What kind of music do you compose ?

I mainly work for multimedia but I also composed for movies and did instrumental albums for musical librairy 9 CDs.

How do you work ?

For now I work on my own, each video game is a new adventure full of surprises, amusement and joy But it also means several working phases.

* Reflection :

After I got the game presented by the authors, I decide of the kind of music I am going to use And I give to each character a specific instrument.

soft melodic percussion for Justine evoke childhood.

• voices, rhythms from cities like Bombay, Tahiti and Istanbul create a word music feeling for the Fabuleux voyage.
• wind instruments to show Alice's moments of craziness.

• rhythmic created by various metallic sounds and cogwheel noises

* Composition:

Composition can only start when I get the graphics of pages (generally sent through Internet). I do not have any precise method; I can start by the melody, by the harmonic structure or by creating surroundings according sound effects or strange sounds. When I start with these surroundings, I keep in mind that these sound effects will have to fit a player's action and not being redundant. Musical orchestration must not be to present to leave place to sounds effects, which are playing as soloists. An image can be either a part of the game or a transition in this game.

1ST case:

You have to be aware of the difficulty of the game and so you have to think about how long the player will need to finish the set; a repetitive music can become unbearable and player should not have to lower the volume to concentrate. Music must be phrased with crescendos, with suspense nevertheless music has to be entertaining for action parts and soothing for reflection one.

2ND case:

Music has to illustrate and reinforce the story, to immerse the player in the game, waves on ashore, wind on a hill are of course indispensable. Following the different screens , themes will appear developing different arrangements. Some instruments representing a theme or a character appear with another orchestration to remind this theme but in an other universe.

theme of the "Pirates in the mysterious island"

• the "Rainbow fish theme"

The scenario and the story take you to make choices in the tonality. The instrument in the Rainbow and the whale, a kind of xylophone makes a link between the screen and a song. Each tooth of the whale is a note from the xylophone. The small hippocampus gives a code through the lyrics of the song so it was normal to use this instrument in the orchestration.

* The finishing part:

This step consists of mixing the different instruments; some will be more present than others will. Some will be heard on the left of the screen some on the right to create a stereo effect. At this time, music does not have the quality of the one that can be heard on the final product. Using numerical application programs allows cutting down loss of graves and high notes. These programs allow me to enlarge stereo too and to reproduce frequencies that speaker will restituate. This will make sounds going up and down, left or right in order to surprise the player.

* Sounds effects:

This is the most amusing part of the work; you have to invent these effects. A game can contain around 250 different sound effects; each one is linked to a player's action. Opening a door can be different according it is a wooden, a metallic or a sliding door but this is rather easy to do. A spider eating a fly, a monkey eating a banana, crushing a creep is much more difficult to imitate. You have to imagine sounds that after being distorted, modified, accelerated will produce funny or scary effect. A sound associated to different objects or different actions can reproduce for example a stork snapping its beak, crabs running on a shore to the sea but also scissors when these crabs have to cut a rope.

• la baleine
• manger la banane
• magneto

In video games and movie industry sound effects are generally done by anyone but the composer, what do you think of it?

I rather like to do both. I do think that sound effects can become very musical if they are rhythmically well placed and they have the same tone of the music. Music is like a well-read text with all intonations, with powerful and subdued moments and you often have to shift them and to get them in a musical phrasing.

To record your music you are using a computer and a recording program, how do you proceed?

Computer is a tool that can put notes on paper. I play the music I create until I am happy with it and then record it without quantization so it sounds more realistic but you have to know the characteristic of each instrument. I studied saxophone and I think it helped me when I did the arrangements of the brass and wind instruments in Alice.

What would you say as a conclusion?

I hope players will have just as much fun as I had.