Working with classical music in our games

Introduction

Audio is an integral part of all our games, and music specifically has been a central focal point. From working with talented musicians to compose original scores for the street musicians in Mosaic, to using a lullaby the whole team grew up with in Among the Sleep. In our two smaller games, The Plan and Sunlight however, we decided to use powerful classical works to carry the narrative and emotion of the games, and we thought it would be fun to elaborate a bit on this process.

Contains spoilers for The Plan and Sunlight.

Decisions

On all our projects, the starting point for the music was the emotional and narrative goal of the project as a whole. It might seem obvious, but really picking apart what the game is, was key to understanding what we want to achieve with the music.

In The Plan, we chose Death of Aase by Edvard Grieg (give it a listen!) because of its grandiose feeling of ascending ever upwards, going somewhere. To us it also manages to combine a sense of personal and delicate tragedy, with the enormity of life and death, which will make sense to anyone who has played the game.

For Sunlight, we chose Tchaikovsky's Cherubim Hymn. Firstly, we knew we had to work with a choir, as it captures the core theme of being one with each other and our surroundings quite literally. This piece also has a divine existential element to it, which hit all narrative nails on the head. And just listen to it – it really does sound like sunlight. We were lucky to work with Kammerkoret Aurum and Ambolt Audio, and the session can be seen/heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvS_jaIogV8

Production and Implementation

While working on The Plan we were fortunate to get a local orchestra, Oslo Cameratas, permission to use their rendition of Death of Aase. This was most likely possible because the project had little to no budget, and we were releasing it for free.

For the first section of the game we used manipulation techniques, separating chords from the song into long ambient drones. This creates a serene and subtle musical backdrop, while at the same time allowed us to establish the song before it would play.

We then split the piece into parts, selecting the first two major parts we wanted to use. The first part plays as you approach the canopy of the forest. The second, and more climatic section, starts once the forest disappears, and you enter the universe. The hope was that players might not notice the transition, so it is somewhat timed to your move speed, if you are in continuous motion.

In the games end, it was crucial to time the musical climax perfectly to the fly impacting the lamp – which was tricky since the player naturally controls the fly. To achieve this we actually move the lamp in addition to the fly for the final minute of the game – so if you continuously fly up we push the lamp away, and if you stay still the lamp is actually approaching you. Because of the framing this turned out to be completely invisible to players.

Now on to Sunlight! Here we also split the piece into parts, although a lot more. We ended up looping sections of the music based on how far in the game narrative the player is to tailor the general structure of the piece to the dramaturgy of the experience. Below is a visualisation of how the parts