Soundtrack: Chants of Sennaar — Learning a people's sound before learning their words

Introduction — the first breath, climbing from the cave into light

When the traveler who wakes inside a stone sarcophagus finishes climbing the first spiral up from the dark base, light pours in. What comes to keep it company is Thomas Brunet's opening piece, "Out Of The Cavern And Into The Light." In this game of observation and deduction that Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is not synthesis but a live cello, woodwinds, and a voice swaying somewhere far off. The tempo is roughly a little slower than a pulse, and it never hurries. It fits your stride, and the speed at which you scribble in your notebook.

For Rundisc, Brunet wrote almost the entire score on acoustic instruments: oboe and clarinet, several traditional flutes, plucked strings, and the human voice. It was recorded at Studio Du Bassin near Bordeaux, cramming nine instruments into two days of sessions; he later returned to add vocals and clarinets. That 'no artifice, just earth and wood' texture in the first breath comes from here.

Each language has its own world of sound

The core of this game is to assign meaning, one symbol at a time, to the unknown scripts each floor's people use, using pictures and gestures as clues, building up vocabulary in your notebook. The only moment you are told you are right is the verification panel, when you correctly label a cluster of related words at once. There is no hand-holding. What is striking is that even before you can read a single glyph, that floor's music has already finished telling you 'who these people are.'

In an interview Brunet says he wrote each people's music not as an allegory of a real ethnic or religious group, but according to 'the way each people thinks and sees the world.' For one, reverence before the divine; for another, leisurely ease; for another, a perfectly ordered calculation. So the music itself becomes a second language to decode. Before you read the words, the mode and the instrumentation tell you 'these are a people of prayer,' 'these are a people of machines.' Mechanic and sound shake hands over the same act: understanding.

One more thing. He places this work in the lineage of 'knowledge-vanias' alongside Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn — games where you feel you 'stumbled upon' a world that was never built for you. So he kept the music mostly non-adaptive, letting it react only at story beats. The sound that keeps flowing quietly guarantees that this world existed long before you arrived.

On the making — play the instrument first, then write

Brunet is someone who sounds the instrument by hand before he writes. Piano, guitar, or flute, he first finds the shape that is idiomatic for that instrument, then builds on top. The light-footed "A Bit Of Fun" began, he says, with him playing a Romanian peasant flute, hunting for the right tone for the scene. Some of the Irish bouzouki and various flutes he played on the demos were replaced by professional players in the final version. Sylvain Millepied played the flute, and it was he who brought in the other musicians.

The works he names as references are Austin Wintory's Journey, Jessica Curry's Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, and Michiru Ōshima's ICO — all scores that hold back the number of notes and raise the texture of a world out of sound. While acknowledging the trend toward ever more adaptive game music, his judgment that this game did not need it is exactly what gives the album the strength to hold up on its own, away from the screen.

The analogy to puzzling — the 'click' of deduction, and modal patience

The feel of deciphering is peculiar. You gaze at a sign, form a hypothesis, confirm it in another scene, write it in your notebook. And when you label several words at once, a small 'click' arrives as the page locks in. This time structure closely resembles how Brunet's music moves. The unhurried sustained tones keep company with the long silent thinking you spend on observation, and when a melody resolves at a beat, the rhythm coincides with the satisfaction of a vocabulary entry locking into place.

I have a habit of measuring everything in BPM, but this collection never pushes you with the beat. There is roughly a pulse, yet its corners are rounded. That is because the music yields its pace to the tempo of deduction — neither fast nor slow, advancing at your own breath. The shifting mode (the color of the scale) per floor matters too. Enter a new floor and the 'dialect' of the sound changes, and your ear notices 'this is a different people' before your eyes do. You memorize the geography of the world by sound, before you solve it.

Tracks worth hearing

First, the opening "Out Of The Cavern And Into The Light." It bottles the breath of live instruments at the very moment you pass from darkness into light. From the composer's own official channel.

Next, "Gardens of Plenty," which spreads out slowly across seven and a half minutes. It is where you can savor longest the 'sound of a different people' that shifts as you change floors. How to build a sustain that never turns into wallpaper even when left running — it is all packed in here.

One more: "The Cogs Of Science," which depicts the people of order and calculation. Just by changing the mode, a 'people who think differently' rises up: The Cogs Of Science ↗ (official).

In closing — if I were to steal something

If I were to steal something for my own music, it is this: instead of 'assigning one leitmotif per place or faction,' let the mode and the instrumentation themselves speak of 'how that group sees the world.' Reverence, leisure, calculation — once values become timbre, the listener senses the difference before being told. The other lesson: do not over-adapt. Let it react only at story beats and keep flowing the rest of the time, and the sense that 'the world existed before you arrived' stands up. And if you can, before sitting at the desk, sound one instrument by hand. Just as "A Bit Of Fun" was born from a peasant flute, a shape that came out of the body does not lie.

As for when to relisten: it suits work where the world becomes legible little by little — language study, ciphers, drawing a map. To that feeling of climbing the tower one floor at a time, the sound quietly lends a beat. If you like the texture of unraveling a world through observation and deduction, you will surely find the same touch in the sound of Heaven's Vault, and in Return of the Obra Dinn, another game built on reading symbols.

Reference links

・Steam: Chants of Sennaar Official OST

・Thomas Brunet official Bandcamp

・Thomas Brunet official YouTube channel

・Kitty on Fire Records: Thomas Brunet interview