Xbox 360
It was one cold wet day when I met Yann Seznec; co-creator of Mujik for the iPhone. Yann has been in Scotland for a number of years and has found himself involved in videogames over the past few years.
With his musical background his main interests are in making music and sound accessible to the "player" but I first thought I'd ask him a little about his place in Scotland.
SquareGo: How do you feel that you fit into Scotland in a videogames sense?
Yann Seznec: Well in a greater sense Scotland is a great place for me I landed here accidently and did a masters in Edinburgh and never left. Part of the reason being Scotland has been very good to me due to the digital media and games focus here.
I've accidently stumbled into the games industry as well. I never expected to make games, in fact I never played games much when I was younger. I started out as a musician and sound designer and I became interested in gaming mostly in terms of interface. Being able to use game controllers and accessing larger audiences through more intuitive control methods, something games are now starting to do and the games world is starting to accept and do very well.
The industry here is very powerful but also very friendly and small. I can get a long way in setting up projects and gaining respect by saying I'm involved in the Scottish games scene and on top of that I get support from people who are more integrated into the game world.
I'm still a bit of a peripheral figure in the Scottish gaming scene because I jump between the music world and those of sound design and game. I'm in the middle of this big Venn diagram of worlds and the game world has been the one that's influenced my career the most in the last couple of years.
SG: You mention certain people you felt helped you are there any particular people you'd like to mention?
YS: Well certainly even just meeting people and speaking to them like Colin Anderson from Denki and Jamie and Paul who were at Tag Games at the time. The people who have given me a lot of support and help are Cohort Studios, Tag Games and Denki and of course people like Brian Baglow who is ubiquitous in the industry. He got me to speak at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival in 2008. That was really great for me.
SG: Any others?
YS: In the past year I was involved in doing a presentation and workshop for Dare to be Digital where I turned a Wacom graphics tablets into musical instruments. It was loads of fun, and sponsored by Wacom! Dare to be Digital is associated with the interactive scene and that brings me to another name, Abertay University, who provided a super interesting experience. I got into Abertay through the Scottish Arts Council which is an example of the Venn diagrams I was discussing because I was originally placed at Abertay to be a digital media artist and my work in Abertay has continued since the end of my residency.
SG: One of the things you showed us at NEoN was the sound into form example where you were using old digital bus signs to illustrate sound in a physical manner under the title "Expected Arrival Time".
YS: That's a funny story. Dundee City Council ended up having fifty surplus LED bus signs and they approached Abertay to see if I wanted to do something and, I said yes of course, I was interested and it became part of the Winter Night Light Festival. It was a two meter tall tower which flashes different patterns in relation to sound. There's a video up on my website.
SG: You talk about the Venn diagram with you at the centre. Would you like to merge them into one?
YS: Yes that would be my dream.
SG: Can we start with discussing Mujik on the iPhone?
YS: I think that's a very good illustration of it. The merging of the sound design with music and game has been my focus for the past year or so. Mujik was the first fully realised way I have been trying to do that and so far it has been the most successful.
I was doing this through my company and what two friends and I were trying to do was look at a musical concept in how to rearrange sound. The grid thing was nothing groundbreaking although we pushed that further than it had been done before but when we first started it Mujik was literally a grid of pink squares and nothing to look at. We wanted to adapt that into something that hadn't been done before and the thing the music industry has widely ignored is the accessibility of a fun interface.
SG: Yes some instructions for music creators are so complex.
YS: Yes there's a weird disconnect and I see it from the perspective that there is so much power in the digital media that the design of the software has run away with the power of things. There are software synthesisers with four thousand settings which is great for some but the vast majority of people don't need that many settings. You can probably do sounds with just six settings and then why not have those settings arranged in a way that is fun to play with, intuitive and accessible. That accessibility will give far more depth than a zillion features would.
So we ended up paring down a lot of the features, meta grids and effects, we were going to put into Mujik but then we said, "let's have three tracks with one grid for each and some motion control and muting and some other very clever and small intuitive features". That was a third of the design and the rest was interface. We spent tons of time with this really good designer to work out how the navigational issues would work given, although you have multi-touch you can ultimately realistically manipulate one sound at a time how do you control that and separate the different levels and interact with them? It was all about making different interfaces that looked tactile and were something you wanted to touch and explore.
Certain elements weren't clear until you touched them and then they were explained. What happens needs to be rewarding enough to make people get involved with it and have a sense of agency making them feel they have engagement in what music is being made. That makes them explore more; so we're setting up challenges and rewarding them for success with another challenge but also showing them in the reward that there are other paths they can take. The user interaction is very gaming centric: combining fun, game and music.
The release was really interesting as the positive reviews, even on technical sound websites, recognised what we were trying to do straight away and that was the measure of success for me. We created something charming and mysterious to them and it was something that hadn't been done before in music software.
I see it fitting into a small and growing trend in software music development.
Where are you going now then?
YS: The new version of Mujik is definitely a hint of where we want to go. There are now four loops of music rather than the one of the original. I want Mujik to become a more flexible system where artists and musicians can release their music in a re-mixable format. A lot of small funky labels want to do this but it's finding one that wants to front the project. I think we're getting there. This would add a more social version where you can render your song and one button press will upload it to a website where others can listen to all the remixes people have done round the world.
We have a couple of other ideas for iPhone and what unites all of them is a different approach to the interface. One is a grid based sampler which records into tracks you roll a ball across. Sampling live audio and then playing it back. Obviously the end product needs some kind of aesthetic and user interface which presents it in a more interesting way. Possibly making it look like a pinball machine.
All the ideas we're working on are about turning a gaming style thing into a music creation and music sharing system.
Ultimately some of the concepts you're talking about would suit bigger consoles.
YS: Oh yes.
Have you had any contact with the console world?
YS: I definitely want to get into the console world and the PSN and Xbox Live market would be perfect but there are development cycle problems. I'm far too small a player to create a console game on my own. Mujik, for example, would work brilliantly on the Wii due to its interactive elements but you need to have created a game to get a license to work with any of the big three.
It's quite hard and the other way is to partner with a games company and I'm willing to do that but it's hard to find one with the time, dedication and vision to make music creation tools which are different from Guitar Hero as that's already been done. Although all the people I've worked with have been great our requirements haven't quite matched up yet.
It's really tough and the iPhone allows me to develop quickly and easily.
I went on Dragon's Den to try and get some money for a Wii remote structure and even though they thought it was ridiculous a lot of games developers made contact with me. Unfortunately none of these quite worked out which was frustrating as we had a killer design that could have taken over the console world. Although the money I made allowed me to do Mujik.
What has Scotland done for you?
YS: Scotland has made my career. It trained me and I got grants after my masters.
What is the biggest block in the industry?
YS: Lack of original thinking beyond the game world and the game development world goes both ways. Just as the art and music world will support their own above the other and pull back to form. They're all reticent of risking experimenting with something new.
I would rather see five companies taking a chance with cheaper experimental games than concentrating on huge titles that extend already existing franchises.
There are experimental games and designs going on there but this returns to the problem of having had to create a game to get a license or being accepted into one of these companies. I'd love to see something a bit more experimental and Denki is trying with a certain aesthetic to their games that works very well for them.
Although Yann is making money from his business there's a man here with some fantastic ideas and concepts that could be developed into something completely new.
We at SquareGo hope he finds that niche and one of the console development companies takes a chance on looking at what Yann is doing and the potential benefits they could reap.
You can also follow Yann Seznec on Twitter.