Blog Post #4 Background music
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!Link to sound clip at the end! Welcome back once again to my blog, today I will tell you about my design process with the background music as the lead sound designer of team Cockatrice. Take a moment and picture yourself in this situation. You are out at sea on a chilly night, it’s hard to anything and it’s critical that you are able to navigate through these waters to get home. The wind is in your face, you’re shivering from the cold and you hear the choppy sea around you and the creaking of your boat. Even though it’s unsafe you try to travel faster through the waters. You hear something, what is it? The boat shudders and tilts as something hits it, a rock? You look into the water and you see only part of a creature moving swiftly away. Then you notice the breach in your boat and the way home has never been farther away. Now how do you translate this into music? Traveling by boat is a slow process so the music must match its pace as to not jar the player and break the immersion with the disparity in between. The music is there to enhance the simulation and envelop the player’s senses into the game’s world. Match the pace and the player will fall into the immersion. This thought applies to the instruments as well. Even if the pace is slow an electric guitar would seem out of place. Where did the Mad Max guitarist come from? Is not a thought I want the player to have. A better choice would be a wind instrument. Remeber in the setting described above the wind and sea are the two major components of the setting. For the background music, I used two different instances of a Japanese flute to capture this. One track was more drawn out and keep more of a constant tone throughout just like the wind while the second has shorter bursts of tone in consequence like a boat being rowed through the water. Now we have a base which roughly matches the environment. Now how the music be taken further to enhance the sense of danger described above? First of all is to bring the flutes down a few octaves since flutes usually have a lighter pitch which is to lighthearted too match the setting. Drawing the tones out will not only match the environment but also the sense of the long journey ahead. This makes the music sound eerier and can put the player more at edge but it’s still not dangerous. This is where the drums come into play. A single drumbeat is played intervally throughout. It punctuates the tones of the short bursts of flute and brings more action to the track. While the flute is playing eerily the drumbeats keep you awake and at attention because the creatures are still out there and there is always a risk that you will hit something as you travel. The gong sound that is heard in the middle of the snippet is to give a bit more variation in the track and to amplify the feeling of the fog since a gong have a nice echo sound to it. Here is a small snippet of the background music, the full refined version will be seen in the completed game as I don’t want to ruin the firsthand experience of our game for the game design students reading this.
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