Learning About Background Sounds

Description

This semester in echoes, I have the role of game design and developer but also the side role of sound production for Room For Growth (RFG). I wanted to talk about my experience with the sound side of my role because coming into this role I had more experience and comfortableness with sound effects but I didn’t have the same experience in background music which led to a new opportunity to learn. In understanding how to create RFG music I had to focus on two key aspects. The feeling of the music RFG was trying to elicit and general rules of the genre of music we were aiming for in our aesthetic.

The Role Our Sound Has

The first thing that I was looking at with sound was considering the role it held in our game. In every game the use of sound as another point in which the player can connect to your game. It has to be considered in the overall aesthetic and in our case the sound for RGC held a heavy role because as our game design is meant to frustrate the player, the sound was meant to contract that and be calming. This would make it so that the player continued to play even though they were a little frustrated with the game. In addition to that our game intentionally uses the lack of onboarding to frustrate the player as their plant dies which means that our music needs to progressively “become dull”. The reason this is so important to consider is as our art aesthetic changes to become more dull the music has to mimic this as well to be cohesive together. The way I ended up going about this as discussed with the team was slowly removing key parts of the melody or instruments which created almost “gaps” in the sound. These gaps led the player to fill as though something was wrong which aligns with the fact the plant is dying. This aspect was a little tricky however and has to be consistently playtested as having too strong of gaps create uneasiness which changes our game’s feeling from frustration to uneasiness.

Lofi Music Genre

The second thing that I focused on was the genre we were choosing and how to follow that in music. Continuing the idea of us trying to create a calming effect in our music, we ended up choosing the Lofi Beat genre of music for our game. This genre actually helped me out a lot as given I’m newer to creating soundtracks, Lofi has a ton of tutorials given how prevalent it is used in music. One specific thing to note about Lofi Beats is the tempo of the music which in the genre tends to be between 60 to 90 beats per minute. Lofi requires the slower tempo to create that calming effect. For that reason, a lot of the first tracks that I’ve made have been in the range of 55 - 65bpm as we were trying to gauge through playtests where we want our tempo to be. We ended up deciding that the tempo of 58 bpm for our music as it was slow and gave that calming effect we were after. I also had to consider the drum and snare speed that is common in the Lofi sounds. Originally I made the beat have the drum and snare alternating every 2 beats, which I noticed is a little too fast. The repetitiveness of the drum and snare so frequently actually turned the sound to become annoying after listening to it for a while. This was confirmed in playtest after receiving feedback that the sound at some point becomes very repetitive and led to me switching the drum and snare to alternate every 4 beats. This dramatically slowed down the sound and was less repetitive to match what we are aiming for.

The semester is not done and learning about these music processes is still happening each week. I’m still gaining more knowledge about lofi beats and how music can elicit a calming emotion every time I work on a new track. That being said, this is all the takeaways I’ve had so far in this project and I wanted to talk about this to highlight that even in working a role on a team there is still so much room to learn and broaden your skillset. I’m pretty excited to see how what I learned about the sound production side of development can further enhance projects I work in my future.