My main contribution for the submission was the ambiences and music for the video-game. When I joined the group most of the foley sounds were already done or assigned to someone. So I took the responsibly of music.
Reading the notes given by the video-game students, I have a very small reference to what they wanted. Just using words like: emotive, melancholic or optimistic music. So I did the music without much reference to sound or visuals. Just did some ambient tracks that felt “video-gamey”.
I did some that were more intended as background music. Just doing drones and granular compositions. Nothing too complex.
The ‘optimistic’ piece was made in Ableton as a long jam. I wanted to only use square waves, which is what would make it sound the most suitable for a video-game, and I wanted to use many different sequencers that were sequencing each other, to get complex and evolving sequences, similar to using mixers or sequential switches on the modular to combine sequences. Used a quantized at the end with a mayor scale. I used some of the max for live sequencers, ‘step sequencer’ and ‘MDD Snake’ which is a clone of the Make Noise ‘Rene’, I love this sequencer because it can make really nice evolving stuff.
I ended up doing more than 10 different compositions all of them ranging between 8-20 minutes, because I though it having longer recordings would give us more possibility of being able to properly match the sound with the visuals when we actually had them. I also ended up using lots of old material and processing that, just to have even more material to work with
Having longer sounds in the video-game would make it sound more interesting instead of short loop, making something that sounds more generative, which I guess can evoke a sense of immersion.
It was pretty fun having to do lots of ambient tracks, this was something I was really into a couple of years ago, but feels like I kinda left that behind. So I was a great way to reconnect with this genre of music which I love