Video game audio – release 3. Rime

Hello to you, dear viewer/reader. The third release of the audience is devoted to the analysis of music and sound design Rime. You will find out what principles David Garcia Diaz adhered to when writing music and creating a model of sound environment, which caused the refusal to use words in the narrative, what symbolism has absorbed the image of an orange fox, as well as many other interesting facts about the audio component of the project.

The text version is recommended for familiarization, since it is in it that you will find all links to the sources that are mentioned in the video version.

Listen to the full version of the soundtrack on YouTube.

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Rime music is beautiful, but during the first listening causes absolutely conflicting feelings, especially if you do it in isolation from the game or to its complete passage. The duality of emotions first is at a dead end, it is difficult to understand why. Airy music, inspiring, but the next moment, melancholy and gloomy. The transitions between the compositions are unimaginably smooth, which creates the impression of a single canvas, which can be hidden from reality and drown in solipsism of its own dreams. It is quite difficult to achieve such an effect, which increases the artistic value of a musical work, however, this effect will be felt with a whip of a fan to tear off the album on your favorite tracks, throwing out unnecessary and uninteresting. David Garcia Diaz created a truly outstanding soundtrack, which is difficult to evaluate all the beauty and grace of which without applying his own efforts.

Hi, now we will analyze Rime music, as well as its sound design. This is the third release of the video game audio syntilization blog. Put on the headphones, turn on the music under the spoiler of Timkodov, pleasant reading!

The official release of Rime took place in the spring of 2017. The Spanish studio Tequila Works, the head and currently the only office of which is in Madrid, was engaged in the development. The head of the project and the creative director was Raul Rubio Munarris, the artistic director was Jose Luis Vaello Bertol. Together they came up with the main idea and developed the concept of the game. And one of the most important conceptual pillars is the rejection of the verbal component. Not a single word will be spoken for the entire game. Someone may object that the decision was most likely dictated by a small budget allocated for the development of the game. Perhaps … but the implementation will dispel all doubts to the expediency of the chosen concept. The game is absolutely self -sufficient and without natural and integral for most people a component. Moreover, this approach raises the question of whether verbal communication is really so important. As you can assume, according to the creators, this is not of particular importance. Most emotions can be conveyed with gestures, body language, facial expressions and, of course, music. Rime is exclusively a game of emotions.

This is a game about the atmosphere and sensations. We are trying to tell history, using feelings instead of words, using instruments such as music, artistic design, use of light.

So in an interview, the leading artist of the studio Luis Belerik justifies this approach. The lack of words also frees the player’s attention, the sensations become sharper, the look is more attentive. Oddly enough, the feeling of lack of words in the narrative does not arise, which indicates a competent sound design. Music conveys the whole range of emotions that you need to cause a player for empathy and awareness of the main plot plan. The finale of the game discusses an important topic for each person, and the selected approach is perceived quite naturally even in the projection of the existing situation on real people. However, completely refuse to use the characters of the game of sounds as a means of communication in Tequila Works.

One of the main gaming mechanics in Rime is a scream used to activate various mechanisms. Most often, when deciding one of the puzzles, the main character, an 8-year-old boy named ENU, will be forced to scream. Non -trivial approach, but why exactly a scream, why not a classic way of interaction was chosen as the main? And why all these designs react only to sound? The answer, oddly enough, is quite unambiguous and simple. Based on the results of the passage of Rime and the realization of the true goal of the main character’s stay on the nameless island, an understanding comes – only such the most expressive form of expression of emotions can lead him to the goal and help accept the truth. It sounds abstract enough to mislead, but believe me, at the very end everything will become clear. The main character simply cannot scream.

If a scream is a means of achieving a goal, https://casino-seven.org/games/ then your friend and assistant, a fox named Nana, serve as a conductor for it. According to the developers, she is a symbol of hope for En, a source of energy and vitality. Every time, lost on the island, you will hear her sonorous barking, which serves as a compass guiding on the right path. A very beautiful way to send a player in the plot without using a map and other intra -game interface tools. Which is more important, it also works to strengthen the state of involvement in the gameplay, it is felt naturally and truthful. Nana will always expect you at a fork and carelessly call you to yourself. You can hear its call only while at a certain distance, so you can get lost on the island, especially at the very beginning, but this is the meaning of any adventure, enjoy it. Let yourself get lost to find yourself new.

The sound designer in Rime was Mirella Diece Moran. It will be funny that the creation of all the sounds that ENU issues (including when it sings a short melody or climbs on a rock), she also studied. Women quite often voiced children in animated films and games, but in this case, as Mirella Dyes herself admits, the notes were made exclusively for the stage of test debugging. However, they turned out to be so high quality that everyone liked its performance, so they decided to leave them. In the diaries of developers, Mirella Dies says the following:

I mainly worked on creating sound effects. Steps, wind, water … ordinary sounds of nature designed to create the naturalness of the environment. Then we added some elements to give the sound the feeling of something “magical”.

What is meant by “magic elements” is unclear, but everything sounds in the game very believable. Mirella Dies also performed a vocal part in the title song of the game – The Song of the Sea. As in all aspects of Rime, the text of the song has a message designed to focus on a more abstract, but firmly connected with the main plot of the game, symbolism. The soundtrack also has an alternative version of this song marked “Reprise”, it sounds in the credits. The vocal part in it was performed by Sylvia by Gill Kofres, who in the credits is declared as the voice of a fox Nana with an assignment in brackets – a lullaby. Interestingly, on Twitter’s developers you can also find a record where the following is said:

You knew that the little fox is called Nana, which means “lullaby” in Spanish?

All this suggests that Nana for En also symbolizes the spirit of the mother, protecting him at every stage of travel.

Forgotten City from Lindsay Stirling is another composition playing in the credits and written exclusively for the game. She did not enter the officially published soundtrack, unfortunately. On the YouTube channel Lindsay, you can find a video designed in the visual style of Rime, where she performs this composition. It is not necessary to watch, but I extremely recommend listening to excellent music. Which is strange, the official release of Forgotten City has not yet taken place.

The main mechanics designed to maintain the interest of the player have always been encouragement and reward for the effort. Finding a collection object, obtaining experience points, playing a cat-scene-all these are techniques for visual exposure and stimulation. In RIME, for the reward of the player for the solution of puzzles or puzzles, sound encouragement, and sometimes combined. With successful overcoming a new obstacle, you always hear a pleasant, diverging by a fan around the player, piercing and enveloping, the very “magic” sound. Its variation becomes audible as it approaches the correct way to solve the problem, which, as planned, is an additional guideline for the player, a small clue from the authors. Also, with a more thorough study of the island, you will find musical shells, each with its part of the main musical theme of the game. This method of reward is combined, which even more motivates to collect all parts of the composition. And it does not matter that it can be listened completely before the start of the study, the process of combining particles of music, albeit as simplified as possible, creates a sense of involvement in the creation of something beautiful. The brain is so arranged that it is always trying to create associative ties. When an object of art in the human mind is closely connected with the action committed for possessing this object, the memory becomes more colorful and is filled with a great meaning in comparison with the lawfulness of the beautiful from the side.

In 2012, the release of another Tequila Works game – the DeadLight platformer. A year later, in an interview with the Spanish publication, PAS Raul Rubio said that Akira Yamaok himself drew attention to the project:

We are very proud that he is with us. He told me that he became a fan of DeadLight and wants to work with us. Of course I answered yes.

However, David Garcia Diaz, with whom Tequila Works, already worked together, was still working together on the DeadLight project,.

Improvisation on the piano that you hear in the trailer, largely corresponds to the spirit of Rime. There was no plan with a millimeter that was verified to a millimeter, David wrote it, expressing his own feelings from watching a trailer.

David also wrote music for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, for which in 2017 he was awarded the prestigious award of The Game Awards for the best sound design, in 2018, he received a reward at the BAFTA Game Award ceremony in 2018. David began his career as a sound designer in 1998. It all started with experiments on indie games with friends, after which it was hired by FX Interactive. Over the next 15 years, he also worked in other companies, such as, for example, Enigma Software and Crocodile Entertainment. Tequila Works and Ninja Theory still keep in touch with him and offer participation in new projects. As the composer himself admits, it was a difficult time, it was necessary to work a lot. During this time, he met a huge number of interesting people, many of whom later became good friends. In the conservatory, he studied the game on the piano, the course of musical composition and harmony and much more. The improvisational game on the piano brings him great pleasure, which is also his hobby. Returning to Rime, it is worth noting that David Garcia, when creating the soundtrack, adhered to a very unusual concept based on two principles.

The first is focusing on the sounds of nature, the reconstruction of space through the sounds of wind and water, the roar of the sea from afar, the sound of sea foam, when you are off the coast, breaking on the cliff of waves, a cry of sea gulls. The composer’s childhood passed near the coast in Galicia, which greatly helped in the reconstruction of the natural sound of the island in the middle of the sea. David Garcia works according to the following method: after recording all the necessary sounds, their primary processing is made in the studio, all sound files are loaded into the game engine. Next, you need to think over the basic logic through which the sound space will function. The resulting model that meets all the requirements can be implemented using the capabilities of the game engine in the form of a final audio system. David Garcia described the creation of such a model on the example of recording a scream of sea gulls:

We prepare sound recording equipment and go look for a place where the noisiness of other sounds will be minimal. Then an audio system is created based on the received records. For example, you can tie a cry of gulls to the distance to the protagonist and force them to make various types of sounds, depending on how the main character will come to one of them. The effect can also depend on the height at which the player is located, or on the type of movement … and it is important to control the number of sounds reproducing simultaneously so that everything does not turn into chaos. It becomes clear that the system is very complex, but simple at the same time, and also greatly depends on the goal that you want to achieve.

The second principle is the music itself, how it evolves in accordance with the events of the game and tells its own story. Harmony and chords are simple, and the melody has weight, which reflects the child’s eyes on the world. Sources of inspiration were the work of composers such as Jo Hisisi, Ludovico Einaudi, Max Richter and Austin Wintor. David Garcia subjected them to a deep analysis in order to derive his formula for the perfect soundtrack.

In 2017, as part of the Fun & Serious Awards ceremony, which was held at the end of the year in the city of Bilbao (Spain), the Rime Soundtrack was awarded the Best Soundtrack award. He also became the winner in the nomination “Best Soundtrack and Sound Design” during the Gamelab Awards ceremony in the same 2017, and the Push Square publication, in turn,, when summing up the decades of the decade, ranked it the most important under the nomination “Soundtrack of the Decade”, putting it on 6th place.

The soundtrack is written in the style of traditional academic music with the involvement of a symphony orchestra and choir. If you say simply, then this is modern classical music, using which in their projects the authors often pursue the goal of creating a player in a sense of scale and monumentality of what is happening. Academic music in the heads of many is associated with spiritual harmony and beauty. From an aesthetic point of view, of course, one can argue that it can really be called beautiful, but still in this case it is worth considering the concept of a communicative function formulated in the theory of music. Academic music is the simplest, but at the same time as a maximum complex alternative to the verbal way of transmitting information that can express the whole spectrum of human emotions. Regardless of the personal interpretation, the basic information will be transmitted without significant distortions, which will make the right impression, and a sense of beauty will not leave almost any listener. Academic music copes with this task better than the music of other styles and directions, which is why it is so universal in its application and therefore it was an absolutely correct solution to choose, accompanied by a visual component of Rime, music in this style. In addition, this joins well with the basic conceptual principle of Rime – the lack of a verbal component in the narrative.

Despite the fact that the music is incredibly beautiful, it is very difficult to notice at first. This is due to the main distinguishing feature of Rime, which has already been mentioned in passing earlier. A single melody, which passes the main motive through all the compositions, creates a feeling of the integrity of the entire album, but this is also the factor that prevents listening. In view of the sensation of uniformity imposed by the chosen style, after some relatively short time, it becomes difficult to understand whether this or that composition really likes. I suggest you personally verify this, turn on the soundtrack in the background, and after a while try to guess which composition you listen. And this is the only possible claim. A small part of the compositions has a memorable climax, but this minus must be considered from the position of the listener and contemplator, accustomed to listening to more popular music styles. Academic music requires a different relationship. In addition, David Garcia wanted to achieve this effect. He successfully manages to deceive the listener’s brain and make the player experience the required feelings, which lies his huge merit. The uniformity and unobtrusive of musical accompaniment also have the opposite, positive effect on Rime. It is easier to describe it from the reverse. Quite often, a sound designer, carried away by music written for the project, does not observe a simple rule – everything should be in moderation. As a result, the fixed musical composition sounds in the background constantly, which, of course, begins to cause irritation, especially if, in addition, the balance of the volume of sound and music was not correctly observed. Either the same composition is repeated from time to time when the trigger is triggered by a certain event. Music in Rime sounds almost constantly, but the volume balance is competently observed, it is weaved together with the sounds of the environment, which is also due to the concept of building music based on the sounds of nature, so the cyclicality is not felt at all, and the absence of obvious transitions does not violate the state of involvement in the world of the game.

If, when passing Rime, you did not pay attention to all the described concepts and principles on which music and sound in the game function, I advise you to go through the game again with this knowledge. You will see, or rather, you will hear really how important it is in the narrative. A team of sound designers did a tremendous job that truly deserves to be called a musical masterpiece, do not miss the chance to touch it, especially if you go through the game for the first time.

Despite the fact that we analyzed exclusively the audio component of Rime, the game is magnificent both in all individual aspects and in their synthesis, but their analysis goes beyond the scope of this issue. And so far all. I hope you were interested. Leave comments and share information with friends. Join the group in VK and add to the total chat in Telegram to discuss with other auduals of everything that you want. I wish you a good mood and interesting and exciting adventures. Before communication.