for External Pressure
This is all about accountability. When you are held to timelines, or even just sitting in a room with someone who's also working on the same project, assuming you have a heartbeat, you're likely to have some extra drive and desire to do a good job and do right by your peers.
Sometimes, we just need a kick in the butt. This does a good job of leading us into the aforementioned "Just Do It" style of concepting.
If You Can't Get Over the Hump...
Sometimes, the way into a project feels blocked, and you just don't know where to start. Ask yourself: is it because I lack something?
Do You Lack Understanding?
Sometimes, something's not clicking. Here are some techniques that have helped me get over the hump of comprehension.
Reinvent the Wheel on Purpose
As crazy as it sounds, sometimes the best thing to do is to try to build something that doesn't need to be built, for your own edification. This could be a soundalike (trying to recreate a piece of someone else's music from scratch), or doing some heavy audio implementation concepting in order to understand the ins and outs of how a game behaves.
Reinvention can be informative and (sometimes) fun. It may yield some unexpected inspiration. While the output may not be useful, the experience will be. And you may even learn some new skills along the way.
Do Someone Else's Job
This almost sounds irresponsible, but at this early juncture of a project, it's really not. You are free to explore in any respectable way that helps you get to where you need to get to, right?
On the film Viktor, I started with some explorations of how the film might sound overall (ie. sound effects and mixing), as a way to understand how the score could work in and around those other elements. It's usually not people's first suggestion that you try to do someone else's job, but it can be helpful to temporarily step into another's shoes in order to get a better, higher view of something. It can help you understand your own goals better.
Or Maybe Just Wait
Seriously, maybe you lack understanding because this is someone else's project, and it's a mess right now, and you just have to wait for things to solidify a bit. Maybe you just need to be patient!
Okay, let's say you understand the project now. But something is still missing.
Do You Lack Inspiration?
It's possible the obvious path is not suitable at this moment, and you need to approach things differently. This one reeks of laziness, but it's about getting that inner inspiration engine into a high gear ...
Ignore Utility, Follow Fun
If you're feeling uninspired, try looking for low hanging fruit, or something that's not obvious, or something that doesn't seem important.
On #Paradise Marsh, it took me a little while to get the proper motivation for music. I had no problem sitting at the piano and coming up with cool ideas, but I wasn't as looking forward to implementing those ideas, perhaps because of the expected workload. So I spent time familiarizing myself with the development tools and building environmental audio systems first. This afforded me lots of little challenges, which I found a lot of joy in trying to sort out. Part of the reason the game still has some placeholder sounds in it is that I found so much inspiration in building robust, dynamic sounding audio systems that I never did circle back in some cases to actually replace the temp assets.
Or Just Wait
Again, don't underestimate the power of time passing. Take a walk, or sleep on it, and you may find a different project in front of you tomorrow.
But wait a minute you say - we're talking about how to be prepared for a project, right? Presumably, this project involves other people... So what about them?
Ask For Help
humble pie
Great idea ! You may be leaving quality on the table by not admitting you'd do a better job getting started with a little "help from your friends".
I find that I am bad at this. I'm often struggling between wanting to do everything myself and relinquishing control in order to accept more outside help.
As an example, I know references work well, right? References, of course, come from outside yourself. And yet in the moment, I often take up the challenge of trying to do it all without extra boost. The reality is, you really don't have to. And in many cases, you probably shouldn't!
A confident starting point sometimes requires that you humble yourself first. Here are some considerations for that process.
Seek Clarity
Ask questions, seek external recommendations, have team discussions... If it's legal, have outside discussions too. Ask a loved one! Someone who knows you well can do an even better job of illuminating your conceptual blind spots.
Waxing Poetic
But remember that you can't do this forever. Long conversations with colleagues about what they might do are valuable to a degree, no doubt. It's useful to get on the same page, and suss out preferences and goals for a project. But ultimately...
The Medium is the Message
use your craft to communicate
You want to let the medium that you work in speak for itself. The goal should be to create concepts that lead you to a "rolling start". Ever played Daytona USA?
We want to hit the ground running. And once you start making stuff, you're already moving!
Act 2: Techniques
Once you've begun concepting, it's useful to have various ways of going about it. Here are some approaches and philosophies that I've found can be helpful.
Maintain a Light Touch
Try not to pressure yourself to use any individual concept. Tread lightly, and paint with broad strokes. The idea here is to maintain a level of flexibility, so you can explore disparate ideas without getting too bogged down in details. You'll probably get bogged down later anyway, so you might as well avoid it for now, while you can.
And if you've already built a palette as discussed earlier, than you know where to start!
100% Instructive
both successes and failures are progress.
Every inquiry and investigation that you take take at this stage propels you forward, regardless of how it might turn out. The good, the bad, and the ugly all narrow your path, and get you closer to leaving the concept phase with a strong sense of the project.
Novelty Seeking
change your approach
Just think: there's not a lot at stake - yet. So the concept phase is THE time to take risks. It's way less risky to do so now vs. later! Here are some ways to mix it up entirely.
Reinvent Your Process
There are many ways to go about creating something. So try iterating on the creative process itself. Find an entirely new approach, and see where it takes you.
When it comes to getting ideas down quickly, piano and keyboard are in many cases go-tos for me creatively. But I've experimented with other approaches as well, and in one instance, for the song ♫Destroy All Travelers from #Passcode, I simply recorded myself humming in the bathroom, and then did my best to transcribe its contour into rhythm and pitch.
External Prompts
let fate decide
There are tools out there that can take some of the guesswork out of creation. Typically these involve a "random" process, like drawing a card, or rolling dice.
Some of my favorite examples include "Oblique Strategies", a deck of cards that will challenge you to take a different approach. For instance, a card might say "Imagine the music as a set of disconnected events", or "What would your closest friend do?". These get you out of your normal headspace and get you thinking about other ways to approach your creative task.
Another example is story dice, which are dice with icons on them. These can be great for writing lyrics, or crafting a narrative for the thing you're working on. Sometimes I find it's helpful to have a bit of a narrative concept for a piece of music before I begin to write it.
But Pick Your Battles
unintentional wheel reinvention
Novelty seeking is good, but be forewarned! It's not wise to try to innovate and be novel on every axis. You'll either end up creating something nobody understands, or you'll end up reinventing the wheel. As mentioned earlier, you only want to do that on purpose.
When modders set out to extend the world of Morrowind, which famously has very unique worldbuilding, they came up with this distillation of the game's spirit:
"The Principle of Alienity" make it alien and interesting; too alien is mundane.
There is a sweet spot for newness. Take some tried and true approaches, so you can lend more energy to the truly unique areas you want to develop for a project.
Quantity Over Quality
my not so precious
You've probably heard it said the other way around, but now is not the time to emphasize quality - save that for later! Aim high, low and all over. The key ingredient here is, again to maintain a light touch. Paint with broad strokes, and try things out first before you try to narrow it down.
An analogy would be the use of LoDs (level of detail) in graphics.
In layman's terms, LoDs are used in graphics to save CPU cycles when the camera is "further away" from an object in a 3D graphics engine. When something is far away, the object only renders with as much detail as is needed at that distance. But as the camera gets closer to said object, the fidelity (through polygon count) increases in stages.
Create The "Far Away" Version First
When you're starting a concept, consider yourself being "far away". You can stay here for awhile. Only when you get closer, does the level of detail needs to increase. Remember that the distance towards the goal informs how much you spend on quality, not the other way around!
The one exception is if you were to put the cart before the horse on purpose. But as discussed, do that with intention, and do it sparingly!
When designing the music system for #Mini Metro, I prototyped ideas at first in the DAW, synced to game footage, basically doing only the bare minimum needed to get some kind of feel for what might work. It was only when I had confidence in one idea that I migrated to developing the system in code.
Ask For Help
humble pie
I keep coming back to this because it's important to consider periodically. You're already making concepts, but still, perhaps you need clarification about a specific narrative concept, or you could hire a musician or two to help flesh out a demo?
Collaborate?
Maybe a collaboration would be just the thing. It can be as small or as big as you want. Things like asking for feedback, hiring a musician, or even a full-on creative partner - there are many shapes and sizes of collaboration. It could even just be about allowing yourself to be inspired by others.
When working on games like #The Floor is Jelly & KRUNCH, the developers were already making music for their games, and then brought me in to help them finish the score. I found their work inspiring, and adapted my style to match their own.
Whittle it Down
honing in
As mentioned earlier, collecting can be good, but you will eventually want to find ways to limit yourself. I know that I've taken the collecting too far on other projects, building up a library of 100s of sounds when really I probably only needed a few dozen. Narrowing the path is a part of the process, and it makes the whole thing more manageable.
Are you familiar with Bob Ross?
Frequency of Bob Ross' paint color usage on "The Joy of Painting"
He painted 381 paintings on air ... and used less than 15 colors.
Here are some other examples:
Limiting yourself to one instrument can be a strong choice, whether it's going to be an entire score done on an organ, or a synth only makes NES sounds, great for a retro-style game project.
Limitations can breed creativity. So build yourself a cozy little sandbox!
Act 3: When to Stop
let go, & hit the ground
Demise
may your concepts rest in peace
All concepts, even highly successful ones eventually have to make way for reality. Concepts are meant to be put into practice. That's where they will naturally evolve, morph or die. For instance, a piano sketch might become a fully realized song, but many parts get left out. Or a slick music system ends up being too complex to use at all. Perhaps it was overwrought.
Concepts help you move forward, and aren't always going to be fully realized, or realized at all. Sometimes they can't, or shouldn't be. A concept might be the wrong fit for a project, or it might be impractical. There might be disagreements about its viability. And there might be limitations, for instance, a lack of resources, that prevent a concept from being utilized.
As we make way for reality, we're getting to the end of our concepting journey.
When Should I Stop?
- You should stop when there is enough actionable material. Time to put all your best concepts to actual work !
- You should stop when there is confidence in a direction. If it becomes clear that this is the way to go, it may be time to put those concepts into action.
- You should stop when you have the support of your collaborator(s). If the feeling in the room is strong for the ideas you have, it may be time to start putting them into practice.
- You should stop when there is a need for actual content. All projects exist on some kind of timeline, even the blurry ones. At some point you will need to produce some actual content. If there is an external need for this, now may be the time to wrap up your concepting phase.
Preservation
may *all* your concepts live on
As you finish concepting, it also becomes important to steward your ideas.
Preserve Active Concepts
Keep in mind the best concepts you came up with; the ones that will inform the work going forward, as it gets more and more polished. Have them at the ready.
Preserve Dormant Concepts
Store away the rest for another day, understanding that day may come sooner than not. In some cases you may never use it, but if it seems interesting, take note of it. Sometimes a concept just needs a different context to be successful.
Many of my projects are chock full of old ideas. Much of #FEZ' soundtrack is derived from sketches that were not written specifically for the game. It's full of fully realized versions of impromptu voice memos.
I had a prototype for #Solar Ash called "Reactive Trees", which involved putting a synth on each tree trunk so that it would respond to the player as they moved around it. This idea got cut but I repurposed it for #Paradise Marsh's "Lost Souls" DLC.
In some cases, a concept may be spunoff entirely into its own thing, into a byproduct. This has been the case for me when I spun off my work on #Mini Metro into a generative MIDI sequencer, or built an audio effects plugin for #Solar Ash that I will (eventually) release as a standalone project.
So, make sure to reuse your old concepts. Use new ones, whether now, later, or both. And keep the cycle going!
Concept on the Fly
just call it reality
As your work gets realized, you learn how the concepts you devised and set aside fit (or don't). You're also likely to keep stumbling into new concepts. You can immediately try them out too, alongside polished work. Whether or not they work can depend. Should you try them out? Maybe!
These "on the fly" concepts are informed by what you've learned in actual, applied work. You have a better idea of what you can and cannot accomplish, which makes them tend towards being more practical and pragmatic. This is good because they are more likely to work out. But they are also less likely to be novel. Maybe that's ok, because once the pure concept stage is over, things that work tend to be more valuable than things that are novel.
So really, the concepting may never end.
Conclusion
For that reason among others, concepting can be hard to pin down, in the same that it can be hard to pin down a creation. But that's where concepting comes in. It's a deeply rich inner space, that, when fostered over a lifetime, can reward you handsomely! Don't forget to enjoy the ride.
