A conversation with a composer about writing music for menus

Lena Voss has scored four console releases over the past decade, including two major strategy series and one horror game whose main theme has outlived the game itself on streaming playlists. What she doesn't get asked about as often is her menu music, despite the fact that, by her own estimate, players spend more total listening hours on a main menu loop than on any single track from the game itself. We sat down to talk about writing for the screen everyone wants to click through as fast as possible.

The music nobody asked for and everybody hears

"The joke I make to other composers is that the main menu is the only track in the whole game guaranteed to be heard by a hundred percent of players," Voss says. "You could skip every cutscene, mute every other piece of music in the soundtrack, and you will still hear the menu theme, because you have to sit on that screen to start the game and quit it. That's a strange kind of pressure. It's the least dramatic music I write and the most-listened-to by a wide margin."

That math shapes almost every decision she makes early in a project. "I ask for the menu brief before almost anything else now, because it tells me more about the tone of the whole game than a lot of story documents do. If a studio wants the menu theme to be a quiet, ambient loop, that tells me the whole score is probably going to lean restrained. If they want something with a hook in the first four bars, that's a different game, even if nobody's told me the combat system yet."

Writing something that has to loop forever

The technical constraint Voss comes back to repeatedly is looping. A menu track isn't written to be heard once; it's written to be heard for however long a player happens to sit there, which could be five seconds or five minutes while they go make coffee. "You're writing music that has to survive being heard fifty times in a row by someone who isn't even paying attention to it anymore, and then suddenly be interesting again the one time they do stop and listen. That's a much harder brief than writing four minutes of music that plays once during a boss fight and is never heard again."

• Menu loops are typically structured in short, modular phrases rather than a traditional verse-chorus arrangement.
• Transition points are written to be seamless at multiple possible loop lengths, since players exit at unpredictable moments.
• Dynamic layering, where instruments fade in the longer a player lingers, is increasingly common to avoid fatigue.
• The first four to eight seconds carry disproportionate weight, since that's the version most players will actually register.

The horror game theme that got away from her

Voss's best-known piece of music is, somewhat to her amusement, not from any of her strategy game scores but a two-minute ambient menu loop from a horror game she scored early in her career. "It was supposed to be the least important piece of music in the entire project. I wrote it in an afternoon because I was behind schedule on the actual level themes, and it's the thing people still message me about a decade later. I think it works because I wasn't trying to impress anyone with it. I was just trying to make a menu that felt unsettling enough that you wanted to press start and get it over with."

She's careful not to oversell the lesson from that experience. "I don't think the moral is 'write it fast and it'll be good,' because that's obviously not generally true. I think the moral is that menu music gets judged on a completely different axis than the rest of a score, and sometimes the thing that works for that axis isn't the thing you'd expect walking in."

What she'd tell a composer starting out

Asked what advice she'd give a newer composer about to score their first menu screen, Voss doesn't hesitate. "Don't treat it as the warm-up track. Treat it as the piece of music that has to work the hardest for the least attention, because that's actually what it is. If you can make something that holds up on a twentieth loop while someone's reading patch notes, you've learned something about restraint that will make every other piece of music in your score better too."

Working around a design team, not just a director

One thing Voss says surprised her early in her career is how many people outside the audio department end up having opinions about the menu theme specifically, more than almost any other piece of music in a project. "Programmers have opinions about it because they hear it every single time they boot a build to test something, sometimes dozens of times a day. That's a different kind of feedback than a creative director giving notes on a boss theme they've heard twice. By the time we lock a menu track, I've usually had input from people whose job has nothing to do with music, purely because they've logged more hours with that loop than almost anyone else on the team."

She's learned to treat that unusual feedback channel as useful rather than annoying. "If three programmers independently tell you a loop point is distracting, they're not being precious about music theory, they're telling you something true about fatigue over repeated listens that a director hearing it fresh in a review meeting literally cannot tell you. I take that feedback more seriously now than I did on my first project."

The piece that taught her to stop overwriting

Voss describes an earlier, unreleased menu theme she scrapped entirely after a similar round of internal feedback. "It was ambitious, it had three distinct sections, and it was exhausting after the fourth loop. I'd written it like a concert piece instead of a piece of environmental furniture, and once a few people told me the same thing in different words, I understood what I'd actually done wrong. I replaced it with something a third the length and much simpler, and it's one of the pieces I'm proudest of precisely because it does less. That project taught me more about restraint than anything else I've written."

Voss is currently scoring her fifth project, a cooperative survival game she declined to name ahead of its announcement, and says the menu theme was, unsurprisingly, the first piece of music she wrote for it.