TAG
#synth
0 reviews · 6 essays
Related essays
Soundtrack: EXAPUNKS — the metronome that won't wait for you
EXAPUNKS is Zachtronics' puzzle game set in a fictional 1997, where hacking cures a plague. The score is by Matthew S Burns, the same composer behind Opus Magnum. I, Doremi, take apart the beat of a program that starts ticking the moment you hit RUN — and the synth textures around it — through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Firmament — the memory of one synth, filling a rusted planet
Maclaine Diemer chose the same synthesizer Myst's composer Robyn Miller once played, and carried that sonic memory forward into a new generation. Including the story of how he first met Firmament as a single Kickstarter backer and later became its composer, I, Doremi, take apart the 'almost entirely synth, with two or three exceptions' score of this single-tool first-person puzzler — with a black coffee in hand, through a lens you can carry home to your own composing.
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: Riven — On an island where you stand still, the music refuses to conclude
Cyan's Robyn Miller returned after 27 years to re-voice, for the 2024 remake, the music he first wrote for Riven. On an island you can wander freely, the score is not allowed to swell — and in a puzzle-adventure of observation and note-taking, water and machinery, not melody, take the lead. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Soundtrack: SHENZHEN I/O — music that names your concentration in its titles
SHENZHEN I/O is a programming puzzle where you write terse assembly for a fictional Shenzhen manufacturer. Matthew S Burns, who wrote its story and art, wrote the music too. The nine track titles — 'Enthusiasm,' 'Concentration,' 'Patience' — name not the scenery but the stations of the solver's mind. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart this 'music for thinking' through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: INSIDE — Telling a story about the inside of a head, through a head
The audio of Playdead's INSIDE was recorded through a real human skull. Martin Stig Andersen and SØS Gunver Ryberg pushed synth tones through bone to give them a brittle, hollow quality. Why does 'sound heard from inside a head' work so well for a puzzle about hijacking other bodies through mind control? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
