Painting Music

We needed some music for the painting scene and I volunteered. Rosa had sent us some early screenshots of the space. From this, I could see that most of the sounds that would be used in the space would be natural environmental sounds, such as water, wind and maybe rustling leaves.

I also thought it would be important to have a different mood and energy level to the other spaces, so opted for a more calm mood. Initially, Rosa wanted more ‘epic’ orchestral music, inspired by anime, however, I thought I would be defiant and make something that might change her mind.

Because of this, I decided to make something inspired by the Japanese Environmental Music scene or Kankyo Ongaku, and Hiroshi Yoshimura in particular, as I felt this would go quite well on top of the environment.

These albums in particular were my main influences for the track. ‘Nine Postcards’ is my favourite of them, for its minimal yet emotional compositions. The version of the album Green that includes environmental sound effects/field recordings was what initially made me think the music would work.

(https://blackcountryrock.co/2019/04/19/kankyo-ongaku-a-brief-history-of-japanese-ambient-music/_)

There’s an article here talking a bit about the history of this scene of music.

https://theoutline.com/post/4181/ambient-video-game-legend-of-zelda

This article above also links ambient music in games and the link to Japanese environment music, though its also a shame that it doesn’t touch on the topic of Minecraft in it, one of the most successful games of all time, and how the soundtrack was inspired by Aphex Twin (as well as Eno and Satie).

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/837-gamings-best-ambient-tracks/

Screenshots

Most of the time was spent composing the actual music. Instrument wise I used Spitfire Audio’s Felt Piano in an instrument rack with Ableton’s Electric (an electric piano, similar to that in Yoshimura’s music), this layered the instrument and gave it more personality than if it were just a simple piano.

There was then a pad layer that added more weight to the track, while still keeping it quite minimal. This was using Ableton’s Wavetable synth which was slowly modulated to go through the waveform.

The final track was a sampled loop of the piano that I put through as a granulator patch that I made in Max. This added a small build-up to the ‘bridge’ section of the composition between the simple and expanded version

Aftermath/Reflection

I think it would have been good to spacialise the music in the environment, yet it doesn’t really make much sense to me as the sound is non-diagetic. Later on, we incorporated the melody in a puzzle where the player had to play a simplified version of the melody on the whale’s bones. I think it would have also been possible to add generative elements to the music if we had been using FMOD. The version I made for the game was made with the intention of being looped so I didn’t make it very dynamic, or have noticeable moments of beginning and end.