Act 2

This page details the process of building a semi-minimalistic orchestral musical score to accompany the character movements from Act 1.

Crafting the Orchestra

In this section of the piece I produced an orchestral score to accompany the character movements with the intention of ascertaining the effect it has on the narrative experience for a player/listener.  For the musical arrangement drew direct inspiration from atmospheric soundtracks in the video games by Bethesda Softworks Starfield and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Oblivion OST inspiration.

Starfield OST inspiration.

Musical arrangement and expressions

The main instruments used for the soundtrack were a blend of Violins, Violas and Celli.  The composition starts off with drone like notes produced with the BBC Symphony Orchestra plugins Celli accompanied by matching Bass notes and begins to introduce french horns to mirror the majestic and spacious music of Starfield.  For the transitional period between Act 2 and Act 3 there was an inclusion of a subtle harp and flute chords to align with the colourful soundscapes you hear in the over world OST of Oblivion.  

Initially the instruments sounded far too robotic, so the next step was to map the expression and modulation controls into the clips envelope then draw automation to give the instruments a more humanised feel and prevent the music from sounding too obvious that the arrangement was created in MIDI.

Expression and Modulation automation.

After adding EQs where necessary, saturators and using compressors to glue the track together into a polished product, the track was bounced and implemented into the session where the footsteps were generated.  It was then I found the music was clearly masking the footsteps, so instead of the footsteps being turned up to a higher dB level, an EQ with a side-chain was added to duck the music down at the very moments of impact where each footstep hits for each terrain texture, clearing plenty of room in the frequency spectrum for the character audio to shine through.

EQ side chain for musical score masking character audio.