Hey, I released a new thing on bandcamp! Check it out!
It’s music for Genome, a creepy sci-fi sim I had a lot of fun working on. It’s mostly sketches that didn’t make it into the final game, but I’m still fond of them and thought it could be cool to share the process.
I was initially really pleased with myself about the first sketch (Squelch Genome), and I thought I had totally nailed it on the first pass. But it was totally wrong for the game! The architecture in the game is partly inspired by Antoni Gaudi's bizarre organic-looking buildings, and I think I took "organic" too literally with the squishy squelchy sounds. In the game, the track drew way too much attention to itself.
So then I went back and looked at musical inspirations and one thing that kept coming up in my discussions with Abby, the lead developer, was Edward Artemiev's score for the movie Stalker. There's a lot going on here — the background is based on a 14th century Italian motet, but there are Azerbajaini and Armenian musicians improvising over it, plus effects from the Synthi 100, an obscure Russian synth.
So in reaction to that, the next sketch (Monk Genome) is a lot moodier, with choral layers referencing the motet sound, though I kept most of the percussion layers. This was closer but still not there yet!
Another thing Edward Artemiev used (though not on Stalker) was the ANS Synthesizer, an idiosyncratic Soviet synth that lets you make sounds by drawing spectrograms. Luckily there is a digital version, Virtual ANS, that is very fun to play around with. One neat thing is that it's very easy to get microtonal textures just by drawing a line in a slightly different place. You can hear the Virtual ANS in the background of the third sketch (Ring Genome), it's subtle but it's there, the slightly detuned minor chords that come in and out of focus.
In the middle of all this, I took my kid to the ALF Museum of Paleontology, where they have these "sound boxes" that reproduce the sound of a parasaurolophus crest! I was extremely enchanted with their sound, and I ended up taking a crappy phone recording. I then tried pairing it with the Virtual ANS sounds, and was pleasantly surprised with the result. This sketch (Crest Genome) turned out to be way closer to the right mood than my more meticulously composed attempts.
The other thing I was listening to a lot for reference was the Pathologic 2 soundtrack, which is just incredible all around. Some of the tracks that are mostly just texture are really mesmerizing.
Anyway, these elements came together in the final version that appears in-game (Final Genome). Listening to it against the first version, they don't have much in common! But you can hopefully hear the game of telephone that got me from there to here.
This is a little more drawn out than my usual process for writing video game music, but not by much. I don't always get things right on the first pass and the final result might be really far from the first pass. This is pretty common in music for media! At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, just because the music is good doesn't make it the right music for the situation.
