Paul Levasseur has devoted years to musical composition. He has two degrees and starts working toward another, this one at the doctorate level, at the University of Toronto this fall. And he's happy to talk about what nudged him in that direction: video games.

'Game composers need to understand the technical side of things that they wouldn't need to understand when it comes to film. But they're not really being taught that.'

— Karen Collins, Canada research chair in interactive audio at the University of Waterloo

"[Game] music serves to produce a mood," Levasseur says. "I enjoy games, therefore I wanted to get more involved in making them; and I like music, so I wanted to create music to build these moods."

He arranged a piece from the 1997 Playstation release Wild Arms, above, for the University of Manitoba Symphony Orchestra as an undergrad, and drew inspiration from games like Seiken Densetsu 3 for his master's thesis at the University of British Columbia. Though he has woven game music into his education, his horizons have broadened. "My viewpoint originally was much more romanticized than it is now," he says. "Unfortunately, [game music] isn't what we do in academia."

A group of international audio professionals wants to change that. The Interactive Audio Special Interest Group (IASIG) has created a video game audio curriculum guideline, hoping courses focusing on game composition and sound design will become more common.

While some game-audio programs do exist, they're outnumbered by programs focusing on music and sound design for film. As a result, many aspiring game composers go through film scoring programs that don't fully prepare them for the video game industry, says Karen Collins, Canada research chair in interactive audio at the University of Waterloo's Canadian Centre of Arts and Technology.

Game composers "need to understand the sort of technical side of things that they wouldn't need to understand when it comes to film," Collins says. "But they're not really being taught that. They're getting away with it right now, but the bar is being raised each year in terms of getting into the industry."

Game music is often composed in tiny chunks, designed to be played in different order depending on how the player navigates the game. "The music isn't a full concert work," Levasseur says. "But there's an audience of people who will know the melodies and who will want it."

Composers don't necessarily get to spend much time with a game before they write music for it, either. "Sometimes they're given a list, say, ‘We need three minutes of combat music, we need two minutes of landscape forest music,'" Collins says. "And they don't really know how that gets integrated into the game."

Another of the IASIG’s proposed recommendations is that aspiring composers and sound designers handle as many of the tasks associated with game audio as possible.

"When they get out of school," Collins says, "they'll be taking on every role themselves, so they're going to be the composer, they're going to be the sound designer. They're going to have to implement, to some extent, the sound into the game. They might not be programming it, but they'll use some middleware that helps them implement it into the game."

Though he's got other, non-video game projects planned, as well as a few more years of schooling, Levasseur says he'd still like to be a game composer.

"Long-time dream, long-term goal, yes, I'd like to be able to work on games and make money at that," he says. "I'm sure there are people who have tons of talent who'd never get anywhere because [chances] are just not afforded to them."

Collins hopes that a game-audio curriculum would do more for those people than programs designed to teach other types of composition and audio design.

"A lot of the industry is complaining that [students] don't have the skills that we need," she says. "And, of course, the students want the jobs. So the closer we can bring these two groups together, the better."