Behind the Scenes: Video Game Pianist, Dr. Martin Leung, U-M Residency

I've just finished up an exciting week at U-M that involved Dr. Martin Leung's visit to U-M.  He completed many different activities while here: teaching lessons to my studio, speaking to the piano majors, being a guest in my Video Game Music class, making a Vodcast that will come out later in the year, speaking to students at large about incorporating the internet and video game music into their portfolios, and playing a concert as well.

Dr. Leung's visit was a major event in my year of research about this kind of music.  I was really glad to see how much enthusiasm some of the piano majors had regarding this material.  Even the faculty seemed pretty supportive of it as well.  Most of all, I was just glad to make an School that in many ways is slow to update repertoire outside of the traditional canons and acknowledge career paths beyond the traditional "super star performer" face up to someone who has had success in another way.  Although it definitely made a difference in the present culture, I think and hope it has the ability to make a difference down the road— that students and scholars who come after will be able to look back and say: "hey, this guy X years ago had a piano studio that played all video game music, so why can't I do Y?"

I'm sure some of my colleagues think I don't belong in this space, doing this research or teaching, and/or that the repertoire is not worthy of attention and focus.  But I'm really learning this year just how much of a community this music creates.  One of my favorite take away's from the week was when one of my students greeted Martin at the start of his lesson by explaining that finding Martin's YouTube channel over a decade ago also led him to a community of music lovers who were passionate about video games and video game music.  One of the things I've learned in all my years of work in game audio is that gamers have a "coming out" process— many people play games, but they don't talk about it often.  However, because of my work, people DO talk to me about their interest in gaming and what they're playing.  I'm always glad when anyone can express him/here self more, and it was an emotional experience to see one of my students explain that he'd found inspiration from Martin and his playing video game music for years.  Wow!

Lastly, I'll leave with a comment about the recital Martin played.  (If you're interested in any of his arrangements, you can find them for free for a limited time on the sheet music portion of his website.)  As you can see from the above picture, the recital was well attended by all sorts of students and even guests who had driven a long way to get to Ann Arbor to hear him.  I really enjoyed the event and was delighted to play some duets with Martin at the end of the program.  Turns out these are the first video game music duets that he's ever performed!  I put these duets up on my videogamemusicnerd YouTube channel, but I'll share my favorite of these duets here.  I absolutely loved playing Super Mario Galaxy, and also the reference to Super Mario Bros 3, in the middle of this duet.  Despite the fact that we probably had only about 45 minutes to rehearse, these duets really came together.  In fact, one of my students wrote a reaction to the recital, commenting: "The duets were incredible— really in sync— you seem to play off each other well."  I think that playing piano duets is one of the hardest things to really have exactly together because of the percussive nature of the instrument, but we did it!

I think that Martin will eventually post the whole recital and I'll link to it here once he does.  For now, you can see the other two on my channel if you like.  Including some antics jumping around during Mario Kart Double Dash: Baby Park.  About this duet, one of my students wrote: “BLUE SHELL!  DUCK AND COVER!— that sort of thing is something you simply can’t get at a normal concert/recital.  Part of why I love video games so much; in the end, it’s about fun.”

Overall, a tremendously busy week, but also an important one in my research that I'm still digesting.  Have you heard Martin play video game music?  Did he inspire you and help you find a sense of community?  I'd love to hear about it, if so.

Behind the Scenes: A snapshot of some current research

I thought it'd be fun to give a little view of some research that I'm currently working on.

Just about a year ago, when I hosted the North American Conference on Video Game Music (NACVGM) at the University of Michigan, I made a presentation about video game piano transcriptions.  I titled the talk "There's no question you'll be popular after performing these in front of your friends: the pedagogy and performance of piano transcriptions of video game music."  The title is a line from the beginning of a Zelda collection and I thought that was perfect.  In this presentation, I discuss the variety of piano material and how the game audio is adapted to work well in a linear format for live performances.  In doing this presentation, I also became the first person to perform on a traditional instrument live at NACVGM, though others before me had made music on game systems.

As I say at the end of the talk, I was planning to have a studio of pianists to have lessons and study video game piano music with me in the coming year.  That's this academic year, and I'm in the midst of that research.  Although it's a lot of extra work to have five piano students and a studio class on top of my normal teaching schedule, I've learned a lot and am hoping in upcoming years to publish about my experience, my students' experience, and about the repertoire.  My hope is that if more teachers of piano knew about this material, they would incorporate it into their teaching.  One outcome that's already clear to me is that this sort of material will attract students who would not otherwise be interested in studying piano.

The year is going so well.  I have a variety of students to help explore the repertoire from a beginner who had never had piano lessons before (though he could read music as a violinist) to a student who could easily have been a piano major if he'd desired it to a doctoral student who helps me with researching the pedagogy of these collections and other aspects like how to program a piano recital of all video game music.  My studio had our first concert at the University of Michigan Museum of Art a few weeks ago as a midway project and Peter Smith took some great pictures from the event, including this one of the studio just after we finished.

As far as I know, this is the first collegiate studio of pianists working on video game music.  Pretty cool!  Although only one of them, the DMA student, is planning to go into the profession, I'm delighted to have inspired the others to revisit their piano playing and hope they'll stay with it through life.

There are some other upcoming events that are exciting too.  Video Game Pianist, Dr. Martin Leung, will be coming in about 10 days to give lessons to my students, and speak to the piano majors at U-M as well as other students about his career and how the internet has changed the modern musician's career.  He's also playing a concert and I'll be joining him for a few duets he's arranged-- they're hard!

This concert is free and open to the public if you're in the Michigan area.

https://www.facebook.com/events/2375425089412635/

https://smtd.umich.edu/performances-events/events/event/?id=12185

We have an end of semester recital planned as well, April 13th.  So it's a busy few months.  Meanwhile, my students are keeping journals about their practice and work and have formal interviews that I'll be able to study through as I'm working on publications I hope will come out of this year.

Since I started this project, I learned of another pianist who is doing research in this area, from Tarleton State University, Dr. Leslie Spotz.  She gave a recital after a sabbatical researching video game piano transcriptions the day after my studio recital at the UMMA.  So cool to realize you're not alone in interests and what you're researching!

That said, I bet there are more folks out there in a similar case.  Do you use video game music in your studio teaching?  I'd love to hear about it if so, and especially if you're a pianist.  What works well?  What doesn't?  How long have you done it?  I welcome any comments or chance to connect about this.

Guest post: Student Andrew Lipian attends GDC on a GANG scholarship

I'm delighted to have my first guest post on my blog!  The below is written by my first ever one-on-one game audio student, Andrew Lipian.  Andrew won a student scholarship from the Game Audio Network Guild to attend GDC in March and I ask him to document his experience.  I thought it'd be cool to hear about the conference from the viewpoint an attendee who is both very interested in the field, a young up-comer in the area, and who went to GDC on scholarship.  Also, a great chance for him to synthesize all the notes he took there and his overall experience.  Andrew will have a second post upcoming soon as well where he describes his recent experience at NYU Steinhardt's Video Game Scoring Workshop.  

Four months have passed since the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco, where droves of video game industry elites gather annually to discuss the mechanics and business of gaming. I recall a large, imposing map of the world in one of the conference halls with the words “where are you from,” scribed above it. The map was bathed in little red dots indicating where attendees hailed from; not even Siberia was without a few. As I squinted between the chicken pox markers to find my home in Ohio, I began to reflect on the awesome conditions that brought me to this remarkable conference; how, exactly, did I get here?

Why, studying video game music with Matthew Thompson, of course! His guidance helped make my secret passion for game audio a not-so-secret passion by having me apply for a longshot scholarship to the Game Audio Network Guild. This award included an All Access pass to GDC with a personal industry mentor in game audio. I submitted a 1-minute RPG-style battle track I wrote under Thompson's supervision, a narrative with some letters of recommendation, and I was elated to see I was selected for the award! The University of Michigan School of Music Theater and Dance (SMTD) even paid for my flight! 

What would follow? A whirlwind of corporate convention constructs the size of circus tents, endless panels and seminars on all aspects of game development; industry titans roaming about like average Joes, and a bevy of indie video game stations ready for play. 

The Moscone Center, host of GDC, was a veritable sea of people. The complex is broken into three massive buildings (North, East, and West), the former two with sprawling convention expos in each basement (if you can call something the size of a NASA Space Silo a basement). Throngs of video game journalists, voice actors, narrative writers, graphics artists, directors, CEOs, programmers, and game designers painted the halls and courtyards. While I enjoyed these diverse people and their ideas, what I was really there for was the Game Audio. 

I would soon be greeted by my assigned mentor, Adam Gubman. CEO and founder of Moonwalk Audio, who has written music for hundreds of clients such as Disney, Zynga, Storm8, Sony, PlayFirst, GSN, GameHouse, NBC Today, and Warner-Chappell – to name a few. We met at one of the many meet-and-greet tables on the third floor of Moscone West, where I would get acquainted with one of the most motivated people I have ever met. With a forward, engaged posture and a surveying glance, Gubman was a dodecahedra-tattooed, spikey haired mensch; intense and cool, with a quick wit and boundless passion for music. He also had a no-nonsense approach to success: if you want this, work hard every day, don't burn bridges, absorb all you can, and persist. I've seen men of his intensity in successful musicians like Tommy Tallarico and Tom Salta and have come to identify it as the flagship trait that makes these men so successful. Their time is precious, they waste precious little of it, and tackle every task with speed and abandon. 

Adam would prove an impactful mentor, spending a great deal of time with me despite a very busy schedule of his own. Explaining a personal story of how a demo song of his won a Golden Globe, Gubman said you never know what each opportunity could bring. Demonstrating loyalty and compassion, he tells me, creates a “halo effect,” building rapport and camaraderie with potential clients. Trust and Loyalty, Adam believes, set you apart from other composers and earn you respect. He advised I take on GDC as a sponge, absorbing all I could, and give my time to every opportunity, even if the upshot for involvement wasn’t clear yet; I decided to run with his advice.

There was no shortage of sessions to enjoy in game audio. From a seminar in VR audio, featuring Winnifred Phillips as lecturer, we analyzed how special positioning for music can be more immersive than stereo in this medium, using 3D elements to implement a 2D score into the VR world. Music could even transition from 2D to 3D for dramatic effect, citing how she used 3D sound effects in the game “fail factory,” to accent the 2D musical score, creating several sounds in the “VR space.” One example was the loud “clang,” of a factory mallet dropping as the downbeat to a soundtrack for a stage. Analyzing “Shadows of Mordor,” with Nathan Grigg and Garry Schyman, they discussed how the tribal identity of various tribes in the game informed the musical themes. Using a tribe’s unique armor types, appearance and function of forts, enabled them to use the music to accent these properties. For example, the “Machine Tribe Fort Theme,” is comprised of billowing smokestacks, so he created a “non-melodic, plodding rhythmic theme with odd sets of industrial sounds to blend together and bring the orchestra in, underneath. Also, in a post-mortem on the “Call of Duty WWII,” sound track, Will Roget –who took home almost every award at the 2018 G.A.N.G. awards – described his embrace of a “modern,” sound through expanding on tradition and not limiting oneself to “genre expectation.” For example, to create the “WW II vibe,” he decided upon string quartet and solo cello over big drums and high winds or overt brass. This enabled him to focus on a modern presentation, with an early focus on the “in-game mix,” such as using trumpets only for doubling horns (instrumental EQ), and expanded low winds and brass into a “synth tuba.” He peppered his music with signature sounds, like the “echo horns,” in the piece “Memory of War,” or air raid sounds in the piece, “Haze of War.” Roget even used extended playing techniques, such as aleatoric orchestral techniques and “overpressure” in the strings. 

There was so much to absorb, I haven’t space in this post to include it all! 

When not at the many seminars, I met developers seeking music for their games, attended a G.A.N.G town hall where I pitched an idea to head up a student committee, volunteered at an IASIG meetup to run their slack channel, and got to present an award at the 2018 G.A.N.G Audio Awards ceremony as one of the 4 scholars at GDC. To top it off, I even got to meet “The Fat Man.”

GDC was an unforgettable experience, where endless paths crisscross into an intricate network to produce the pixelated art and sonic beauty keeping our hands glued to a controller. Whether I was examining the music of “Middle Earth: Shadow of War,” having my music played and critiqued before a panel of game composers at the “Demo Derby,” (where it was well received), or making new friends and colleagues, GDC provided an invaluable foot in the door for what I love to do. 

As I left my friends, boarded my flight, and scribbled notes on contacts from the handfulls of cards I obtained, the words of Adam Gubman pushed me forward faster than the jet I sat on. “You gotta be fast, you gotta work hard to deliver for your client; you have to push and persist every day.” 

Live Performances: University of Michigan Marching Band Plays Video Game Music

In my previous post, I mentioned that I read in a newspaper article that "6 out of the 11 schools in the Big 10 (what?) had performed video game music in their halftime shows" and wondered if UM's Marching Band had been one of them.  Indeed, the question has been answered affirmatively, as Kevin Hochstein sent me a link to this video of the UM Marching Band performing video game music.  This was almost 10 years ago.  Cool.  Go Blue!