Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was one of the fathers of modern psychology, and the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. “Atonal music,” they add, “has a high arousal potential that is likely going beyond the pleasure peak for most listeners.” Brand New and Endlessly Complicated “A stimulus’ arousal potential is mostly modulated by variables such as complexity, surprise, ambiguity and novelty,” writes the research team for Frontiers in Neuroscience. So what happens when music isn’t trying to achieve that goal? Instead of making the listener feel safe, the music instead tries to make the listener feel unsteady and anxious. “The interplay between the violation and confirmation of these expectations is widely accepted to be a key underlying mechanism for music-induced pleasure in tonal music.” “When listening to music, individuals constantly generate expectations about future events and about how the music will evolve,” observes a team of researchers in an article for Frontiers in Neuroscience. When our predictions come true, we feel a little spark of pleasure and self-satisfaction as we perceive that everything occurred precisely as we thought it would. In other words, we are always trying to figure out the structure of music – to learn its rules and habits, so that we can predict its outcomes. “Listening to music is conceived of as a form of statistical inference learning.” “This has been proposed as an overarching principle of neurocognitive functioning: biological agents are constantly striving to minimize the long-term average of perceived surprise,” writes Nils Krause of the Freie Universität Berlin. How do our brains interpret music? According to an article in The Journal of Neuroscience, it may all be a matter of expectations – that is, we feel most at ease when we can anticipate what will come next. One of the more intriguing aspects of music is its relationship with human cognition. Some of my previous articles have considered the fascinating psychology of music, and how the brain receives and enjoys musical content. How can music best convey the sensation of peril? In order to answer this question, let’s first consider how the brain perceives music. I knew that this atmosphere of uncertainty would be very important in the musical choices I made for the score of Jurassic World Primal Ops.

Great peril resides at the heart of both this game and the famous Jurassic franchise as a whole. Whereas a shooter might strive to make players feel well-armed and powerful, this game does the opposite. While gameplay superficially resembles an action shooter, players are armed only with tranquilizer guns and must depend on dinosaur allies in order to survive and complete objectives. The gameplay mechanic involves tracking dinosaurs, surviving their attacks, and battling human enemies - so danger is a constant. Here’s a video of Jurassic World Primal Ops gameplay that features the musical score I composed for the game: The game is an action-adventure in which players are tasked with collecting dinosaurs, leveling them up to the top of their awesome strength, and then deploying them during missions to defeat enemies. The action of the game is set in various locales across North America following the calamitous release of the dinosaurs from the Lockwood estate at the end of the popular film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. In this capacity, players undertake missions to rescue dinosaurs from poachers, mercenaries, and other malevolent forces. The Jurassic World Primal Ops video game casts players in the roles of expert dinosaur handlers working for the Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW). But first, let’s briefly discuss the game itself. In this article, I’ll be focusing on a couple of broader concepts related to the role that music played in this project. I’ll be giving a lecture during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco about my creative process, and I’ll be including some fine detail about how I planned and constructed this music.

With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to write a brief article that includes a few of the guiding principles that shaped my work on this project.

As a result, I’ve been asked numerous questions about how this score was created. Over the past few months, I’ve been tremendously honored that my score for this game has garnered several award nominations, including Outstanding Original Score for Interactive Media from the Society of Composers & Lyricists, and Music of the Year from the Game Audio Network Guild. So happy you’ve joined us! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my latest projects is the musical score for the video game Jurassic World Primal Ops ( listen to the score here).

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