If Music Was Candy

If music was candy, classical music would be taffy, heavy metal would be licorice (it's black, duh), techno would be all the weird Japanese sweets, and WoW's soundtrack would be Smarties. Those godawful bland chalk pieces that tried to taste or seem like real candy, but it's transparent that it's the cheapest thing that's kinda sweet, so whatever. When I was a kid, I would rather get a can of soup on Halloween (and did, once) than fucking Smarties. It may sound petty, but music is a huge and subtle way to set a mood or make an otherwise mediocre place amazing. Disclaimer: not ALL the WoW music is bad, there's a few good pieces as well as a few horrible sonic abominations. I'm generalizing.

I got the idea for this post when I was in Dalaran; I was afk and suddenly heard a stirring movement from the strings. I switched to WoW, and marveled at the complex orchestral richness of a song I must have heard 1,000 times before but always somehow missed. Then I realized Pandora had just served me up Mahler's Symphony no 2; upon pausing it I heard the accustomed dross coming out of my headphones that I expected from Dalaran. This lead me to the problem of how to create an interesting and striking soundtrack for a game.

One way would be to take actual music that was made JUST to be listened to, and put that in. As opposed to the traditional method, wherein a composer is hired to make some generic John-Williams-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings movie music and throw that around and call it "epic". Take the classics: Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Schoenberg, all those old white men with intense expressions. Those guys wrote amazing music; do you think your budget music monkey can top them? No? Then go to the source!

Another way would to be consciously anachronistic and use contemporary styles of music. Blizzard has already shown it's not above doing this (see: Forge of Souls); imagine hearing some Iron Maiden on the Gunship Battle, or Ministry for Mimiron. Fuck to the yes. It's very self-conscious, and Tarantino-esque; which is not to say it's bad, just an extremely different approach. Extremely awesome.

A third way would be to take some vein of folk music (Scottish, African, Russian, whatever) and assign that as a musical motif for a raid/zone/whatever. Folk music typically doesn't use classical major/minor forms, and so it sounds striking to our modern ears; just dissonant enough to be distinct. There's a huge breadth and depth to folk music, as well as room for modern interpretation, from Stravinsky's early work to folk metal bands like TYR and Cruachan. Point being, there's a lot to work with there, largely untapped by gaming. It also feels authentically fantasy to me, since fantasy is in part based on those olden times.

As a parting note, I was going to write something about ICC, since I've finally been present for all the bosses thus far, but I couldn't really think of anything bad to say, premise for the gunship battle aside. Seriously, "We're gonna go save Bolvar", "NUH-UH WE SAVE BOLVAR", "EF U ASSHAT" and then it's on. Makes no goddamned sense at all. But the fights feel like they've taken lessons from Ulduar and ToC, and applied it to new, tighter encounters. Hoping it continues that way.