Austin Wintory

Early life

Austin Wintory was born in Denver, Colorado in 1984 and started learning piano when he was ten years old, after he was introduced to composer Jerry Goldsmith by his teacher. Before the age of ten, Wintory did not play any and barely listened to music. By the age of sixteen, Wintory started writing and conducting the Cherry Creek High School Orchestra during their performances of the "Spirit of the Cosmos" pieces. Two years later, at the age of eighteen, Wintory conducted the Utah Symphony during the recording of "Cosmos", which became one of his most popular projects, although he refers to it as "atrocious garbage". Since 2003, Wintory has composed over three hundred musical scores.

Beginning of game composing career and Flow

Wintory met Jenova Chen while both attended the University of Southern California (USC). After networking with an interactive media student at USC and scoring a small game project, his name was passed along to Chen, who asked Wintory to score his thesis project, Flow later re-released on PlayStation Network. Wintory, Chen and Nick Clarke developed the first version of Flow as a three-man team, with Wintory remarking that Chen had an incredible way of processing information, seeing far beyond code and reaching into the emotional implications of things. As a traditional orchestral student at the time, Wintory considered the music of Flow was radically unlike any he had written before. Wintory regards the pink area of the game, where the player controls a jellyfish-like creature, as the humorous area of the game, describing his music for it as almost "circus-like" compared to the overall soundtrack.

Monaco

Originally, Monaco developer Andy Schatz sought out licensed music as a backdrop to the game's setting, feeling that the style of music needed was too esoteric to hire a composer. Wintory, however, was able to convince Schatz that he could create an original score that fit the project's vision. Likening 2D sprite-based games to the silent film era, Wintory agreed with the notion that the soundtrack to a game like Monaco should have an earnest yet self-aware nostalgic feeling, stating "There's no way to just objectively listen to that style of music without automatically being like 'This reminds me of a bygone era.'" Wintory was excited at the chance to create an old-timey score with wit and humor, stating "when else am I ever going to be asked to write anything remotely like this?"

Soundtrack development

Chen discussed looking for a central musical idea that would span the entire game, which ultimately took the form of the score's first track, "Nascence," recorded in April 2009. Wintory credited the inspiration of hearing Chen discuss the project for how quickly the first musical ideas clicked in his mind. According to Wintory, the primalness of Thatgamecompany's games, which are heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, appeal to a broad audience through the story of mankind rather than a more esoteric story. He did not consider the abstract storytelling of Journey as more or less difficult to score than other projects, only different. he also described the experience of scoring in an abstract, parallel way as taken to a new level by Journey.

Most of the soundtrack revolves around a group of soloists (cello, bass/alto flute, harp, viola and serpent), plus a string orchestra (the Macedonia Radio Symphonic Orchestra) and various sound effects. Wintory approached the soundtrack as "essentially a cello concerto." Cellist Tina Guo, who worked with Wintory on several scores, has been praised by Wintory as "a cellist of the highest caliber" and was the first person Wintory thought of for the soundtrack on the day he first spoke with Thatgamecompany founder Jenova Chen about the game. In April 2011, Wintory wrote "Woven Variations," a miniature cello concerto for Guo inspired by Journey's score, which the two performed together in Los Angeles.

Wintory controlled the musical direction of the game based on his ideas, which were then "collaboratively messaged with Thatgamecompany." Journey was Wintory's longest stint developing music for a project, with the game's development lasting over 3 years. He felt the extended development time allowed him the freedom to place music into the game, yet sit on the ideas and receive detailed feedback from Thatgamecompany developers on the emotions they were looking for. By directly working with Thatgamecompany to implement his audio as he wrote it, and playing the game alongside Thatgamecompany staff, Wintory had access to the game's complete experience and could make fully informed adjustments.

The game and its music were generally developed in sequential order, resulting in Wintory's oldest written pieces arriving in the game's beginning. As the development phase of the project expanded, Wintory looked back on older pieces, and felt he changed greatly as a person and a composer. While Wintory made some changes to older pieces, he generally resisted reworking music written 1 1/2 to 2 years prior, feeling the need to preserve much of the naivete and innocence of the earlier work as its own kind of "emotional arc".

Reception

The soundtrack was released as an album on April 10 on iTunes and PSN. The album is a collection of the "most important" pieces of the soundtrack, arranged by Wintory to stand alone as an album without the context of the player's actions. The album comprises 18 tracks and is over 58 minutes long. It features the voice of Lisbeth Scott for the final track, "I Was Born for This". After its release, the soundtrack reached the top 10 of the iTunes Soundtrack charts in more than 20 countries. It also reached position 116 on the Billboard sales charts with over 4,000 sales in its first week after release, the second-highest of any video game music album to date.

Leisure Suit Larry creator and original composer Al Lowe approached Wintory with scoring the Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded remake, since the Replay Games development team were fans of Journey. After accepting the offer, Wintory described it as shocking as the two projects "couldn't be more opposite of each other."

On December 5, 2012, Journey received a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, becoming the first video game score to receive a Grammy nomination, sharing the category with John Williams' The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Ludovic Bource's The Artist, Hans Zimmer's The Dark Knight Rises, Howard Shore's Hugo, and Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross's winner, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Journey's nomination occurred in the wake of Christopher Tin's "Baba Yetu" (originally composed for Civilization IV) winning a Grammy the previous year for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), and it was Tin who first made Wintory aware of his Grammy nomination via a phone call. Prior to the Grammy nomination, Wintory described video games as having evolved into "a full-blown art genre that is right alongside literature and any other form of storytelling."

Films