This year has been definitely a successful one for Winifred Phillips. Let’s take a closer look. Electronic Arts released her music from SimAnimals in January, and it became Winifred’s first commercial soundtrack release. And the soundtrack from a fresh Spore Hero for Nintendo Wii and DS was made available already in October, nearly at year-end by the very same Electronic Arts. Created by a genius game-designer Will Wright, Spore made a small revolution in the game industry just the way his The Sims did once. A bunch of reviews describe Wright’s success and Spore game mechanics. That’s why so as not to repeat the story we’ll touch on his audio performance, that is real-time sound generation.

Contrary to what you might think, none of this innovation as well as its realization belongs to Wright. We should say thanks to Brian Eno, a musician, composer, sound engineer and producer, who somehow invented ambient music. Using Brian’s unique system of sound landscapes generating in a computer game is a great idea, but applying such a musical system to a project for not the most powerful console Wii and its sister DS is more likely to be a failure. And for that reason here’s Winifred Phillips with her traditional musical soundtrack saving the situation. In some sense she’s a lucky, cause as Eno’s music sounded differently every time, its separate release was impossible but Winifred’s soundtrack didn’t have such problems on its way to becoming commercially released.

Spore Hero is a logical continuation of SimAnimals soundtrack. It is still the same high-souled, full of the feeling of adventures and mostly positive music. Probably, there’s no sense in yet another emphasizing how beautiful, detailed and vivid this music is. However we can tell you about some new features in comparison with SimAnimals soundtrack. Although the number of tracks is the same, the length of the each musical theme in Spore Hero has doubled and therefore the timing of the whole album is twice as long as in SimAnimals. Firstly, it allows you to enjoy the music longer; secondly, it opens new opportunities for experiments. Judge for yourself what’s better: there are too short tracks in SimAnimals that’s why the melodies are just slightly developed and stay within certain time limits, though the beauty of the music provides compensation over and above.

No doubts Winifred had much more space for creativity in Spore Hero. Here the tracks remind a lot of cinema and cartoon music. The main themes of the compositions change each other more often and develop in quite an interesting way. A lot of tracks here have a very complex arrangement and are based on a method of micro insertions when a quick change of solo instruments or its rotation is applied. In the 50s an American composer Scott Bradley used the similar technique of complicated orchestra pieces in Tom & Jerry Tales writing a separate musical segment for each motion of the cartoon characters. Bradley was also convinced that it’s not the music that should be written first to fit the images but just the other way around. One don’t need necessarily to play Spore Hero to enter the spirit of Winifred Phillips’ tracks cause her music is as independent as Scott Bradley’s immortal works.




Pasya

Overview

Winifred Philips provided music for this year's SimAnimals and has several film-related video game scores to her credit. SimAnimals was a wonderful score and had moments of lyricism recalling Elmer Bernstein. Phillips' latest score, for Spore Hero, has already been receiving many accolades and is now up in an Original Score category from the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. It is only the latest in a series of many notices that have noticed her fine melodic content, perfect orchestral colors, and command of narrative underscoring. Wii players will have a chance to enjoy her music for this latest game from Electronic Arts. The score is available as a digital download featuring over an hour of music.

Body

The main theme for the game has a definite jungle feel with little filigrees of harps and thematic statements with clarinet. There is also a whistle-like flute sound that lends a little ethnic-coloring. "Home World" features some worldless choral ideas and a real magical quality — something which is a quality of the score as a whole — with plenty of little semi-comedic ideas and asymmetrical rhythm patterns.

"Haven," and later "Sporexplore", find us in a style reminiscent of a light Disney jungle adventure with everything good that one can imagine in the innovative scoring and delightful melodic ideas. The jungle feel permeates the score and is often explored with pizzicato string sounds and a great variety of instrumental colors. There is a rather light touch to all the musical bell sounds that sort of flit about in parts of the score as well.

Menacing music, though rarely of the terribly frightening kind, appears first in "Sporaging" where a perfect sense of mystery and a little magic appears. There are some fine action moments too in "Monster Mayhem," "Beast Brawl," and "Evolvable," which add just a little more brass to ratchet up the excitement and help create musical variety to the score as it plays out. And things get really menacing in the appropriately titled "Nemesis" which spills over into the creepy "Critters". All heck breaks out in "Spore War" and we get a nice rounding off the score with a return to the main theme in a longer final statement on its own.

Summary

Most of the tracks are substantial musical tone poems with enough variety to work well on their own and no doubt make Spore Hero an overall entrancing experience. Many a smile will also cross your face as you hear the exuberance and often hilarious sounds that follow you along this intriguing journey.

Steven Kennedy