Well look what arrived in the digital post this week… yes, it’s another gem from the creative genius that is Adam Foreman, AKA A4man. 

On top of the awesome work he churns out for videogames, board games, animated short films and more, he’s also a dab hand at caricatures (see my Twitter avatar) and I recently asked him if he wouldn’t mind throwing together a little something for a recent update I made to my Soundcloud page. 

The ‘Cartoon Espionage’ theme was originally intended for a client I worked for on a kids’ spy game but ultimately didn’t make it to the final cut. Shame, as I was rather proud of it.  

Listen to 'Cartoon Espionage' on my Soundcloud page. 

But anyway, working to a brief no more comprehensive than ‘have you got a picture of a spy who’s not very good at spying?’ he put on his thinking cap, picked up his, er, drawing pen and came up with this fabulous character going about his not-very-good spying business. 

So thank you Adam, for another sterling job – and if you want to view more of his work then check out his portfolio at http://a4man.com and watch him on Twitch right as the magic happens at http://twitch.tv/a4manartist.

In which I get all Von Trapp on your ass to explain ‘The Devil’s Interval’

'Le Songe de Tartini' ('Tartini's Dream') by Louis-Léopold Boilly

One of the most fun things about writing music for games is the variety. I’m sure I’ve dribbled on aplenty about how entrancing I find the work game developers do in the way that they create entire worlds for players to navigate and interact with, but the sheer miscellany of said worlds presented me by the various developers with whom I have worked intrigues me just as much.

Indeed, over the course of the past five years I’ve written music for games in which you are lost on weird and far-flung planets in Sticky Nicky; taking on the mantle of a pickle-throwing conquistador in Pickle Frenzy, escaping post-apocalyptic city scenes in Paradigm Shift, transporting power from the future in GunMonkeys, and slotting shapes into place in a geometric wonderland in Division Cell.

In fact, the only constant is one of my own usage; a musical device of which – it must be said by accident rather than design – I have become extremely fond: the ‘augmented fourth’, or ‘Devil’s Interval’. I don’t wish to be all ‘music-nerd’ (at least not overtly) yet here I cannot avoid a little techno-babble. I will try and skip through this bit with the minimum use of ‘lingo,’ and instead invite you to do the song from The Sound of Music. You know the one, ‘Doe, a Deer…’? I have had to write it like that because obviously ‘a doe’ is the correct name for a lady deer but in line with the ‘solfège,’ (the ‘Do,’ the ‘Re’ and the ‘Mi’ that feature in the music education method used to teach pitch and sight singing), it would need to be written as ‘Do a Deer’ which might, once posted on the internet, lead to me receiving ‘interest’ from the RSPCA.)

Oh, cripes, the point… I was busy getting all 'Von Trapp' on your asses… So whether at work, internet café or in a darkened room at home, you’re all singing, right?

Piano keyboard showing the 'solfège' note names

‘Do(e),’ a deer, a female deer,

‘Re,’ a drop of golden sun,

‘Mi,’ a name, I call myself,

‘Fa’ a long, long way to go,

‘So(l)’ a needle pulling thread…

And you can stop there. Cos what we’re after in order to complete our quest for The Devil’s Interval is the space between the ‘Do,’ and a note in between ‘Fa’ and ‘So’. Sing them. SING THEM.

‘Do’ to ‘Fa’… then ‘Do’ to ‘So’… then ‘Do’ to the note in between ‘Fa’ and ‘So’…

woooooo

If you can find that, and you’re not more perplexed than all those scientists just before they located the Higgs Boson, then you’re doing well, and can award yourself 1 x Gold Star.
Anyway, back to some musical theory. As I was taught it (having never been part of a family of singing Austrians), ‘Do’ is the solfège name for the ‘tonic’ (i.e. the first note of any given scale) and the notes of that (major) scale progress up through various nerdy names (supertonic, mediant) to the fourth note or ‘subdominant’ (read ‘Fa’ in the above example) and then the dominant (‘So’), the technical name for which is the dominant (before going on to submediant (‘La,’ in Von Trapp world) and leading note (‘Ti’) ahead of the next instance of the tonic.
Good. The intervals created between the tonic (‘Do’) and the subdominant (‘Fa’) create what’s known as a ‘perfect fourth,’ and that between the tonic and (So) is a ‘perfect fifth,’ the use of both of which tend to sound all medieval trumpet fanfare-y cos that’s mainly all that trumpets and horns without modern valves were able to do, hence why Michael Kamen put lots of them at the start of his theme for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and stuff like that. Therefore when you ‘bloat’ the interval between 1 and 4, it becomes an ‘augmented fourth,’ and at this point the more astute (and still awake) of you will agree that also as a wizened 1 to 5 it is also known as a ‘diminished fifth’. In essence it is the same thing (however I am certain that pedants will be at pains to stress that that strictly speaking it depends from which direction it is approached). It also comes under the heading ‘tri-tone’ as it is three full tones (no semitones) up from the tonic note. But enough science. Either way, it is THE DEVIL’S INTERVAL and whilst (we understand) that it was Actually Banned in Olden Times by churchy types (on pain of excommunication, or 'death by hot pokers' or something), it ultimately became a popular ‘device’ frequently employed from the Romantic era onwards to denote diabolic evil and chaos. Franz Liszt used it to signify Hell in his Dante Sonata, and I’m fairly sure there’s an example in Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung somewhere, too. Maybe less scarily you can find it in ‘Maria’ from West Side Story, although I never met her and she might just have been awful. It also pops up in the the ‘Back to the Future’ theme (more as part of the tri-tone as a result of the chord progression than a 'menacing' interval). Which is pretty cool ‘cos not only is Back to the Future ace but if there isn’t something other-worldly about time travel then we must be doing it wrong.

I gather from the internet that the subject of this musical anecdote was first been designated as a 'dangerous' interval by a bloke called Guido of Arezzo, a leading music theorist of the Medieval era widely regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation. It was old Guido's work that is believed to have led to the first instance of the phrase 'Diabolus in Musica' – 'the devil in music'. Like I said, as it has turned out, whether personal preference or due to the subject matter of the games for which I have written, the Devil’s Interval has wormed its satanic way into quite a few of my tunes. And I’m not sure I have the paperwork for the sale of my soul…

I hope you can hear the sense of looming menace it invokes, whether actively, aggressively malevolent or passively haunting, there’s something not right about it, and it tugs at the edges of your psyche, rolling and incessant.

I guess it became known as ‘The Devil’s Interval’ because it was all ‘senestre’… for people in 'the olden times’ there was nowhere to put it; no way of quantifying it, it had no place in the conventional, sensible music of the age. Which is very possibly why I like it so much.

Maybe try it on your Auntie some time.

IN LEAGUE WITH THE DEVIL: CAN YOU FIND THE AUGMENTED FOUTHS IN SITU?  

GunMonkeys: Because You Know I’m Better

Magma Monsters: theme from Magma Monsters

Fangus the Were-Baby: Fangus the Were-Baby

Last weekend I took a hike to Tobacco Dock in east London for EGX Rezzed, to check out the games on show and meet with developers. Among the offerings I particularly wanted to look at was Fireproof Games’ BAFTA winning puzzler The Room, Team17’s Penarium (a game whose progress I’ve been following with great interest over the past year), plus the rather fine-looking platformer Poncho from Rising Star.

The weekend was also an opportunity to see in the flesh in the metal the magnificent dystopian mech-epic shooter Beyond Flesh & Blood, currently in development by Manchester-based studio Pixelbomb. That’s certainly one to watch; it looked fabulous even before I learned of the new version they’re putting together in UE4, which makes for an even more scintillating experience. 

I met Eduardo, in from Valajallajadueeddjjjjaos some place in Spain, who introduced me to his concept game that takes board gaming between friends to a new, digital level. And then as you may have seen I got walloped AROUND THE HEAD by cosplay star of the show Barbara-Ian, which was a little uncomfortable, but which admittedly looks great in slo-mo. 

(HD version here for extra high definition pain)

I FOUND THE BAR..! 

In the end it was all OK because I seemed to re-spawn in the bar, where I managed to entrap Mr Dan Marshall of Size Five Games for an ale and a natter ahead of his talk on The Swindle. Which was suitably ‘brillo’, naturally, showcasing the forthcoming steampunk crime caper in glorious technicolour, explaining some of the game’s mechanics – and offering the chance to hear snippets of Toby Evans’ fab soundtrack.

The bruises inflicted by the swing of Barbara-Ian’s mighty weapon may only just be fading but I'm already looking forward to the next EGX event in Birmingham at the end of September.

Last week I was also featured in Waitrose magazine, which was great as while I don’t get any money off fruit and veg or anything like that it is super exposure and I’ve had some lovely comments back as a result. Even though I am doing some kind of funny 'constipated face' thing…

Here's the tweet...

What then is next on the agenda? Well over the past month or so I’ve been lucky enough to work on music for three games, two of which are released this month. Scott Mitchell’s Magma Monsters (iOS & Android) hit the App Store on Thursday, bringing a colourful labyrinthine world to smartphone screens via the incredible work of Adam Foreman, with whom I worked on GunMonkeys. His character art is just ace, please go check out his portfolio at a4man.com, download Magma Monsters here for iOS for free and get bashing those nasties!

Then there’s Not Without My Donuts, a wacky cartoon caper in which you have to pluck sweet treats while evading the clutches of an armada of creepy crawlies. The soundtrack for this was exceptionally fun to do, and the game will be out on the 27th I believe.

I also did a track for videogame reviewer Krames, particularly pleased with this one.

Next up for me is another project for Evilized Games – this one a dark survival thriller for which the soundtrack is swirling and menacing; a project about which I will try and write more in due course. 

Please do check out my 'back catalogue' and get in touch if you’d like to talk about a soundtrack for your game. Especially if you’re making a space game…

Delighted to be able to write to let you know that, courtesy of that lovely chap Jordan Carroll (AKA Angry Cube Development), and following a wonderfully busy 2014, my website has now been updated and refreshed, kicking things off for 2015.

We've (well, he's) cleverly linked the site in to this blog; a blog that I started a few years ago when I harboured ambitions of furthering myself as A Proper Writer, which as you can see, ultimately came to naught, despite my *hugely entertaining* tales of being beaten at football, being beaten at Monopoly, and being beaten by Southern Trains' interesting take on the 'rail timetable'.

This is actually good as it turns out, as it leaves more time a) to time travel back to the mid-Nineties (via the N64 I unearthed in a drawer at home), and also b) to write music for all you fabulous, talented game developers out there. It's continually inspiring to see the projects that are being worked on, I always look forward to #screenshotsaturday on Twitter with great anticipation.

Please check out the latest samples that I've posted in the 'music' section, featuring of some of the things I worked on in 2014. Hard to pick a favourite but highlights include scoring the brilliant animated short 'Fangus the Were-baby', made by Judith Johnston, Adam Foreman and Nicola Welbourne, and being asked to create theme music for a number of game reviewers.

The start of this year sees me looking forward to working on further projects with Evilized and other colleagues – three of which are currently underway – angling (naturally) for more exciting game projects later in the year as well as developing the theme and TV incidental music angle and even some fancy corporate ident work.

I'm also going to redouble my efforts to tap out a semi-regular blog on subjects at least loosely related to music in general, and game music in particular.

Cheers and best wishes to all of you for your projects and endeavours in 2015.

D.