House of Ashes and the science of sound

Welcome to this feature about House of ashes, Launches Today for Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S in the Xbox Store. I’m Barney Pratt, Audio Director for Supermassive Games. Today I’m going to explain our cinematic approach to music, for this game and the larger series, and how we develop a signature motif that can span space and time.

Each of the Dark Pictures Anthology The games span a completely different world, time period, and story, so we want to offer a completely different musical score. Whether it’s character themes, location themes, giving subconscious clues, or deliberately deflecting direction, music is the loudest audio element to follow and propel the broader narrative arcs and moments as the characters and the story progress. history.

We have developed a complex hybrid system of movie and game music techniques to fully immerse the player in the Dark Pictures cinematic experience. We create and edit custom music tracks to precisely match on-screen action not only for a precise event, but also for each related event in the broader story arc, allowing themes to repeat, expand, and change as required. dictates the narrative. We need to deliver a completely flawless cinematic musical journey through all of the story’s key options, choices, paths, dilemmas, and turning points, so the difficulty here is creating each musical cue to transition and flow without the player find out while they are directing your own story.

Music style choices stem directly from the narrative, and we get a real buzz by setting different instruments, tracks, and themes that really work to enhance that story. For Medan Man, we look at the youth, the waves of the sea and the fierce and violent brutality of the events to come. For Little hopeFlashbacks to the dark times of the Salem and Andover Witch Trials of 1692, we take a historical approach, investigating instruments from that time. These lonely lone instruments sounded like a lament to these omen events, and it was quite a challenge to deliver the cinematic mechanics of a horror game with such a thin and limited score, but we stayed in the direction, playing with volume and proximity. to activate. the horror. For the theme of the main character in Little hope, Jason Graves composed a simple 6-note motif on an aged piano that offered an in-depth explanation of the main character’s part in the story and clues about his emotional journey and its outcome (no spoilers!).

We collaborate with Jason as soon as possible, and this is vital to the soundness of the score. When it came to House of ashes, we were presented with a narrative that had a consistent element, something that deserved its own recurring musical phrase. We called this our ‘signature sound’, which needed to work across multiple musical cues and deliver a huge emotional range, from something subtle and unnerving to more dramatic situations, representative of key narrative moments within the game.

At first this was envisioned as an organic overlay of the music, and I remember Jason sending in the first samples that included a ‘coo’ from a pigeon. A bird’s larynx vibrates so fast that the sound it generates is incredibly pure and survives a lot of manipulation in terms of pitch and stretch in the audio mix, so this was an amazing starting point, however it didn’t give us enough. control and variety. We knew it had to be simple: subtle and smooth enough to underline conversations and dialogue, but also jarring enough to instill fear in the player.

Using that original sample as a kind of template, Jason got to work and followed up with a great musical arrangement, a simple phrase, laying down, pitching, diving, lurching, warning, something that could be played on multiple instruments, in different keys and on. different tempos, superimposed, transformed and repeated, but never identical. Each variation exactly matches the level of fear, dread, or power of that narrative element in the game at the time, but is still representative of that signature sound that plays throughout the game and is therefore completely recognizable.

Its simplicity allowed it to be very versatile, played with instruments synonymous with Sumerian culture, through orchestral instrumentation to a synthesized arrangement that implies the technological advance exposed in history. We could transpose the technique to different keys and different tempos to give it more kick, more intrigue, more push, whatever we wanted.

This was completely in sync with the broader musical direction and progression of the score as the story unfolds. The game opens in a historical setting about 2000 years ago with a matching percussion soundtrack, and as the horror begins to unfold, we move on to timeless horror orchestral instrumentation, later, as the narrative exposes a twist. In addition, we move on to synthesizers. to emphasize accomplishment for the player.

I hope you enjoyed this look at the Dark Pictures audio world and how we created the soundtracks for gamers. House of ashes comes out today, October 22, and we can’t wait for everyone to play it!

Thank you for your time.