Film, television and video game composer Garry Schyman has created the original score for the highly anticipated and innovative first person shooter BioShock developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games. Composed in various styles of early twentieth century writing, the music is at times chillingly ominous and at other times deeply beautiful and poignant. BioShock is developed for the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PC and will be released in North America on August 21, 2007 and internationally on August 24, 2007.

BioShock is the "genetically enhanced" first person shooter that lets you do things never before possible in the genre: turn everything into a weapon, biologically mod your body with plasmids, hack devices and systems, upgrade your weapons and craft new ammo variants, and experiment with different battle techniques.

You are a cast-away in Rapture, an underwater Utopia torn apart by civil war.  Caught between powerful forces, and hunted down by genetically modified “splicers” and deadly security systems, you have to come to grips with a deadly, mysterious world filled with powerful technology and fascinating characters. No encounter ever plays out the same, and no two gamers will play the game the same way.

To immerse players in this captivating and haunting world Schyman crafted a complex combination of aleatoric elements, early 20th century writing, musique concrete, traditional tonal and late romantic styles. The score, recorded with a live orchestra at historic Capitol Studios in Hollywood, features solo violin, cello, and piano performances. M4G recently caught up with Garry to discuss the unique score for BioShock.

M4G: How did you get involved with BioShock?
Garry Schyman: I was contacted by the Audio Director of Irrational Games.  I had worked with Emily Ridgway on Destroy All Humans! while she was at Pandemic Studios and she was very pleased with my work, so when she was hired at Irrational she called me to score BioShock.  She had trust that I would be able to deliver. 

M4G: What was the initial musical brief and were you given an opportunity to go beyond this?
Garry Schyman:  Oh phrases like:  Very scary, eerie, completely unique and different, immersive, sad.  I knew that this game was highly anticipated and that the score had to be something very special.  That can often be intimidating but I was really just challenged by it.  I knew that Emily trusted me and that I could experiment and play with themes and approaches without concern that I would be sacked if they didn’t like my first idea or two. 

M4G:  What was the timeline and schedule like i.e. how long did the process take to work on this forthcoming AAA title?
Garry Schyman:  Well I was initially hired for a 90-day period.  But as the technical challenges of creating this unique game piled up, I ended up working on the game on and off for about seven months.  I would work for weeks at a time, and then have time off as they progressed with the game.

M4G: Without giving away any spoilers, can you describe what we can expect from the musical landscape in the city of Rapture?
Garry Schyman:  I think I came up with something pretty unique for this score by combining various styles of composition.  Styles like aleatoric (orchestral players asked to improvise very eerie and scary sounds on their instruments within very defined specs), 12-tone like melodies on solo instruments such as violin and cello, and tonal melodic ideas that included moody and sad melodies and chords or melodies within styles of music from the period. I also used musique concrete, which use sounds from the real world mixed in as musical elements.  Sometimes all of these were combined together, and at other times just one or two of them.  A few cues are completely unique unto themselves like solo a piano work in the style of late Rachmaninoff (as composed by a fictional character in the game) or cues in the style of Shostakovich.  We really were going for the early 20th century classical sound and that worked very well for the score.  By combining eerie ambiances over it, I got something very unusual.

M4G: We hear everything from a solo piano arrangement to intense metropolis cacophony. Is there a particular setting or theme that you enjoyed scoring and why it appealed/impressed you.
Garry Schyman:  It was all fun and challenging to write.  I think my favorite cue is the solo piano piece in the style of Rachmaninoff.  After laboring on it for a couple of days, I called my agent and told her I felt like a “real” composer!  Ha-ha… It’s a very complex and a difficult piece to play and it challenged one of the best studio pianists in L.A. to record it.

M4G:  You’re tickling some smooth ivories…Do you have any influences and what attracted you to start playing the piano at an early age?
Garry Schyman:  Well I wouldn’t call myself a great pianist by any means.  I can get around the keys though.  I loved playing classical music, especially Beethoven, when I was a kid.  Later I fell in love with early 20th century music, playing works by Bartok, Prokofiev, Ginestera, and Villa-Lobos among others.

M4G:  The variable concepts of next-gen FPS gameplay featured in BioShock seem very ambitious. Did this affect the scoring process and music delivery in any way?
Garry Schyman:  Not really.  I composed fairly linear music for this game and delivered stereo mixes.  Pretty standard.  So in this case the challenge was writing unique, interesting music.

M4G: The artwork, graphics and physics displayed in BioShock are incredibly enticing.
What elements or aspects of the game inspired you the most?
Garry Schyman:  The Graphics were very inspiring.  The game looks awesome.  I think the thing that inspired me the most as I was composing was the fascinating Ayn Rand-ish back-story.  It really helped me to find my way.  I love Ayn Rand and she was sitting here in my studio on occasion whispering “that sucks it’s just not good enough – you are an artist make it better!”
 
M4G: What kind of emotional pallet did you concentrate/focus on?
Garry Schyman:  As it turns out this game has a soul.  Deep down there is a tragic and very sad aspect to it.  After all it is the story of humanity’s quest for the age-old hope for utopia on earth (or under the sea in this case) and its utter failure.   So besides writing scary or eerie music, I wrote a very sad theme that gets to play every now and again.  Otherwise one can imagine being in one of the scariest carnivals ever and trying to escape it; then writing music to match that.

M4G: Is there a defined musical treatment for the relationship between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister?
Garry Schyman:  I wrote some very eerie twisted atonal music for them.  It is a dysfunctional relationship after all!

M4G: Instrumentation such as harp, an opera singer and violins galore are prevalent in some of the tracks. Please tell us about the live recording experience and the players involved. 
Garry Schyman:  We recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood.  I had a fairly large string orchestra for the first few sessions, after which I brought in soloists to record over-dubs.  My favorite was Martin Chalifour who is the principal concertmaster of the L.A. Philharmonic.  He is a master violinist and plays concerti all over the world.  I had written some very challenging solo violin parts and he rehearsed them at home and came in with his Strad and nailed it.  I wanted someone who could give me a virtuoso performance because the solo violin, in some cases, is completely exposed and if the performances weren’t great, it would not have worked.  Additionally, we recorded solo cello, horns, tuba, solo piano and a soprano sang a propaganda anthem I wrote.  It was just a smorgasbord of fascinating and fun music to write and record.

M4G: How was the compositional process for BioShock different from your other game scoring experiences?
Garry Schyman:  I would have to say that the challenge of coming up with something so unique and different was what distinguished my process on this project from other gigs.  Plus the opportunity to write some totally straight classical music in the style of Rachmaninoff was very unusual and may never present itself again.  This was a highly unusual gig, and I truly consider myself lucky to have been involved with it.
 
M4G: What challenges, if any, did you need to straddle to make it work?
Garry Schyman:  New and different – ha-ha!  Everyone asks for that but most of the time they don’t really mean it.  In this case they did, and of course coming up with a whole new style of composition is challenging indeed!

M4G: Did you have to liaise with a group of people, as far as the working infrastructure and direction goes, or was it more of a one-to-one with the Audio Director?
Garry Schyman:  Until the very end of the project, I worked exclusively with the Audio Director.  The rest of the team was so absorbed in their work that they didn’t have time to focus on the music so they left me alone to experiment and come up with ideas, which I did, bouncing them off of Emily exclusively.  She is particularly good with music, being a trained musician herself.  In any case by the time they really centered on music, we had come up with something that worked perfectly with the game and all they essentially said was, ‘wow this is very cool – we love it’. 

After I finished my work on the game, they called me back in to write a few extra cues they discovered they needed when all was said and done.  One of the cues was a propaganda anthem à la 1940’s, and I worked directly with the game’s lead designer and the head of the company Ken Levine, with him writing the lyrics and I the music.  It was a fun collaboration mostly taking place around 1 AM in the morning when he was available to work!  It was recorded with a wonderful soprano named Rebecca Sjowall.  Once again, what a cool piece of music to be asked to write! 

Garry Schyman is represented by the Gorfaine/Schwartz Agency. For more information on the composer visit www.garryschyman.com.

For more information on BioShock visit www.bioshockgame.com.