Eímear Noone interview – how video game music is changing for better and worse

Five years ago, we interviewed Irish composer Eímear Noone, about her involvement with Classic FM’s show High Score. However, given her storied history, as a groundbreaking female composer who has worked on everything from World Of Warcraft and Overwatch to the 25th anniversary celebrations for The Legend Of Zelda, we ended up discussing a lot more than just that.

Given nobody had even heard of Covid the last time we spoke, clearly a lot has changed in the world since then – not least the fact of her becoming the first female conductor to perform at the Oscars.

In our new interview, we ended up discussing all manner of music-related subjects, from the increasing opportunities for female composers, to the lack of synthwave in triple-A games, the dangers of AI, and the unnecessary cruelty of the movie Tár.

The original excuse for speaking to Noone was a series of concerts in the UK, featuring music from a variety of games and creators, but unfortunately the English dates have since been cancelled.

Tickets are available for concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow though, via the website of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO).

The programme will feature music from games including The Last Of Us, Uncharted, World Of Warcraft, Mario + Rabbids, Fortnite, Kingdom Hearts, Horizon Zero Dawn, and God Of War Ragnarök, as well as a number of surprises – including new works made public for the first time.

GC: I think the last time we spoke was about eight months before the pandemic…

EN: Oh, 2019, my god, things have changed so much. Wow. It’s a different world, isn’t it? It’s really a different planet.

GC: So, in a fairly literal sense, what have you been doing since then? Obviously, you’re doing this tour now, but it’s not your first one, is it?

EN: No, I’ve been creating concerts like this for a long time. But this is my first sort of mini-tour under my own name with the IDG, which is really significant for me. And it just kind of shows that this music is maturing and it’s gaining traction and the audience, the UK audience, is fantastic for this music. Very, very generous, very attentive, and very supportive.

And it’s an audience I know quite well at this point, including the fact that I can look into the audience and then I’ll know most of the first two rows at sight.

GC: [laughs] Really?

EN: Oh, yes, yes. I mean, my first video game music concert in the UK was at the Hammersmith Apollo with the Royal Phil[harmonic Orchestra] in 2011, and I know that there are going to be people that were at that concert that are coming to the tour, and have come to everything I’ve done in the UK since and they are just wonderful.

Such a supportive audience and an audience that I will always serve no matter what I do musically. I’ll always come back, because I’m just so moved by how they treat the orchestra – in the moment, in the concert hall – and it needs to be sort of seen and felt. It kind of bowls the orchestra over, especially if it’s their first time experiencing this audience. It’s how I feel. I mean, I feel like whooping and going crazy and treating the orchestra like The Rolling Stones, but that’s how this audience treats them and it’s fabulous.

GC: I was looking over what we talked about last time, because I didn’t want to repeat myself, and we discussed how Hans Zimmer was having such an influence on video game music. Where developers wanted to mimic his rejection of melody and recognisable, hummable tunes. I don’t get the feeling that’s changed much in the last five years?

EN: That’s a really fair point. And it’s like anything else, there’s kind of a zeitgeist and fashion that music goes through. And with film, I see things in certain genres of film, like fantasy and action, and animation in particular, where we get to write the themes still and it’s coming back. Ever since John Powell did such a great job with How To Train Your Dragon series; that did a huge amount for bringing back the big tune to animation. And I absolutely love his work.

But in the gaming realm, depending on the type of game as well… it seems like in the Japanese games, like the Nintendo games, there’s less from the later composers, there’s less of the [Koji] Kondo style, memorable tune. I mean when we do Zelda, we have the main theme of the ‘ba ba da la da la’. But there’s so many themes across the Zelda franchise. There’s just so many! And every single one of them is a winner.

That’s his gift, is melody. And I remember working on the album we created for release with Skyward Sword – Symphony Of The Goddesses – and thinking, ‘There’s so many tunes in here and, by the way, how did Irish trad music get in here? I mean, Wind Waker, hello?’

But those themes now, depending on the game… we’re working on a triple-A game at the moment, but the game doesn’t lend itself towards the big tune. It’s a different style of game. So you go with what is there, what lends itself to the game. And even things like Fortnite, they’re more about feeling than a hummable tune.

GC: Now you mention it, it’s surprising it doesn’t have a recognisable theme tune.

EN: There’s some great music in that but, it depends on the game developers. Do they want a sonic identity for the game that is like that? That is in the old school. Do they feel that it’s too retro leaning? It’s always coming from what the game developer and directors and producers want and what they perceive to be of the moment or nostalgia.

GC: The thing that always strikes me about Nintendo is that there’s a very strong jazz influence to much of their music. But in general, I think Japanese composers are much less afraid of looking at other cultures and picking out stuff they find interesting, like the Irish instruments you mentioned. Whereas a lot of time Western game composers just seem to be copying whatever’s popular in cinema at the time.

EN: You know what, there’s another thing at play there. It’s funny you mentioned jazz because there’s a different perception in the West, of the zeitgeist. So, for instance, early TV music in Los Angeles would have come from a lot of jazz. And that has a specific sort of harmonic style because of using classical musicians… my husband came to classical music through jazz, actually. He’s a composer, but he has that influence. And so in the early days of TV, things like Hill Street Blues and even things like Murder She Wrote…

GC: The memorable stuff.

EN: [laughs] Yeah, exactly! And there was a school of jazz composition in Los Angeles, that a lot of these guys came through, and sometimes I hear that influence in the Japanese scoring, which is really cool, and I really like it.

However, it would be perceived as belonging to that era in Western scoring, of being old-fashioned. So that’s kind of a perception thing. I don’t agree with it, right or wrong. I mean I enjoy diversity in everything, and different sounds, different language, but I hear that quite a lot in the harmonic language and even in the orchestration, now that games are fully orchestrated and use live orchestra.

And I love what you’re talking about, Japan having so many cultural influences. And I heard… my kids are huge manga fans, and I heard a TV show that came from Japan and I’m listening to the score going, ‘This is California rock in Japanese!’ And I just thought it was so much fun. It sounded like Blink-182 but it was in Japanese, it was great!

GC: One thing that surprises me is that chiptunes and synthwave are so rarely in bigger budget mainstream games. There’re a few exceptions, like Cyberpunk, but to me synthwave is the evolutionary link between 8-bit video game music and the modern day. You see it in something like the Tron Legacy soundtrack but never really in games, and I find that disappointing.

EN: I think developers’ perception would be that it’s retro and if that’s what you’re going for, that’s a stylistic choice. Whereas, when people don’t want a really obvious stylistic choice, or to paint yourself into a corner, if they want something that has more breadth that can be a problem. But if you want to you can weave chiptunes into the orchestra…

That’s my era, as a kid. So it is fun. But at this point, it’s the perception of chiptunes being retro that’s the problem.

Eímear Noone — It’s a real shame the English tour dates got cancelled (Picture: Andy Paradise)

GC: Like a modern version of LucasArts’ iMUSE?

EN: A little bit, yeah! That’s a good reference. But we have to be careful.

GC: Definitely. And it’s not just big, greedy publishers. A lot of the most recent examples have been small indie developers doing it to save time and money, because they can’t afford a composer or whatever.

EN: Yeah, absolutely. I can see exactly how it could be done. And, really, it is terrifying and we need some laws down there. We need to regulate this absolutely, for sure. So that we can use it in creative ways. I can see, for instance, the production music libraries being the first to go.

There’s a lot of composers that keep the lights on by writing for music libraries, and there’s enough of that music out there, and there’s enough elements that an AI engine can be put things together within certain parameters. Could you change the key and speed it up 10 BPM right here? Can you make it stop at this point, with a hit on the end, and whatever. I can see how easily that can be done.

GC: It all seems so shortsighted. If you rip these people off and put them out of a job, what are you going to sample in the future? Is all art going to end up this sort of inbreed copy of a copy?

EN: As technology moves, the law has to catch up. For instance, YouTube still doesn’t pay composers for video music. They discriminately don’t pay for video game music, if they’re using your work in the background of a video.

GC: They do for other music, don’t they?

EN: They do for other music, but still not for video game music. For composers, budgets have gone down and then streamers don’t pay what your regular terrestrial television stations pay to use creative work. So what’s happening, is music creatives are working obscene hours to make a living and stay creating for the public. And then there will be a fallout from AI, for sure. For sure.

Really, the only insurance against it is to invest in your own unique voice as much as you can, to be as much yourself, basically, as you possibly can. To mine everything that is different about you as a creative, which is what we should be doing as artists anyway. But that’s very hopeful and very positive. But it’s got an element of naivety built in as well.

So, we do need regulation. We do need people like YouTube and the streamers to catch up with making sure that artists can continue to create, because these structures are in place to keep us alive while we’re creating a project. And in-between projects, you’re not talking about people that get a salary and health insurance and pensions and all of that. We’ve chosen a riskier path, but people shouldn’t be punished for that or punished for creating something joyful.

Most of us, we’re just happy to create and keep the lights on. Most of us don’t need a particular amount of adulation. We just feel privileged and happy to do the work and share the work. And I do feel like that’s how I contribute to my wider community. I’m not a doctor. I can’t save lives, but I can at least maybe distract you for an hour and a half, maybe.

GC: OK, that’s all rather worrying but there is a happier subject we can discuss, since we talked about Shirley Walker last time.

EN: Ah, Shirely!

GC: It strikes me that the situation for female composers has got a lot better, in just these relatively few short years. I thought Natalie Holt’s work on Loki season two, for example, was fantastic.

EN: Yeah, yeah!

GC: But I’ve noticed a lot of other female composers’ names popping up recently, so there seems to have been some sort of conscious effort to encourage them?

EN: Yes, there has been a conscious effort on the part of the industry. I appreciate that. I think we need more of it. The tricky situation is when we’re working in music teams… you have a music team because you have such a huge amount of music to generate in a short period of time. I’m really bad at working at building a team, because I love to orchestrate every detail and put in every articulation mark and every breath myself.

Because that’s my background, I used to work as an orchestrator, so it’s very hard to cede control of anything. [laughs] But Natalie’s wonderful. Pinar Toprak is another one, of course, Hildur Guðnadóttir… I think affirmative action is really important.

GC: Hidlur… her name rings a bell, but I can’t think what she’s worked on.

EN: She did Chernobyl, the series…

GC: Oh god, that had an amazing soundtrack.

EN: Yeah, she did the Joker movie. That’s what she won the Oscar for. But I make sure, when I’m doing a concert, I have at least two other women on the programme besides myself. And it’s because the audience deserves to hear that music. It’s not an act of charity.

The work, as you said, Natalie, the work stands up. It speaks for itself. This is very high skilled… it’s very detailed work. It’s massive amounts of hours. It’s a huge investment in skills to be able to execute the job at all. And then you have the added gender stuff.

We have the ceiling breakers, these little islands, but in order to get the skills you need to be on a music team, and that involves being in a confined space together, pulling all kinds of crazy hours to get to the deadline. And we need more women bringing in younger women as assistants and learning the craft. There’s so much of it that you learn on the job.

I’m lucky because I work and live with a composer who’s even more experienced than I am, which is my husband Craig. So, we give daily debates over what’s going on in the score and how to scope the scene and how to orchestrate something. And we sort of compose for each other as well, where we play back something to make the other one laugh or to do something cool… so we kind of egg each other on.

But the MeToo movement was amazing and that had to happen. But I think people are cautious on teams, when you have to pull long hours and a lot of composers work from home. There’s all this confluence of things that are making it harder for, on the sort of flip side, making it harder for young women composers to get onto those teams. And the way scoring has gotten, and the deadlines have gotten shorter and shorter, you need a team of people to deliver on time, at this point.

You have a lead and then you have to have support or you can’t… three hours of music in two months, that’s fully orchestrated… A pop song is three minutes, you know? So, it’s a crazy workload. And that’s why you see, when you look at the end of a movie, you see a list of names. For young women in the industry, I think we need the more established ones to make sure that there’s a space on these teams.

Everybody needs to do their own little bit to address the imbalance. It’s still very, very imbalanced. I mean, it’s better than it was in Shirley’s day, which makes me sad because she was such a giant.

GC: Are you able to say what you’re working on at the moment?

EN: I can’t tell you what the game is called, but it’s triple-A, it’s…

GC: Half-Life 3?

EN: [laughs] No, it’s a different style to what I’m usually known for is all I can say. It’s very cool. I absolutely love the game, the story’s really deep it, it’s… I can’t say anything else about it, but it’s due to be released early to mid-summer, so I will be able to get to talk about it soon. As soon as they’ve announced our participation. [We’re still not sure what this is – GC]

GC: How much do they tell you, as a general rule, about games, especially when they’re trying to keep them secret? I imagined they only revealed the bare minimum, but you seem to be implying that’s not the case?

EN: No, no. We have to be involved in knowing what the lore is and the story is, and the gameplay, and how it looks and everything like that, because we have to score it.

GC: I’m sure you do; I just wasn’t sure they’d appreciate that fact.

EN: We know what it means to the company to keep things secret. You don’t want to be the one that spoils the surprise. I’m sure there’s lots of business reasons for that, but I am glad to be completely unaware of them. I just think for the public it would spoil the surprise.

I find the gaming world is much more secretive about things than the film world. But at the same time, I don’t want to mix up my NDAs, so I’m not saying anything at all about anything. [laughs]

GC: Did you see The Game Awards in December? We vote for them but it’s always frustrating when your nominations don’t make the cut. Starfield, for example, is not a very good game but the soundtrack is great. But it wasn’t even on the short list, which makes me wonder if these things are being judged purely on their own merits or if they’re being overridden by the game’s wider reputation, for good or ill.

EN: I’m doing Starfield this year, in concert. Yeah. Yeah. I love Inon [Zur]’s work. I’m like, you know what? I really like the music. So it’s going on the programme. I know the fans really like the music and I love it and it, it’s worth performing. I don’t really care whether it wins awards or not it.

All of these awards things are very political and I just don’t have the space in my brain for it. I have to say I don’t have any bandwidth for it at all. I am surprised Starfield didn’t get nominated. That’s really surprising.

So yeah, awards, music awards… all kinds of awards. They’re fun and stuff, but I take it with a pinch of salt, really. At the end of the day, for me, it’s my ears and how the music makes me feel. And if I think it has a life on the stage and the audience will react to it and enjoy it, I don’t really care how many votes, or whatever, it got. Because I feel like if I’m reacting to it this way, then the public is going to react to it that way, or a certain segment of the audience is going to react to it that way at least.

So it’s kind of a gut, visceral reaction to the music. That’s kind of what I go by, which sounds really…

GC: If you’ve got this far, I think it’s reasonable to assume you know what you’re doing.

EN: [laughs] It’s really cool and weird at the same time, when you’re performing your friend’s music, because you know them on one level and then you get to know them through their score, which I have to spend quite a bit of time with in order to perform it. It’s a different level, a different dimension.

GC: Just one last thing I wanted to ask you, have you seen the film Tár with Cate Blanchett?

EN: I have not. It’s a little close to home for me.

GC: I can imagine, given the ending.

EN: Well, I know some people involved with the film, so I wondered about that myself. I did.

GC: We shouldn’t spoil the ending, but it seemed very relevant to you. Not on a personal level, but at an industry level…

EN: Well, on a personal level as well. I mean, I do know people involved with that film, so that kind of was very strange for me. And I come from a very classical background, and I choose to serve this audience because I think it’s important. And I found that hurtful and I found it quite unnecessary.

I also found the character was every trope of every misadventure I’ve heard in conducting over the years, and none of it was perpetrated by women. I didn’t recognise that character as being a woman.

To me, I don’t see… it’s such a big deal for us to get opportunities. None of my colleagues or I will ever risk that kind of behaviour, professionally. We can’t, we can’t afford it. And I felt like the character wasn’t relevant to anybody I know. And I know a lot of women conductors, but I found the end very hurtful and unnecessary.

GC: It did seem weirdly specific and mean-spirited.

EN: I did ask because this is an area that I have been a pioneer in. I did ask if it was personal. It felt personal to me, and I don’t know why I do everything I can to advocate for women conductors on the classical level, crossover level, opera, the Oscars. It just felt personal. And thank you for asking, because nobody’s asked me, and I didn’t recognise that character in any of the women that I know, because we can’t just can’t risk that kind of behaviour.

GC: I was going to make that point when we were talking about female composers. Even after they get their foot in the door, they’ve still got the problem that if they make one mistake, that’s it. They’re out.

EN: If you make a mistake as a woman, you’re making it for all women and that’s something. So no, we can’t afford to act the way Lydia Tár acted. That’s not even remotely believable to me, based on my experience of my colleagues, who they are, how they treat the orchestra, how they treat their colleagues, how they treat each other. It’s just not a recognisable situation to me.

And I did find the ending personal and hurtful, and I feel what’s wrong with bringing joy to the general public for a couple of hours here and there? What’s a negative about that? It is for me, such an honour to serve that audience with passion and with joy because that’s what they give back to me.

And you know what, the amount of hours, the skill level, the kind of work that we put in to do this, to serve the public is enormous. And it’s not to be… I later read that the character was originally created to be male, and that made more sense to me. I couldn’t understand it. Basically, any woman that is conducting, that’s working at all, it’s a huge achievement. And to denigrate that, I heard from so many people about that. And it’s a pity, it’s a real pity.

One of my passions is in addressing that kind of snobbery and elitism in music, because I feel that’s a barrier. It’s a psychological and social barrier to the general public. And I think the orchestra is such a treasure. We need to be sharing it in the most unintimidating and inviting and inclusive way we can.

Maybe it’s the Irish thing, where I have an anaphylactic reaction to snobbery and elitism, but I think it’s a great honour to bring joy to the general public and the gaming public. And I take it very seriously, I would say. So thank you for asking.

GC: Well, I feel bit off for mentioning it now, I’m sorry. Especially as it means we’ve ended on a downer. Err… in one sentence, can you say which piece of music you’re most looking forward to in the concert?

EN: Oh my gosh, I can’t say that because so many of the composers are dear friends. But I will say there is nothing like the level of vulnerability and communication when I perform something that I’ve written on my own, in my own little room, for the public and I can communicate my story and who I am and where I stand and how I feel through music to people right there in that moment.

There’s nothing that comes close to that experience because it’s so vulnerable. And yet it’s such a privilege and you hope that you can reach somebody in that audience on some level that’s beyond words, and that’s the greatest honour.

GC: That’s a much happier note to end on.

EN: I appreciate it, David.

GC: I am sorry this has gone on for so long, but I really enjoyed that.

EN: Likewise, likewise.