BioShock Musical Score Interview

Music 4 Games has conducted an interview with Garry Schyman, the composer recently identified as the talent behind the BioShock soundtrack.

Q: Without giving away any spoilers, can you describe what we can expect from the musical landscape in the city of Rapture?

A: 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.