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(Image: SONY)

Sony's PS4 VR release for Farpoint marked a key development as first-person shooters well and truly made the leap to virtual reality. But what you see isn’t the only thing that’s technically impressive.

Having worked on the game for over a year, composer Stephen Cox was responsible for the daunting task of honing the sound of Farpoint’s immersive sci-fi game world.

With a background in sound design and countless credits in film and television, Cox’s work on Farpoint marked his first experience working on a triple-A title, collaborating closely with the team at Sony and independent studio, Impulse Gear.

Taking cues from the best of the sci-fi genre, Cox’s score compliments the immersive world of Farpoint to great effect. We sat down for a chat with him to find out how he did it.

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One of the things that’s really interesting about Farpoint is it’s not just a shooter, it’s a VR shooter. There’s a lot of interesting aspects to the way the audio on a VR title is constructed. Was there a conventional pitching process?

It seemed fairly conventional. We received the project brief and that gave a really great description of the game. Instantly, the kid inside of me was jumping up and down. Then we got a style guide, which was basically a list of references – ‘Here’s the tone, the vibe, emotionally, and what we’re looking for musically’. Then we were asked to do what we wanted. I loved that part of it. There weren’t a lot of constraints like I’d come across with TV work before where you’ve got to write a specific style. You can’t step on the dialogue. For Farpoint, the gloves were off.

With sci-fi, there are so many tropes there that the audience is already familiar with. Was that something you were keen to subvert?

I think that was the goal, initially. We did want to make this feel a little different. Although, I don’t think they wanted us to go too far away from what people’s expectations were during that type of experience. It has to feel ethereal, wondrous and terrifying. Also, we’re on a different planet, we’re not in a meadow. [Laughs]. It, really, had to just match the aesthetic with musical tones. That’s what was on the forefront of our brains.

I guess it’s also interesting because you’ve got to consider the environment in which the player is hearing the music. How did that factor in to what you guys were doing?

It was constantly changing. Really, we were all re-inventing the wheel as we went and that was kind of the marching order. It was like, “Okay, we’re gonna try this. Let’s start ethereal, let’s start big and see if it works, because we don’t know what’s going to work.” And there was a lot of research and development on both sides where we were going, “Okay, instead of having this big enveloping thing, let’s try something a little more focused and see if they work better.”

How did you factor in where the music would be coming from in the game world? That can be really disorientating in VR.

Speaker placement was always a conversation – where are these speakers going to live in the world? Are they going to be stuck to your ears or are they going to be on a plane and stuck to the world? I think it alternates a little bit but for the most part the VR community is coming to the agreement that it’s cool when speakers are in the world. So, when you turn your head the music is almost a part of the set and the ambience. But how far apart they are or how close together? All that is dependent on the level or the space, but there was always that conversation.

What was one of the most interesting sounds you guys worked with?This is kind of interesting. One of the reverbs that we used was the impulse response of a giant natural gas container that’s 100-200 ft tall. So when you put some kind of signal through that, it echoes forever and it sounds huge and expansive, but it also has this weird resonance feedback, so certain frequencies would resonate and thump at certain places. There was a lot of carving to key down the sound design, which was great because that’s where I started before composition.

Is that a natural progression for a sound designer?

No one really saw it that way! In the industry they were like, “Oh, now you’re in music? That’s weird.” But in retrospect, it’s perfect.

So talk me through the feedback process with the guys at Sony. How did that work?

There was constant feedback throughout the process. I had a few main point men there – Jonathan Mayer, the Senior Music Manager at Sony, was my initial contact there. He was the man. I’ve dealt with a lot of filmmakers and the notes that Sony give back to a composer, in my opinion, are the best. They’re the most detailed, yet they’re not constricting. Certain directors can have a vision that is so pinpoint that they can just be over the top in terms of information overload, whereas Sony, line-by-line, will hit stuff and give you the space and wriggle room to exercise your creative muscles and come up with something brand now.

Farpoint (PSVR)

Farpoint (PSVR)

Were there any key points that you received specific feedback on?

The revisions were constant – especially with the main them in the beginning. That was really important to Seth Luisi – Impulse Gear’s co-founder and the genius behind the Aim controller. I think he did the first version of the Aim controller, which was called something else back in the SOCOM days. That’s kind of his claim to fame. He was always there on the other end, really pushing us hard on that theme because it needed to be sort of sci-fi, sort of cinematic. He was looking for a certain emotional content that took a little while to crack. Once we got there we went, “Oh, I get it. This is the style that they’re going for” and it went really quick after that.

We mentioned that sci-fi has such an established sound, especially when it comes to video games. What were the reference points that you were looking at?

We got references from the get go, so we knew what the developers and Sony liked. The Martian had just come out and that’s a very cool, dated score. It just kind of sits there and drives forward. Interstellar had come out maybe a year or two before. It’s Hans Zimmer’s masterpiece - I thought it was awesome. Definitely Alien, the first score, just because of the eerie, lonely desolate vibe that Jerry Goldsmith was going for. That was really there.

You started work on the game long before the PlayStation VR kit was publicly available. Did you get to play with the kit much before you started?

Yeah, they call it the ‘composer kick-off’. They brought me out there and I was a fly on the wall for ten hours straight. You have to sign an NDA just to walk through the door at Sony and then you have to be with someone who has certain clearance. And Impulse Gear had their headquarters there temporarily with about fifteen guys working really hard on various things very quietly. There was Farpoint art all over the walls. I was like a kid in a candy store.

Seth brought over this VR rig and I tried it on. I went in there with a bit of intrepidation because of the motion sickness. He puts on the headphones and it was just instant love. Everything worked. The 3D was so immersive. And then I started playing the game and the Aim controller made it for me. That was it. There’s no aim assist. It’s only as good as you are. So I had the headphones on and it’s so quiet here in this office with all of these guys working so hard and I’m there screaming being totally unprofessional. I took my headphones off and I realised, “Oh, my God. It’s so quiet in here.” But I was stoked after that. I went away from that with a very clear idea of what would drive this thing, but a lot of questions too. And we spent the next year just kind of figuring that out.

You’re releasing a soundtrack too. How do you go about taking non-linear music and turning it in to a standalone listening experience?

The soundtrack, for the most part, is just a much more crafted and mixed version of the final approvals of the major cues throughout the game. There’s a lot of emotional stuff that happens in Farpoint, so that is a key vibe. Some of them are an amalgamation or medleys of certain cues and there are many cues that revolve around that, but for the most part it’s how the game progresses. The soundtrack is laid out in a linear fashion, matching the gameplay.

This was your first time scoring a game of this size. I take it the experience hasn’t put you off?

I’d do it again a heartbeat. I’m sure you guys have heard stories that working with Sony can be hard and stressful – and it is. No doubt. If you’re not ready for that level of work, but I was ready and I loved it. We got to the point where there was just synergy. We knew what they wanted and what worked and just kept pushing forward and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Not just with Sony, but with anybody! We don’t need a third party. I would love to talk to ten developers in the room who have different visions and just make it work somehow. But I think it’s the world building process in Farpoint- being a part of that sonic palette that makes up the whole experience and the whole aesthetic. I love it.