Recently, our Community Manager Yuuhi had the opportunity to sit down with SpryNoisy, the Audio Lead currently working on Spirit Crossing. The following blog is a transcript of the Q&A that originally took place in Discord (with gentle edits here and there for blog-friendly formatting, of course.)
There’s quite a bit of information to share, so grab a warm drink, bundle up, get cozy and let’s dive right into the world of game audio design!
Yuuhí: I’m Yuuhí, I’m the CM for Spirit Crossing here on Discord. And this is SpryNoisy, he is responsible for music content and songs. But we can start with the first question, actually: How did you get into this kind of role?
SpryNoisy: Well, hello everybody, first. I use he/him pronouns. Thanks everybody for coming and listening. I’m excited to chat with you all, actually.
How did I get into this? My background is in theater, actually. And, so I started, I’ve been working in theater for a very long time, and wanted to move into games, into something different. About 10 years ago, via kind of like VR experiences, did some sound for that and continued to work on it. And then sort of mid-pandemic, wanted to shift a little bit more resolutely into making sound for games.
And so I, through a mutual friend, who was a good friend of mine since I was a kid, and his friend, who is one of the directors at Spry Fox, we got in touch, and Spry Fox was interested in bringing on a sound person, so we talked, and it worked out, and there was synergy, so here we are. And then we became part of Netflix. But I got into it, I guess via a live performance, theater kind of view. So I, you know, it affects the way I think about sound and how it gets used and how it gets experienced and all of that sort of thing.
Yuuhí: This is awesome, and it is fascinating how those areas are so close but so different, right? Since theater has a lot of sound involved.
SpryNoisy: Well, the mutual friend who started a VR game startup, 10 or 12 years ago now – with a friend. And he, in doing VR games, where you’re kind of immersed in the experience, his first thought was: well, sound-wise, we should hire not necessarily a game person who’s used to working in two dimensions, or at least sort of that screen kind of paradigm, and hire somebody who has experience with how sound functions in space, which is theater. So he called me and said, “Hey, do you want to try this out?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely,” because I was sort of thinking about that anyway. So it all kind of worked out, and it’s been great. I’m really happy to be doing it.
Yuuhí: I’m so happy to have you here. I’ll follow up with more questions as they are related, and I’m also reading from chat. Our first question, not related to your background, was sent by Yukia. He said, For music, what are the mechanics of how the music is arranged and layered since there’s eight different instruments with at least one or two variations?
SpryNoisy: Right. So, the music system, when I started thinking about it, when it was designed, there was a spec that had been written up by a designer about how music would function in the game. And I wanted to make sure that it was also a very musical experience as well. So I thought, well, how do we put something together that’s extensible and manageable, and isn’t going to make us want to go crazy every time we needed to add new content? And make it so we could add features to it, and all kinds of other things.
The thought was to try to leverage industry-standard types of technology, so that there was very little translation between the composing process, or the arranging process and getting into the game. What I started with was trying to figure out how to take MIDI files and get them into the game. So, when you write a song, when the composers write a song, or if we use something that’s in the public domain, the first thing you do is you make an arrangement in MIDI. And I made some rules about the format of the song, and that’s how the mechanic actually works, and how it swaps parts and does all the variations and things like that. So, the songs are agnostic to the instruments that are playing them, and how those instruments are working, right? Because it could be a tree that’s playing a song!
SpryNoisy, continued: Also, any instrument can play any part, but they have their preferences. So, each song has a format, which gives it a series of parts that all work together. And then, as you join a group of people playing songs, the system will figure out what parts are already being played, and then assign you, if it can, to a part that your particular instrument has chosen as a part that it likes to play, that isn’t already being played. So, if you’ll notice, like, if you’re playing the bass instrument, and you’re playing on your own, it will play the melody. But if you join in with somebody else who’s playing the same song, it will play the bass part. And you’ll notice that the horn and the clarinophone will switch, flip-flop who’s playing kind of the counterpoint line, and who’s playing the melody line, and that’s kind of it. The way that the songs are arranged and composed, the parts are kind of archetypal.
So, it is sort of agnostic in terms of who plays what part. The idea there being that we make sure that everything works with everything, because you never know what’s going to happen. You might have like a, you know, a choir of 18 people playing bass, and you, you still need the song to work, and not just be one big kind of giant bass part. So that’s why. When we arrange things, we do it with that in mind to make sure that in terms of the musical experience, it maintains that flexibility of still sounding good and interesting, and then also being fun when you discover that there are different kinds of arrangements.
You can sort of hack it if you want to swap parts with somebody. If one person is playing a clarinophone, and someone else is playing a horn or a flute, and one of you is playing the melody and the other is playing the counterpoint, if you both stop and then reverse who starts first, then you’ll swap parts. So, you can see the inner workings of the system if you play around with it a little bit, and then use that to make musical variations as you’re playing, which is sort of fun.
Yuuhí: Don’t give them ideas because I see Yukia is already taking that as a challenge to gather 18 people playing the bassochord. 😂
SpryNoisy: I would love to hear that! Please make a video if you do that! I think that would be amazing. You know, we’ve got some instruments stuff coming, which I think will be fun. And people will get a lot of enjoyment out of it, I hope.
Yuuhí: A related question that CJ also sent during the question gathering phase of the Q&A: I’m also curious how the four freestyle options are decided for each instrument and song. From what you said, the freestyle option is, whoever fills in later, is that correct?
SpryNoisy: So, any instrument, except for the hand claps at the moment, can improvise at any time. Part of also thinking about the system was to not put too many limitations on it, to just make sort of like a well thought out set of options that could be used at any time, because it becomes unmanageable when you try to impose too many rules. You know, a certain type of ensemble and only one person can improvise at a time, and things like that. So, anyone can improvise at, at any time, and how “good” it sounds, is up to you as a player and how much or how little you want to do it, because you can play the melody and fill in little lines between the melody. Or you can let somebody else take a solo, and then you take a solo, or on some songs where it just plays kind of random notes, which is kind of fun, everybody can just play a lot of noise at the same time if that’s the kind of thing that you’re into.
But the system is sort of attached to, well, not sort of, it’s attached to the motion in your left hand. So, you can move up, in general the idea is, moving up gets you towards higher notes and down towards lower notes, and to the left will get you more sparse playing, and to the right will get you more dense playing. And everything in between. So, it’s, think of cardinal directions, right? You can go, you can go up to the northeast side, right, and get high notes and very dense, for example.
The most obvious place where that’s implemented right now is in the drum and the tambourine. It’s less obvious in the other instruments, because it’s still sort of in process there. But that’s the idea. And then different instruments can have the ability to improvise differently,more arpeggiated improvisation on the mando, for example, and more melodic improvisation on the flute or the clarinaphone.
Yuuhí: We are all figuring out together that there’s a logic to the improvisation, players are super excited to find that out.
SpryNoisy: Yeah, and there are some tricks built into certain instruments, too. So, for example, the flute, which has that double barrel, it has that drone barrel, right? The low note is generated using the improv system while you play. So, it will give you that low pedal tone note while you’re playing, and follow along with whatever the melody is. It will also accompany you if you decide to improvise over it, which is kind of neat. Same with the mando, you get fingerpicking for free.
Yuuhí: CJ also asked, “Does more dense mean more frequent?” In the case of more dense notes, you mean?
SpryNoisy: Yes, yeah. So, it’s not, tempo is not the right word for it, because musical terms get tricky in that way. But yeah, density is what I sort of landed on, right? To the left is less dense, and to the right would be more dense. And I will warn you, if you’re going to look, but also it’s not clear and not finished for every instrument. So, you will find that it’s a little hard to hear in some cases. That’s why I mentioned the drum is the easiest place to hear it.
Yuuhí: Awesome! I can’t wait to see more players sharing videos of them playing and figuring out all the tips and tricks of improvising you mentioned.
SpryNoisy: Yeah, it’s good content for the (fan) wiki, how it works. I’m happy to share. Shouldn’t be a mystery, right?
Yuuhí: Let me jump to the next question. What kind of music are you taking inspiration from for composing the songs in the game?
SpryNoisy: So, for the songs, which are player music, and for the music, which is the underscore, at least that’s how I think about it, and how I divide things up. The idea was to pull from just about every source that I could think of, and mix them up in interesting ways, and try to stay away from anything that was too overly referential to something specific. So, what is that? What does that mean?
That means like, if you’re going to use a, you know, an Indian or a Middle Eastern scale for a song, play it on a piano, or a banjo, or something else, you know? On the other side of that, if you’re going to use a sitar sound, have it playing bluegrass or something like that. And the idea was to kind of create an interesting blend of things with interesting timbers mixed together that you wouldn’t normally necessarily hear together. And then from there, in terms of the musical underscore, it’s about the the spirit of the season, the kind of glow of the season, or the current world event that we’re in, the seasonal event, and trying to create a little suite of music that goes together, that has a certain vibe.
And so we came up across different timbers and types of instruments to use for different seasons, and how to put all those things together. For the songs, I want to and it’s still in process, but the idea is to make sure that we have a representation of different kinds of songs and different styles and different ways of making music together from all over the world. We’ve got American songs, and European folk songs, and Middle Eastern, and Indian, and South American folk songs and sounds that are influenced by all of those different regions. I know I didn’t mention everything, but yeah, raga scales played on piano and etcetera.
So we spoke with the composers, myself and the composers, and they’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to writing the music and then the three of us have been collaborating on how it sounds. And I gave them a series of exercises at the very beginning, when we started working on it, to figure out what the vocabulary would be, and figure out what kind of sounds we wanted and how to put them together, and what was working, and what wasn’t.
So, once we had a good sense of things, then we dug into writing music for the specific parts of the game that we needed. And then, we kind of went from there. And that’s also set up in that kind of archetypal way. There’s the suite, each season has those pieces assigned to it a time of day, kind of like a raga, actually, and also a mood, or a vibe. So, you’ve got the fun and the sense of awe, and you’ve got the dawn and dusk, and you’ve got the stillness and being at home, and all of those things.
Yuuhí: This is fascinating, and also great to hear that there’s influence from all over the world. That opens up a lot of space for new, innovative ways, and experiments in music. And I think that’s why also players appreciate it a lot. A lot of people said they love the Winter music. And there was also a related question asking, uh, I think this was confirmed by yourself on chat, that there was a switch-up for music for Winter, and they asked if there was going to be change of music for every season, and basically you said just yes, right? (laughs)
SpryNoisy: Yeah, every season has its own music. Some of the seasonal events, for those of you who have been around long enough to experience the seasonal events, some of them have their own music. The Harrowing Hunt has an entirely different soundscape for it. But yeah, the music does change. And then, there’s also a question here about music from other Spry Fox games. There are a few Easter eggs in the Village. I leave it like that, obviously, we don’t want to say what Easter eggs are!
But perhaps we’ll dig more into that next time when we post part 2!
– Spry Fox
