Tim Larkin:
Composing Myst’s Musical World
“When I heard the Masai tribesmen chanting,” says Tim Larkin, “I knew I wanted to use that guttural, percussive grunting sound in Uru. On the second day of recording they wore their red beaded warrior cloths, and you can hear the beads clicking as they bob and sing.”
As audio director for Cyan Worlds, the company that created the Myst phenomenon, Larkin is always listening. Clicking Masai beads, droning aboriginal didgeridoos, rich and airy Armenian duduk flutes, the harmonic overtones of Tuvan throat singers, sequoia trees rubbing in a Yosemite grove — Larkin weaves them all into the music and sounds of “Uru, Ages Beyond Myst,” the newest addition to the Myst universe. And, like most of his peers who compose music and design sound for video games, Larkin does it all on his Mac.
The Uru project absorbed Larkin for nearly three years. “The graphics are so incredible,” he says. “As you walk through the Uru environments, everything moves with you — in real-time, photo-realistic 3D.” Watching these scenes evolve provided continual inspiration to the composer. “I’m very visual,” says Larkin. “When I’d go through an area in the game, I could hear what music or ambient sounds should be introduced.”
New Audio Realism
Larkin is enthusiastic about the game’s audio realism. “With the graphics in 3D, the sound has to be, too,” he says. “So in Uru, when a sound is emanating from the center of the screen and the camera pans left, the sound pans to the right.” It’s what sophisticated entertainment consumers expect from television and film, and a notch up in the verisimilitude of video games.
Uru uses environmental audio technology called EAX to mimic the effect of sound bouncing off objects. “When you pass a rock or a wall, the sound coming from the other side gets more muffled,” explains Larkin. “And when you walk into a cave, you hear the reverb — when you go back outside, sounds become more open again.”
While technology advances have boosted audio quality, what Larkin brings to the game is his musician’s ear. He’s a performer and composer who’s played piano and trumpet since childhood and earned a serious list of credits with stars such as Ella Fitzgerald and Tito Puente and clients including HBO and National Geographic. For the past decade, Larkin has applied his talents to crafting the soundtracks of video games, using the latest samplers, synthesizers, plugins, libraries and recording and editing software on his Mac.
Macs for Music
“With Apple technology, everything integrates so well,” Larkin says. “That’s why most of the companies I’ve worked for use Macs for audio. In fact, one company wanted to hire me but they were on PCs, and I said I wouldn’t work on PCs. So they let me switch their entire audio department over to Macs.”
In his home studio, Larkin uses a dual-processor 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 running Mac OS X, with a 17-inch Studio Display and a 20-inch Cinema Display. His keyboard controller is a Roland D-70 connected to eight sound modules, with a MIDI interface to the Mac. His software suite features MOTU’s Digital Performer for composing and DigiDesign’s ProTools for sound design and mixing (“ProTools runs like a dream on Mac OS X,” he says).
At Cyan headquarters just down the road, Larkin has a near-identical setup: a 733 MHz Power Mac G4 with two 21-inch Sony monitors, running Mac OS X, Digital Performer and ProTools. He has two Roland JV-1080 sound modules, one Roland XV-5080 sampler/sound module, two Kurzweil K-2000 samplers and one Kurzweil JD-990.
“These tools are great,” says Larkin. “With the Mac, it’s so easy to get under the hood when things need changing at a system level. And it’s easy to send files around because the formats are all compatible, whether they’re ProTools or SD2 or .aif or even .wav.”
