Interview with Call of Duty 4 composer Stephen Barton



Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare features an original score by Stephen Barton with the main theme and music production by award-winning composer Harry Gregson-Williams. Gregson-Williams is one of Hollywood's most sought after composers who has worked on a variety of high-profile projects including blockbuster movies such as "Armageddon," "Enemy of the State" and "Kingdom of Heaven," to name a few. Gregson-Williams entered the gaming world in 2001, providing music for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and for the two next games in the series, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and the forthcoming Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of Patriots.

Gregson-Williams' and Barton's assignment follows in the footsteps of other established film composers attached to the franchise: Michael Giacchino (Call of Duty), Graeme Revell (Call of Duty 2) and Joel Goldsmith (Call of Duty 3). Film score fans will recognise the hallmarks of Gregson-Williams' modern cinematic styles most commonly used in his collaborations with director Tony Scott on movies such as Domino, Man On Fire and Deja Vu; featuring a distinct hybrid of minimalist electronic beats, sweeping orchestral strings and edgy sound design elements that has become a popular style adopted by composers in film and video games. Click here for music samples. Music4Games recently caught up with Stephen Barton, who wrote the original score for the game, to find out more.

M4G: Film critic Roger Ebert said games will never be as artistically worthy as movies. Hideo Kojima also said video games are not art. Do you think games can be Art?
Stephen Barton: I think Ebert's main point was that the interactivity of video games detracts or removes from them completely their potential as art, but I think that misses the crux of the issue a bit: you don't have freedom of choice in a video game, you may be able to follow several different paths but those paths are dictated by the developers - in fact the choices are severely restricted as to where you can go. In a sense, if you watch a movie you have the 'interactive' option of getting up and walking out. In a live theatre performance (and few would argue this wasn't artistic) you have the option of laughing at a joke or not laughing, and how the performers react to that can alter the performance itself. Different levels of interactivity perhaps, but then where does one draw the line?

On the other hand, COD4 may be seen to be pro-war or anti-war, but you can't complete through the game without shooting the enemy, there's no 'pacifist' difficulty setting! So in so much as art is an expression of an idea through a medium, I think it's entirely possible for a game to be art; but not all video games are, or intend to be. It all rather depends though on how you want to define 'art'. It seems perhaps a bit early in the history of games to say 'never' though.

M4G: How did you get involved with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare?
Stephen Barton: Through Harry - Infinity Ward were very keen on some particular cues from a couple of Harry's scores, and although he was insanely busy at the time with a film, he came up with the notion that he could write one of the main tunes, and a big opening sequence for the game, and that I could handle the rest. He is a great mentor though, and he was very much hands-on in monitoring how things were going. I've been very lucky to have my studio located in his building for about the last 5 years.

M4G: How many minutes of music did you write for COD4 and how long did the entire process take?
Stephen Barton: There are about 65-70 minutes of music in the game, including Harry's main theme and 4 or 5 minute 'The Coup' sequence that follows the opening titles for which he's written a rather marvelous cue. I think the whole process took about three months from very first initial ideas and percussion tracking at Abbey Road to the final mixes leaving the building.

M4G: Can you describe the collaboration with Activision? Did you work with an audio director or the producer of the game on providing mock-ups of the score first?
Stephen Barton: We collaborated mostly with the team at Infinity Ward, the mad geniuses behind this franchise - Activision (particularly Adam Levenson) were of huge help as the publishers and very supportive, but day to day on the production side it's very much Infinity Ward's baby, and they quite literally eat, sleep, and drink their work over there. Steve Fukuda was the main music liaison, along with Mark Ganus who oversaw sliding the music in with the rest of the sound, and Vince Zampella was also key - but they work absolutely as a team with all the developers over there, it's one of the most remarkable companies.frequently they would slide the music in and give it over to the guys designing that particular level to get their thoughts on it. A typical note was 'the consensus is this' or 'the general feeling is to get more at this moment', for example.

M4G: How much music was recorded live and which musicians did you record with? Did you add any electronics to the live process?
Stephen Barton: The bulk of the orchestra was recorded at Abbey Road Studio 1 with the first call London players, plus about 3 days of percussion tracking with a team of three percussionists and a truck load of different ethnic and orchestral instruments. Though as you would expect from a contemporary set piece there is a definite need to draw in more elements than just the orchestra (which still however is the basis of the music). Costa Kotselas in particular provided a lot of the guitar parts, which were really fine indeed - he plays with a very natural and organic rhythmic sensibility (though with heavier, more aggressive sounds), which helps blend those elements with the other instrumentation - it gives definition and punch without simply muddying up the whole sound world.

The prior Call of Duty games (all with great scores) were obviously World War 2 based - where the orchestra serves to magnify the glory of the battlefield and the individual soldier, and in effect to give it a timeless feeling - which ironically enough makes everything feel more immediate. With a contemporary warfare setting it's clearly the present day, so a simply orchestral score might actually serve to detract from the realism, which might be an interesting approach aesthetically but wasn't the goal here. There's also a larger political sense to the game, you're always part of a bigger worldview - you're not really Rambo.and to a large extent that 'political espionage' sound has been set by scores such as "Spy Game," "Enemy of the State," "Black Hawk Down." Using that musical vocabulary in some parts of the game seemed appropriate, albeit hopefully in new ways.

The realism of the game engine is such that a large goal was to not detract from that realism by over-scoring. It also allows for the music to play subtext, rather than straight action; for example in the sniper 'ghillie suit' levels the music often comments on the emotion of the environment rather than necessarily always amping up the tension. I hope it helps draw the gamer deeper into the experience in a couple of ways: firstly the SAS snipers depicted are well trained soldiers who are calm in such situations and so perpetually 'tense' music would detract from that reality - and secondly when it gets really tense (as it does) then the music can have greater impact and really set you on edge.

M4G: What is your studio setup at Wavecrest Music?
Stephen Barton: I sketch most things to paper first in some way shape or form - it helps to have a visual reference of the material, you can see how the contours are working. Effective music always seems to have a visual clarity on the page. Pretty much everything here gets programmed into Cubase SX for demo though - triggering seven dedicated Gigastudio 3 machines in each studio, with the mockup orchestra (every major library plus several private ones) as well as numerous synths (various Virus modules, Nords, Waldorf gear).

One new box that proved very useful was Eventide's H8000FW, which is frankly an amazing amount of power in a rack unit. I tended to use that with various modular synth elements - also a little old analogue synth called the Pro-1 (relative of the Prophet 5), which was used to create a lot of the organic 'sonar' and phone-tapping like effects in the menu music and the sniper 'espionage' levels. It was great as a couple of the pots were a little dirty which meant when you landed on a certain place, it would almost oscillate between two values which gives this really interesting, organic 'unstable' sound - almost 'nervous' quality. I'm lately also very fond of this great French box, called the JazzMutant Lemur - which is a customizable control surface. It allows you to program intensely detailed and subtle effects that would take months to set up step by step, and opens up things like granular synthesis and filters into organic tools that you can really manipulate the same way you would a musical instrument.

We mixed here at Wavecrest in the dedicated 5.1 room downstairs - Mal Luker, who has mixed many a major film score and numerous scores for Harry and myself, was the final scoring mixer. Pretty much everything was mixed inside 3 ProTools HD rigs with a D-Command console - in particular using the amazing Massey plugins as we knew we had to keep the dynamic range under control to avoid any compression artifacts when crossing over to the final AC3 stream in the game, but as transparently as possible. Also, given the noise of the battlefield, it had to be a pretty solid final level to compete with the sound design. Since the track count was very high (often 80 or 90 mic tracks of 9 or 10 percussion passes in the bigger cues, let alone the orchestra etc.) ProTools was the only way to get a handle on each section on multiple rigs and stem it all down to something manageable.

M4G: What's next for you in the world of composition?
Stephen Barton: I've just begun doing some music for "Prince Caspian" (the next in the "Narnia" films) for Harry, as well as a couple of other interesting projects for the new year.

A spokesperson from Activision has informed M4G there are currently no plans for a soundtrack release. Click here for music samples.

www.charlieoscardelta.com