Soundtrack: Etherborn — gravity changes direction, but the music never falls over

Introduction — one human breath inside the geometry

Walk onto a curved surface and the line between floor and wall dissolves. As long as you can step onto a face, your own sense of 'down' rotates toward it — that is Etherborn. You control a voiceless, translucent being, picking up orbs of light to grow new paths and drawing closer to the voice that calls you. Released on 18 July 2019, made by Spain's Altered Matter and published by Akupara Games, this light-and-geometry puzzle-platformer was covered in Komugi's review. As it happens, today marks exactly seven years since that release.

The screens are startlingly inorganic: rounded abstract architecture, flat color planes with no excess ornament. And yet, one sound in there clearly carries body heat. The composer is Gabriel Garrido García. Recorded live at Abuelita Studios in Barcelona, it is a string quartet, clarinet, bassoon, and a soprano voice (the credits are confirmed on Akupara's official blog). Land on the first area and a thin, sustained string tone fills the space first. By ear it sits around 50–60 BPM — or rather, the very skeleton of a beat is faint, closer to breathing than to pulse. I heard this as a single strand of human skin cutting into the cold of the geometry.

Live strings inside abstraction — and the music ages across a whole life

The thing I most want to talk about here is the choice to record live players for such an inorganic world. The Escher-like architecture is made of perfect lines and curves; it could have been scored entirely with synthesis. Instead García brought a string quartet, clarinet, bassoon, and soprano into a Barcelona studio and captured sound actual humans played. The turn of a bow, the seam of a breath, the faint waver of pitch — that 'imperfection' is exactly what lends body heat to a non-human space. It is the mirror-image solution to The Swapper, which I once wrote about sounding cosmic loneliness with a freezer and a tape recorder; here Etherborn uses live resonance to pull abstraction back toward the human side.

The music is also tied straight to the story's skeleton. Each of Etherborn's areas traces a cycle of life — from birth to a final stage — and the score shifts alongside it. It begins in clear, clean strings and grows more shadowed in its harmonies as it nears the end. Of the late track 'The Longing of the Stones,' García himself notes it is an homage to Arvo Pärt: tintinnabuli, that bell-like style, voiced by the players breathing in time with the singer — the writing where silence carries the most information. The music does not switch per event; it ages slowly, across a whole lifetime. That long arc is, to me, the single finest invention in this game's sound.

Music that never scolds — no-undo walking needs no stinger

As a puzzle-specific trait, what is fascinating is that Etherborn has almost no concept of failure. There is no timer, a fall returns you at once, and the design does not even need an undo button. So the music, too, has no retry stinger and no dissonant cue that scolds a mistake. The strings are legato and unbroken, placing no firm downbeat. That you cannot tap your foot to it maps directly onto an experience that never rushes your steps.

The sound here, then, is not the kind of music that reacts to your input. It is placed in the space beforehand, and however long you ponder, however many times you misread gravity, it keeps sounding at the same temperature. There is no fanfare when you solve, no alarm when you stall. A sustained tone simply keeps breathing, waiting for you to re-walk the surface at your own pace. This 'unreactive kindness' is a different species from the way Baba Is You's chiptune declined to scold trial and error — it is forgiveness designed from the side closer to silence.

Analogy — an unmeasurable tempo, an unmeasurable walk

I have a habit of measuring everything in BPM, and Etherborn's music quietly refuses my ruler. Downbeats are faint, harmonies drift slowly, and it flows on with the bar lines left ambiguous. This is no accident, because the player's thinking, too, proceeds at an unmeasurable tempo. Where to bring 'down' on a curved face, in what order to gather the light — you stop your hands, gaze at the space, take a step, and stop again. That walk has no regular pulse.

Music that marks a beat pushes your back: next, next. Etherborn's music does the opposite. The sustained tones present no frame of time; they simply support you as you rotate your viewpoint and re-assemble the up and down of the world. The tempo of solving and the tempo of the sound shake hands on the single point of being 'unmeasurable.' That is my read: this game's sound is neither fast nor slow — by stepping off measurement altogether, it breathes in time with a puzzle made of walking.

Tracks worth hearing

Start with the sound of the newly born stage, 'Shapes of a Memory - The First Memory.' Clear strings unspooling — the most transparent doorway into this game. Listen for a resonance like the first breath of life, before any shadow has arrived. It is audio from developer Altered Matter's official channel.

For the paired, shadowed sound, try 'Desert of the Mind - Light': Desert of the Mind - Light ↗ (also Altered Matter's official upload). And if you want all 21 tracks in one unbroken bath, the album video on the official Akupara Games channel is the way: Etherborn | Original Game Soundtrack (full album) ↗. In one sitting you can follow the whole life-length arc, from the clear early strings to how they shadow over toward the end.

Closing — if I were writing it, this is what I'd steal

If I were writing music, here is what I'd steal: the decision to deliberately mix in one live-recorded sound precisely when the subject is abstract and inorganic. Drop a single droplet of 'imperfection' — a bow's return, a caught breath — into a sea of perfectly tuned synthesis, and the space tilts suddenly toward the human. Etherborn chose this as design, not ornament. The other thing I'd steal is the idea of aging the whole work as one arc rather than switching tracks per scene. Entrust progression to a long change from clear strings to shadowed harmony, and the player learns by ear how far they've come, without any individual cue being sounded.

To revisit it: at night, with one lamp left on. Beside unhurried work, this music that marks no beat settles in remarkably well. As companion pieces, for placing live sound inside abstract space try The Swapper, and for a sustained tone that steps off the beat try the single drone of The Talos Principle — both from my past articles, set side by side. Even when gravity changes direction, this sound never once falls over.

Reference links

・Steam: Etherborn - Soundtrack (official OST DLC)

・Etherborn (Original Game Soundtrack) — official Akupara Games Bandcamp

・Materia Collective: Etherborn (Original Game Soundtrack)

・Akupara Games blog: the live-recording story and full credits

・Akupara Games official YouTube channel

・Spotify: Etherborn (Original Game Soundtrack)