In Silent Hill, the radio in your pocket hisses before anything appears. You are walking through fog, alone, and there is nothing in sight. The static rises. You stop, or you run, and only then does something step out of the white.
The man who built that hiss described the idea in one sentence: "Instead of predictable BGM, I tried to play only atmospheric sounds or to use noise when an enemy appears." The game came out for the PlayStation in 1999. Before it, nobody at Konami had asked him to invent anything of the kind.
He had not planned this life. Akira Yamaoka was born in Niigata on February 6, 1968. "I wanted to be a designer in the first place," he told Game Developer magazine in 2007. Then he started working with CG on a computer, and, in his words, he learned that he could make music with the computer. He joined Konami in 1993. His first assignments were Contra: Hard Corps and the Sparkster games.
Konami decided to make a horror game. Yamaoka later described the team this way: "The project team was organized with people called from different projects in the company at the time." It was not a team that had been picked for glory. Wikipedia, summarizing his accounts, says that when a composer was needed he volunteered, reportedly believing he was the only one who could make the soundtrack. He was hired as a composer and soon found himself responsible for the sound of the whole game.
He had a complaint about the work he knew. "I was thinking a lot about game soundtracks before Silent Hill and I thought it was lacking creativity," he said in a Konami interview. His answer was to use less tune and more atmosphere. In his words, the music of Silent Hill is the result of trying to make people sense fear and hatred "without visual signs but with symbolic sound."
Silent Hill 2 followed in 2001. He later named it his favorite of his own soundtracks. From Silent Hill 3 on he was also credited as a producer, so the sound and the shape of the game were being decided by the same person. He has named Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails as his main inspiration, an influence that came from outside the game industry.
On December 2, 2009, Konami announced that he was leaving the company after sixteen years. On February 3, 2010, he joined Grasshopper Manufacture and worked with Goichi Suda and Shinji Mikami on Shadows of the Damned. His name appeared again in the credits of Silent Hill f in 2025.
The radio hisses before the thing arrives. In your own life, what is the hiss, and when it starts, do you listen, or do you turn it down?