Basic Music Theory For Sound Designers
Overview
Learning the basics of music theory will be a huge help to you when it comes to composition and sound design.
If you’re a composer, it will allow you to understand the structure of music better and enables you to communicate more technical details in a clear and concise language to other composers, sound designers or producers.
However, even if you’re not interested in composing music, the theory is still useful for sound design. For example, when designing tonal sounds, being able to identify the key of the music in a scene allows you to design your sounds to specific notes that harmonise with the music, fitting more nicely into the overall mix.
This doesn’t mean you have to learn every single note in every single scale, but that understanding the core principles will help you identify opportunities to enhance your sound design, either by choosing to apply music theory concepts or intentionally ignore them.
Here is a phenomenal tutorial from Andrew Huang that lets you learn the basics of music theory in half an hour: https://youtu.be/rgaTLrZGlk0
Another great video from Andrew on the Harmonic Series:
https://youtu.be/Wx_kugSemfY
Lastly, a fantastic music theory cheat-sheet from Gravitas Create:
https://gravitascreate.com/music-theory-cheat-sheet/
Game Audio Application
As mentioned above, one of the big game audio applications for music theory is to make sure that your tonal elements are in tune with each other and the soundtrack, or alternatively purposefully out of tune.
Out-of-tune sound design is an especially effective way to create a negative feedback response, which you might use for a sound effect of clicking on something that isn’t unlocked yet, for example.
Additionally, as composers of interactive scores that change depending on the player's actions, seamlessly moving from one track into another is vital, and a solid understanding of music theory can be very helpful with this as we can apply these rules when working with various stems that need to be blended together and layered.
Here is a great talk by Vincent Gagnon, Audio Director for Ubisoft Montreal, on music theory for sound design: https://blog.audiokinetic.com/tuning-your-game-music-theory-for-sound-design/
A quick rundown of why music theory is important for video game music composers: http://www.videogamemusicacademy.com/music-theory-important-video-game-music-composers/
If you want to dive deeper into the world of advanced music theory for games then I highly recommend 8-bit Music Theory. They cover all manner of music theory concepts with practical examples from iconic games: https://www.youtube.com/c/8bitMusicTheory
Want to learn more about game audio?
Check out our Learning Roadmap!
