Sonic Generations: Jun Senoue Answers Your Questions!

A few months ago, we asked our readers if they had any questions for Jun Senoue and the other members of the SEGA audio team that worked on Sonic Generations. It may have taken a bit of time to get the conversation flowing, but we make good on our promises! We don’t disappoint!

After the jump, Jun Senoue has answers to two of our readers’ questions. One answer is short and sweet; the other one is quite lengthy. Check it out!

OSV: When playing Sonic Generations, the music is synced up very well to the actions of Sonic in-game. Was that intentional?

Jun Senoue: There would be no better compliment for me. The sync is intentional, and I tried my best to have the music boost up the pacing of the game, while matching the gameplay on every level.

OSV: A multitude of different musicians and composers have been involved with the Sonic games over the last twenty years, from established VG composers like Yuzo Koshiro, Richard Jacques and Howard Drossin, mainstream musicians like Marty Friedman, Masato Nakamura and Amir Derakh and a massive list of Wavemaster/SEGA employees. How did you pick the list of composers you wanted for the project? Did they pick their own tracks to arrange, or were tracks assigned to them? Was there anyone that you would have liked to include that was unable to contribute?

Jun Senoue: For sound creation, especially music creation, musicians can be involved in the project in 3 ways: composition, arrangement, and performance. For each and every music piece, we try to assign the musician who best suits the piece while also considering how well they match with the situation in which that specific piece will be used. As for arrangements, there are times when we have the musicians handle the entire arrangement, or times when we work together by asking the arranger to handle the part they’re good at. Also, regarding performance, we always think of picking musicians who can manage to double the original fascination of the piece through their performance and song.

On top of all these, this title required us to work on arrangements of 2 different styles, Classic and Modern, for each stage, so we first established the basic style of the pieces, and then assigned people who were cut out for each of them.

A member of our sound team, Naofumi Hataya, has consistently been in charge of the Classic arrangements of the Genesis version game music, and this is because he has been keeping a concrete vision on what it takes a music to be a game music since then. We believe that no one else can better recompose the pieces based on the original music than he can.

As for the remixes Cash Cash and Circuit Freq worked on, we asked them to take on the pieces their music style matched with the arrangement we had in mind. Cash Cash was featured in one of the vocal music in Sonic Colors, and Circuit Freq is a side project of one of the members of Julien-K, featured in Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog. Cash Cash has told us that the first Sonic title they played in their childhood was Sonic 3, which was also the first Sonic title that I was involved in. And so, the piece we arranged together has certainly become something that represents this specific title, Sonic Generations.

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Thanks to SEGA and Senoue-san for their cooperation. We hope to hear more from them in the future! Check out more regarding Sonic Generations and the SEGA sound team at the official SEGA Blog.