Soundtrack: Taiji — Choosing to keep the sound on, inside a lineage of silence

Introduction — the first sustained tone above the clouds

You look down on islands floating above the clouds and wander a board you paint black and white. In this grid-logic puzzle that Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is a soft-edged sustained tone. There is no instrument marking the beat. The tempo is roughly too slow to count, and pads pulse slowly, as if breathing. Your stride, and the movement of your eyes hunting for rules, both settle into the breathing of this sound.

The music was written by the developer himself, Matthew VanDevander. He built Taiji as a solo developer — the art, the design, the puzzles, and this sound all come from a single head. Because of budget and time constraints, he says most of the instruments you hear are software synths (VSTs). Rather than the texture of live instruments, a smooth surface of synthesized tone covers the world — and that is the first thing that stays with the ear.

The island that didn't choose silence — where it forks from The Witness

The proper noun that appears most often in Taiji's reviews is The Witness. A wordless island, painting cells, deriving unstated rules through observation alone — the structure is very similar. But the sound design forks in the opposite direction. The Witness carries almost no music and bets on footsteps, wind, and birdsong. Taiji chose the road of laying down an ambience of sustained tone that never disappears.

This is what interests me. Both games make you think without words, yet one opens room for thought through silence while the other opens it while filling the air with sound. Taiji's music was designed as an infinitely evolving ambient soundscape that shifts as the player explores. Rather than hiding the seams of a loop, it was written as a flow with no ending in the first place. That is why it can play on without ever pushing to the front of your attention.

Grzegorz Bednorz, who composed for the game, has released a long video essay arguing how music mirrors game design, using Taiji and several other titles as material. Whether to lay down sound or stay silent is not a matter of taste but the flip side of what a game wants you to think about — a view that lines up neatly with my habit of reading design while I listen.

A mirrored structure — folding an infinite flow into a finite album

Taiji's album arrived in December 2022, about three months after the game itself. The one who did the work was Bednorz, reweaving the dynamic music that had flowed endlessly in-game into tracks that, for the first time, have an ending. It sounds modest but it is heavy work. To cut generatively-playing sound into a single piece with a head and a tail, you must decide where to begin and where to close. When you fold the infinite into the finite, a composer's sense of beauty shows most nakedly.

Scan the tracklist and the island's area names line up as they are — Gate, Shrine, Mill, Gardens, Mine, Ruins. But later, unfamiliar titles appear: Enirhs, Llim, Snedrag, Enim. Look closely and these are Shrine, Mill, Gardens, and Mine spelled backwards. The album then closes on Black, White, Chaos, and Order. The root of this puzzle — painting white and black, chaos and order — is mirrored right into the album's ordering. The reversed titles are a quiet analogue of the experience of flipping the board over in your head.

I am weak for tricks like this. Beyond the sound itself, they speak the game's mechanics through the 'outside' — the track order and the naming. It only works on someone who has played, but when it lands, the depth is different.

Solving tempo and musical structure — a beat with its corners sanded off

Taiji plays as a puzzle of observation, where no answer is handed to you from outside. You stop before a board, compare it against the one next to it, and turn hypotheses about the rules over in your head. The move count is not fast. In fact, the time your gaze holds still is longer. Put a beat-driven track over that and the pulse would rush your thinking; a poor fit.

So the music is a beat with its corners sanded off — or rather, a sustain with no beat, handing the lead to the tempo of thought. Roughly by feel, there is just one sway, slower than a heartbeat. I always have the habit of measuring music in BPM, but on this island I can find nothing to count. And that is fine. Sound you cannot count respects the player's inner clock.

Silence (The Witness) maximizes the room for thought, but long deliberation can turn lonely. Taiji's sustained tone warms that loneliness faintly without stealing the tempo. Between silence and accompaniment, there is this comfortable seat.

Tracks worth hearing — the island's names, and their reversal

The official audio — the full album and each track — is up on composer Grzegorz Bednorz's channel. Bathe in it straight through first. It works as background too, but listening while recalling the boards lets you notice the trick in the titles.

If you pick single tracks, try the low-end weight of the mine in Taiji OST - 06 - Mine ↗, the crossing of thoughts drawn in Taiji OST - 13 - Mixed Ideas ↗, and then Taiji OST - 19 - Snedrag ↗, whose title is Gardens reversed. Place the front and the back side by side and you can hear, with your ears, what this work uses as its mirror.

In closing — if I were to steal, it's the hand that folds the infinite

If I were to steal for my own music, two things. One is the order of 'write it as a flow that never ends, then fold it into the finite later.' Rather than making a three-minute piece from the start, first let a seamless bed play, then cut out only the moments you want heard, giving them a head and a tail. Scooping crystals from generative material uses a different muscle than building a loop.

The other is speaking mechanics through the meta layer of titles and track order. Reversed spellings and an ordering like Black/White/Chaos/Order tell the work's world without adding a single note. At the very end of production, when you set the tracklist, Taiji teaches me that I am allowed to be greedier.

If you want to compare across the lineage of silence, follow this with The Witness, which deliberately erased its music, and the COCOON soundtrack, which also handles quiet. To lay down sound or to stay silent — telling that single move apart, island by island, is a pleasure.

Reference links

・Steam: Taiji Soundtrack official DLC

・Grzegorz Bednorz & Matthew VanDevander — Taiji (Original Game Soundtrack) on Bandcamp

・Official YouTube channel: Grzegorz Bednorz

・Spotify: Taiji (Original Game Soundtrack)

・Grzegorz Bednorz's video-essay announcement: How Music Mirrors Game Design in Taiji and Other Games

・Indie Game International 152: Matthew VanDevander (interview on solo dev, The Witness, and music)

・Taiji official development blog