Soundtrack: Call of the Sea — Flip the love song over and you get a second theme

Introduction — the sound of an island coming into view from the deck

In 1934, Norah rows a small boat toward a nameless island in the South Pacific. In this first-person exploration puzzle covered by Puzzlebyrinth's review, the first thing to reach your ear is neither chiptune nor a sustained drone. It is a string orchestra: violin, cello, harp, flute, oboe, and the human voice. At a moderate tempo, roughly 64-76 BPM by my ear, a relaxed melody leaning toward triple time rises up, holding adventure, mystery, romance, and melancholy all at once.

The composer is Eduardo de la Iglesia. For this game, built by Spain's Out of the Blue Games and published by Raw Fury, he wrote 23 original tracks. The main theme is a mere one minute forty-seven, recorded live with a string ensemble (Mad4Strings). Short as it is, it contains the full emotional range of that moment when the island's outline appears. The instant it plays, you know: this is a game where the music steps forward.

Negative melody — writing the husband by inverting the wife's theme

What I most wanted to take home from this score is how the two themes are built. In an interview with the developer, de la Iglesia describes the music as a love story about two melodies, Norah and Harry. He wrote Norah's theme first. For her husband Harry's theme he used a technique called 'negative melody': take every note of Norah's melody, flip it up-for-down around an axis, and compose in the opposite direction.

What makes this more than a compositional party trick is the story. Narratively, Norah follows the trail of Harry's expedition across the island; her path is a mirror image of the one he walked first. The inversion of the melody and the narrative structure of tracing and being traced are joined by a single idea. Even a listener who knows none of the theory feels in their body that the two themes are 'alike yet opposite.' The BPM and key sit close together, only the contour is turned inside out, more or less.

Where song touches story — the voice actors sing, and a father sings Tahiti

There is another hidden link between experience and music, and it lives in the voices. 'My Dear Old Pal' is a piano arrangement of an old post-war song, sung by Cissy Jones and Yuri Lowenthal, the actors who voice Norah and Harry themselves. The voices that make the characters speak become, directly, a song inside the story. The seam between dialogue and music quietly dissolves, and the couple's relationship rises up once more inside the melody.

De la Iglesia also wrote an aparima, in homage to Tahitian dance (Ori Tahiti) and the culture of French Polynesia, and had it sung by his own father, Ángel de la Iglesia. The South Pacific island setting takes root in respectful, specific sound rather than a borrowed 'exotic' veneer. He has said, by the way, that every track except the darkest ones grew from his love for his wife Esther, from a real love. To write a love story out of love itself: it tracks.

The puzzle analogy — the tempo of observation, and a melody that pulls you on

Silence suits the long deliberation of Stephen's Sausage Roll; chiptune suits the trial and error of Baba Is You, I always say. So what suits an exploration puzzle like Call of the Sea, where you observe, combine fragments, and move on to the next beach? The answer is not a looping ambient bed but a melody with a destination.

Thinking in this game advances less by sudden insight than by emotional forward motion. You study a clue, take notes, row the boat. Your hands may stop, but your heart keeps moving toward your husband. So the music, too, can be the kind that does not cut off at the moment of solution but keeps nudging your back with 'there is still further to go' the whole time you solve. Strings draw long melodic lines and slip to the next idea on chords that never fully resolve. The tempo is not fast, yet it does not stop. For a game where the stall of the puzzle and the advance of the story exist at once, a melody that pulls you forward fits beautifully.

Tracks worth hearing

From the official release. Start with the album's opening track, the main theme on Call of the Sea (Original Game Soundtrack) ↗. One minute forty-seven folds in the island's entire emotional range; just the opening swell of strings is worth it.

Then the song with voices, My Dear Old Pal ↗. Once you know the logic of the negative melody, this piano piece sung by the two voice actors lands as the moment when the two themes lean into a single song.

(I could not confirm an official channel for any of the YouTube uploads, all of which appear to be personal re-uploads, so this article points to Spotify, the official distribution. All 23 tracks are also available via the Steam OST DLC.)

Closing — what I would steal

If I were to steal something for my own music, it would be the negative melody without hesitation. When you have a pair, a pursuer and the pursued, a character and their reverse, build one theme by inverting the other. A theoretical operation reaches the listener's unconscious as a 'mirror.' It comes cheap, yet means a great deal. The other thing I would steal is the nerve to have an in-story song sung by the actual characters' voices. Even if it is less polished than a professional singer, the bond to the story becomes incomparable.

To relisten, choose a long journey, or time spent waiting for someone. This distance, pulling you forward without rushing you, comes into its own. For more string-borne romance, follow it with Daniel Olsén's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes; for the overlap of sea and mystery, follow it with Return of the Obra Dinn. As for me, I am looping just the opening of the main theme once more.

Reference links

・Steam: Call of the Sea Soundtrack official OST DLC

・Out of the Blue Games: interview with composer Eduardo de la Iglesia

・Spotify: Call of the Sea (Original Game Soundtrack)