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 have produced an orchestral music score to accompany the character movements with the intention of ascertaining the effect it has on the narrative experience for a player/listener.  This musical arrangement here draws inspiration from video games by Bethesda Softworks such as Starfield and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  

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 matching with Basses 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 and 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.

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.

Expression and Modulation automation.

EQ side chain for musical score masking character audio.

Below is the 5 minute excerpt of Act 2 to listen to. (NOT ADDED YET)