Interactive music is why I want to make music for games. Creating music where the listener has almost complete control over how they hear it is extremely inspiring to me. Making video game music is the closest a composer can come to having an actual conversation with their audience. It allows the player to have an extremely immersive experience, and when done well can guide the player emotionally through a game. The ability for the music to adapt to the players actions is an extremely important part of any game looking to sound professional.

I ended up writing a piece of music that teeters on the edge of being an ambient piece. This ended up serving the project the best because ambient-adjacent music tends to be a little more flexible when it comes to rhythm and harmony. This allows me to worry less about which instrument variations are playing together at any one time, making the implementation side of things easier. Leaning into the flexibility this style of music gave me from the get go made the whole process much easier. 

I ended up with 5 tracks/instruments. The Melody, Pads, and Bass tracks come as advertised: the Melody track has all of the melody variations, the Pads track has all of the pad or chord variations, and the Bass track has all of the bass variations. The final 2 are both effect tracks, one being the FX track (go figure) and the other is the crunch track. The FX track has 2 variations, vinyl static and tonal ambience. The Crunch track is every Melody variation ran through a distortion/bitcrusher effect. Then I reversed the polarity of the original Melody track and recorded the output when I played the Melody track and the Crunch track at the same time. Because the polarity of the original melody was reversed, it cancelled out any identical information in the Crunch track, leaving only the distorted effect. Crunch_x is the distorted version of the corresponding Melody variation!

When composing, from the get go I used dissonant harmonies like 2nds and 7ths. This gave me a lot of wiggle room when it came to mixing and matching each variation with each other. Starting with these extended harmonies meant that if a variation added one of these intervals/harmonies inadvertently, it wouldn’t seem out of place. For similar reasons I kept the rhythmic content quite simple. Keeping it simple would mean that there wouldn’t be too many rhythmic clashes between variations, and by keeping the most complex rhythms in the Melody variations the more complex rhythms seem intentional in every context. 

The biggest challenge when composing was hearing each variation in every combination. While I tried to make this process as easy as possible, there were still many times when certain variations just really didn’t work with each other during the composition process. The strategy I settled on was to make a complete loop that used every instrument, creating the first set of variations. I then muted all but one instrument and composed a new variation using the remaining instrument as a foundation. In practical terms that means I would create one complete combination of all five instruments, ending up with Melody_1, Pads_1, Bass_1, Crunch_1, and FX_1. Then I wrote Melody_2 over Bass_1, creating the second melody variation. I used the new Melody_2 as a guide to compose a new set of variations, ending up with Melody_2, Pads_2, Bass_2, Crunch_2, and FX_2. I could repeat this process as many times as I liked. I of course had to check each new variation with previous combinations, however this approach meant that every combination was connected. Connecting each variation and combination in this way meant that it was more likely each variation would fit together in novel combinations.

I’m happy with the final result. I think the music I composed for this project served the aims of the project well, and was a good chance for me to explore this space compositionally.