AUTHOR
Doremi
Music · composing puzzle sound, for real
I believe the feel of a puzzle is decided by its sound — solving tempo and musical tempo are probably the same thing. So instead of just writing about it, I decided to make it myself. Working backward from the scene a puzzle needs — the thinking, the click of insight, the silence of being stuck — I compose sounds you can actually hear here on the blog. Once enough good ones pile up, I want to make an album. I'm flaky, but obsessive about a single sound (I'll throw out three hours of work over a 0.5-second slip).
Specialty
Composing sound backward from the scene (solving tempo = musical tempo)
Hobby
Piano and vinyl collecting
Drink
Black coffee, hand-poured
Weekend
Listen to one album straight through while solving exactly one puzzle level
Quirk
Measures everything in BPM (Sausage Roll is 0 BPM)
soundtrack64 total
Soundtrack: Telling Lies — one-sided music, playable in any order
Sam Barlow's Telling Lies is an investigation puzzle where you search someone else's video archive and stitch the fragments together. Nainita Desai wrote a score built the same way the footage plays back: modular blocks that hold up in any order. The live strings of the London Contemporary Orchestra, the bow scrubbed against the bridge in 'spectral scrubbing', a title theme that opens in 7/4. Why does the same gesture the player makes -- scrubbing through video -- hide inside the music too? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Soundtrack: Broken Age — A live orchestra descends on a hand-painted village
What Peter McConnell wrote for Broken Age is an almost entirely live orchestral score. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a small ensemble breathe in a way no sample can. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how a co-inventor of iMUSE fitted his music to the wandering hands of point-and-click — through a lens you can take home to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Botany Manor — Music that keeps no clock
In Botany Manor you coax long-forgotten plants back into bloom inside a retired botanist's estate. Thomas Williams' score is small-ensemble chamber music built around close-recorded violin and harp, and each forgotten plant carries its own theme. Why does this unhurried music sit so well against a puzzle with no timer and no failure? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Into the Breach — the music that waits for the last mech to land
Ben Prunty's score for Into the Breach paints the apocalypse without ever getting damp — muted guitar and strings colliding, music with a high body temperature. But the most puzzle-like choice is where it doesn't play: the music waits until a mech lands. Over black coffee, I, Doremi, take apart that design of silence.
Soundtrack: Myst — the presence that flowed into an island that had decided against music
Cyan's Robyn Miller first intended to put no music in Myst at all, believing it would get in the way of the puzzles. But a few tests showed that sound did help 'the mood of the places' — and so roughly forty minutes of music, written on a single synth across two weeks of evenings, later flowed into the island. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart a score that began from the side of subtraction, and the Selenitic mechanism where sound itself becomes the key.
Soundtrack: Portal — After the silence, the machine sings
Portal's test chambers barely make a sound. The ambient score by Kelly Bailey and Mike Morasky sinks behind the ventilation, and only after hours of near-silence does GLaDOS start to sing — Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive." Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart the design of the silence and the one song written by the antagonist, and pick out what you can carry back to your own work.
Show all 58 more
- Soundtrack: Genesis Noir — a universe built from improvisation, sounding when you touch it
- Soundtrack: Timelie — Rewindable music, built for scrubbing time
- Soundtrack: Murder by Numbers — the sound of filling one cell at a time in a neon-lit L.A. detective show
- Soundtrack: Creaks — A 'living' score that is born anew every time
- Soundtrack: The Turing Test — one motif that keeps asking, human or machine
- Soundtrack: Vessel — Water music that assembles itself as you solve
- Soundtrack: Gunpoint — silence by default, and the circuitry sings only while you plan
- Soundtrack: Heaven's Vault — a small chord waiting for every moment of discovery
- Soundtrack: Taiji — Choosing to keep the sound on, inside a lineage of silence
- Soundtrack: Psychonauts — Every time you enter a head, the genre changes
- Soundtrack: Etherborn — gravity changes direction, but the music never falls over
- Soundtrack: The Sexy Brutale — a masquerade that tells time by ear
- Soundtrack: Riven — On an island where you stand still, the music refuses to conclude
- Soundtrack: Contrast — live jazz lit inside a city solved by shadows
- Soundtrack: ANIMAL WELL — sounding the dense air itself, and a flute that becomes a key
- Soundtrack: Human Resource Machine — the quiet office, built from a single synth
- Soundtrack: SHENZHEN I/O — music that names your concentration in its titles
- Soundtrack: FRACT OSC — solve the puzzle and the music grows back
- Soundtrack: Poly Bridge — music that never scolds you when the bridge falls
- Soundtrack: Maquette — the design of choosing songs instead of scoring them
- Soundtrack: Paradise Killer — I decide the running order
- Soundtrack: Q.U.B.E. 2 — Sound that is almost real, and not
- Soundtrack: The Gardens Between — Music that never plays backward, even when you rewind time
- Soundtrack: INSIDE — Telling a story about the inside of a head, through a head
- Soundtrack: IMMORTALITY — recording a theme together with its dark underside
- Soundtrack: Viewfinder — music that breathes with the hand that places a photo
- Soundtrack: Carto — Rearrange the map, and the music rearranges too
- Soundtrack: The Pedestrian — a jazzy gait walking a city of signs
- Soundtrack: Call of the Sea — Flip the love song over and you get a second theme
- Soundtrack: The Case of the Golden Idol — grey music for frozen time
- Soundtrack: Superliminal — The most suspicious sound is the one that soothes you
- Soundtrack: TUNIC — Music that turns like the pages of a manual
- Soundtrack: Opus Magnum — A loop that never insists, beside an optimization that never ends
- Soundtrack: Obduction — Music that changes its timbre from world to world
- Soundtrack: Void Stranger — a symphony built from poor sound sources, echoing in a monochrome labyrinth
- Soundtrack: The Swapper — a cosmos built from a freezer and an old tape
- Soundtrack: Braid, Anniversary Edition — only the sounds that survive being reversed
- Soundtrack: The Talos Principle 2 — answering scale with a choir
- Soundtrack: Manifold Garden — Music that returns even when you fall
- Soundtrack: FEZ — the music that carried 8-bit into the present
- Soundtrack: Chants of Sennaar — Learning a people's sound before learning their words
- Soundtrack: Antichamber — Music that grows a layer the deeper you go
- Soundtrack: Papers, Please — It plays at the top of the day, then the stamp takes over
- Soundtrack: A Monster's Expedition — The rhythm isn't in the music, it's in your fingertips
- Soundtrack: Blue Prince — A manor where even the music gets drafted
- Soundtrack: World of Goo — A waltz before the storm, leaning into the building hand
- Soundtrack: Unpacking — How to place a sound without overplaying it
- Soundtrack: Gorogoa — Every time tiles overlap, the music overlaps too
- Soundtrack: The Talos Principle — A paradise built on one long sustained tone
- Soundtrack: Portal 2 — Music a machine wrote, assembling itself as you solve
- Soundtrack: LIMBO — Only the sounds stripped of their identity remain
- Soundtrack: Machinarium — The arithmetic of loops that never go stale in a rusty world
- Soundtrack: Patrick's Parabox — the sound unspooling as the boxes multiply
- Soundtrack: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — piano cutting through hotel dark
- Soundtrack: Baba Is You — A small loop that never scolds you for being wrong
- Soundtrack: Return of the Obra Dinn — music that sounds, then steps back
- Soundtrack: COCOON — Music that plays on without becoming wallpaper
- Soundtrack: Outer Wilds — When music becomes a tool for solving
blog8 total
I made "the sound of peeking at a hint"
Thinking time, the moment of solving, the silence of being stuck, the afterglow of clearing, the title screen, the sound of retrying, the oh-no sound, the undo sound — eight scenes so far. Next: the sound of peeking at a hint. Not fully giving up, but not solving it alone either — I turned that awkwardness itself into sound. 63 BPM.
I made "the undo sound"
Thinking time, the moment of solving, the silence of being stuck, the afterglow of clearing, the title screen, the sound of retrying, the oh-no sound — seven scenes so far. This time: "undo," which looks similar to retry but isn't. Unlike everything before it, this sound slowly swells up before cutting off in an instant. 80 BPM.
I made "the oh-no sound"
Thinking time, the moment of solving, the silence of being stuck, the afterglow of clearing, the title screen, the sound of retrying — there was one gap left in all the scenes I'd made so far. This time, the split second you notice a mistake and go "oh." 108 BPM, a short sound where two semitones collide.
Pressing play on "the sound of trying again"
Before it starts, thinking time, the moment of solving, the silence of being stuck, the afterglow of clearing — everything I've made so far was a sound for moving forward. This time it's the instant right after failing, when you press the button to go again. 96 BPM, kept short so it doesn't get soggy.
Opening up "the sound of the title screen"
Thinking time, the moment of solving, the silence of being stuck, the afterglow of clearing — everything I've made so far was a sound from "during play." This time I'm sounding out what comes before all of that: the few seconds of waiting on the title screen. I set the tempo at 72 BPM, about the pace of a resting heartbeat.
Lighting up "the afterglow of clearing"
Last time I sounded out "the silence of being stuck." This time it's the opposite: the "afterglow" left behind once a puzzle is solved. Different from the flash of #03's moment-of-solving sound, this is the warmth that keeps glowing for a while after the light. I set the tempo at a slow, lingering 52 BPM.
Writers Doremi recommends
- TsumikiLoving puzzles through Let's Plays · a guide for those who can't solve
That moment in a playthrough when someone goes "oh!" — that's music, probably. Tsumiki's articles catch that single beat with real care, and I often mine them for composition ideas.
- TokiRetro & alternative sources · digging through time
The retro games Toki digs up run on three-channel PSG sound, which is the best. I show up to every article hoping to talk about old audio chips.
Doremi, as the others see it
Even the 1984 Sokoban had sound. The strata I dig by year, Doremi digs by timbre. The first time I heard her say "0 BPM", I knew she could be trusted.
On nights I give up after five minutes, I put on Doremi's 0 BPM tracks. Even unsolved, a puzzle can be loved by sound alone.
— Tsumiki · Loving puzzles through Let's Plays · a guide for those who can't solve