At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.
Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship to music, sometimes it needs to have all three and become a video projection.
An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.
I feel it's my job as the artist who is making the music to pair it with visuals that I see in my head while writing the music in the first place.
You can get away with a lot more in a film or television score. It is contextual.
I think that marriage of music and picture is so vital, especially in a film that's almost exclusively exteriors.
Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.
I have a brilliant sound design team who's been working with me since 'Mr. Robot,' and one of the things we always think about - and it's also something we think about with cinematography - is how we get inside the characters' heads and how do we place the audience where we want them to be or how we want them to feel at any given moment.
I don't know - music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image - you see what I mean - it's like a part of the process.
I would say my favorite is probably the 'Colder' video. Just because that sort of brings the album artwork to life. It's not my favorite song on the album, but visually, I think it just came out exactly how I had it in my head.
Speaking seriously, 'Ikaruga' influenced how I synchronize the game sequences with the music. Combining the two in a way that appeals to people's hearts is a task that's quite difficult.
I'm also very pleased that we were able to include a full orchestrated score for Dragon's Lair 3D. The 40 different music pieces blend with the action to make you feel more a part of the whole adventure.
I can remember soundtracks that you just can't separate from the film - It's just so intertwined, so important. Like the Hitchcock ones where they kind of inform each other and become this larger thing as a result.
Writing for a film means the music has to serve the film, the narrative.
I couldn't do a record without knowing I'll translate it into something visual.
You have to make an audience experience with the ears as well as their eyes.
I'm really inspired by the interplay of visual art and music, a total artistic environment where there's sound and visuals. When I think about that I get stimulated and excited. It's a feeling that you can't label with words.
When you work on animation, the music has a great task: to create a sound and melodies and mood and atmosphere and energy dedicated to these extraordinary characters.
If you focus too much on development of the visual angle, it could be a detriment to what you're doing musically.
Each time you present a tour, you're faced with these questions of, 'How do you want to present visual information? How do you want to take the music that we're making on stage and visualize that?'
It's like an electroacoustic, surround-sound cello gamba. It embodies everything that fascinates me the most - acoustics, playing instruments, digital processing, movement of sound. Somehow, everything is combined in Ómar.
I usually like to introduce the film and the music with the opening titles. It's a great help for a composer to bring the audience into the work that we're going into.
I have kind of an intuitive feeling as a composer as to what would be appropriate for those groups and how to feature certain paths in a certain way, whether there was dialogue in a scene, or whether there was no dialogue and music was telling the story at that point.
