manaloplay How an Orchestra Plays Along With a Live Video Game
For each music cue in the dreamlike, solemn odyssey of the video game Journey, the engine tracking the player’s behavior pulls from a library of compositions, scoring a dynamic path through the game’s vast desert landscapes.
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, a live orchestra is taking on the same task in Journey LIVE. In both performances, at least five players will take turns using a controller to pilot a nameless robed figure through the online game, triggering music cues that the orchestra must perform in the moment as the player progresses through the story or takes unexpected detours.
“I always like to tell people it will be like the most challenging wedding you’ve ever played,” said Melissa Ngan, a flutist who has played in Journey LIVE several times and now leads the orchestra playing the show at BAM. “Many of us remember those moments early in our lives where we played wedding after wedding, and you just have to have one eye on the ensemble and your music, and the other eye on what’s happening down the aisle.”
Journey is a wordless game, and Austin Wintory’s Grammy-nominated score acts as a kind of narration as the robed figure follows traces of an ancestral civilization through the sun-dappled desert and into the bowels of structures that once teemed with life.
ImageAustin Wintory’s score for Journey, which was released for the PlayStation 3 in 2012, was the first video game score to receive a Grammy nomination.Credit...James Estrin/The New York TimesThough roughly linear, the game has no explicit missions. The narrative unfolds as the player explores different landscapes. The game’s eight major sections are each broken into three scenes, and each of those contain up to seven musical jump points.
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