Like I said in the Sound Bible, I wanted a simple melody, one that a beginner could play. But the main reason was that although I had learnt a few instruments and could play some of them, my knowledge of music theory was basically non-existent, so it would have been very difficult for me to try and write a tune out on my own.
So I found a tune that met my expectations, Hi by TEMPOREX, and I referenced his compositional structure and wrote two beats. I wanted something like lo-fi music that kept ambient sounds or imperfect recordings in the music, so I added drone white noise to those two beats, and I recorded the sound of my computer fan, and the fire alarm going off in my room, and put them together.
This is the original draft, but as I was writing it I didn’t realise that the first two paragraphs were the same as Hi, probably because I was listening to it unconsciously. So I cut out the very first beats.
This is the recording of the white noise, I used my phone to record it which I guess could make the effect closer to what I want.
Further Processing:
Final Edition：
I added a right hand melody to the initial rhythm. It made the rhythm sound more like a complete tune, but I didn’t apply this to the prototype, firstly because it wasn’t complete enough and couldn’t be looped over and over again all the time, so the rhythm was more just my personal exploration of creating music.
Second Edition:
In the second version I explored a more satisfying right hand melody which was also the prototype for the final version, but the beat was too much faster than I expected, so this version was not edited further.
First Edition:
The initial version followed exactly as I had drafted it, but because I initially wrote the pitch wrong and made the main melody a soprano melody, which led to an unclear left-hand melody, I reversed the left and right-hand melody in the second version.
Reference:
Hi by TEMPOREX
The song has a simple melody, but the addition of the post-electronic soundscape gives it a very dreamy and slightly spooky feel. I was inspired to create the soundtrack after seeing it played on another video site using a musical keyboard similar to a child’s toy.
This song (start around 8 second) got me hooked when I first entered this map. Especially the intro, the lo-fi soundscape with steam-like murmurs coupled with the sounds of machinery running from the game environment gave it a steampunk and decadent feel. This is why I chose to include empty room noises in my background music.
Family Tune by Rusry Lake: Roots
The style of this game, Rusty Lake, was something that I wanted to apply to the prototype of my game, and I tried to refer to this song at the very beginning of composing the background music, which has a more cheerful structure as waltz, but this song gives off a heavy vibe. The reason I couldn’t realise this structure is that the chords are a very important part of the song, as the left-hand melody needs to loop all the time, but I wasn’t sure I could write the chords to fit it perfectly, so I just gave up.
Leave a Reply