Soundtrack: Hidden Folks — Over 2,000 sounds, every one made by mouth

Introduction — This game has no "songs." I still want to hear it every day

Every sound in Hidden Folks (2017) comes from a human mouth. The jungle birds, the car engines and the voices of the little people all do.

It was made by Adriaan de Jongh and Sylvain Tegroeg. According to the official site, there are over 2,000 sound effects. No synthesized or stock audio is used.

This is an unusual soundtrack entry. There is no composer. Instead, we listen to a world voiced with nothing but mouths and a microphone.

In Komugi's review on this site, the difficulty is "easy" and the game takes about five hours (Hidden Folks review). Nothing rushes you, so you have room to lend it your ears.

Hidden Folks screenshot (from the Steam store page)

Mouth sounds bring warmth, not realism

In an interview, Tegroeg says they thought mouth sounds would add authenticity (wertn). Whenever new art is drawn, they book a recording session and turn the animations and stories into sounds, just for fun.

What matters here is warmth rather than skill. A person saying "crunch, crunch" fits a hand-drawn black-and-white picture better than a realistic footstep sample.

Per the description of the published sound pack, Tegroeg performed the voices and Martin Kvale handled audio correction (94 sounds, itch.io).

I tend to measure everything in BPM. This swarm of sounds has none. Instead of a steady beat, it runs at the speed of life inside the drawing.

Recording is easy; mixing is the hard part

In a Medium interview, de Jongh says they did not know how to mix the sounds so that they felt like an environment. So they brought in Martin Kvale for the mix.

Lined up side by side, mouth sounds are just a pile of noises. Turning that pile into the air of one place is the mixer's job.

For songwriting: even a great melody does not stand up unless placement, level and reverb make it a place. And humble material can still build a world through the mix.

Another scene from Hidden Folks (from the Steam store page)

Sound as a clue — a puzzle you search with your ears

In the same interview, de Jongh says some targets are revealed by sound: you can only find them if you turn the sound on and listen to where they might be.

This is something only a puzzle game does with audio. Sound is not mood here, it is information about the board.

He also recommends headphones and sessions of 15 to 45 minutes. Even the length of a session is part of the sound design.

A game like this needs silent gaps for thinking. Each mouth sound is short and fades fast, leaving time to look for the next one.

Analogy with puzzles — short voices for a searching mind

I have written that silence suits the long thinking of Stephen's Sausage Roll. Searching in Hidden Folks is the opposite.

Search is not deep diving but a constant sweep of the eyes across the screen. A long melody would clash with that rhythm.

Short mouth sounds fit. Touch one thing, hear one sound. It is a tiny reply that says "you touched it" and does not hurry the next move.

A searching scene in Hidden Folks (from the Steam store page)

Tracks to hear

I could not find a soundtrack album for this game, so please get the feel from the official channel's trailer.

The "Beach" video is also on the official channel: Hidden Folks - Beach ↗ (The Hidden Folks Universe).

Try listening for 30 seconds with headphones and your eyes closed. Guessing what is making each sound is already a small puzzle.

Closing — what I would steal

What I want to steal is the permission not to be good. The voices are not in tune or in time, yet if they fit the world, that is the right answer.

Next time I write a track, I want to use one thing recorded with my own mouth as rhythm material, turn it into a place with the mix, and only then decide whether to add a melody.

What sound from your own room would you use as beat one?

For other entries about worlds built from sound, see The Witness and CHUCHEL.

Sources

・wertn: Sylvain Tegroeg インタビュー

・Medium: Behind the Game — Hidden Folks(Adriaan de Jongh)

・Hidden Folks 公式プレスページ

・itch.io: Hidden Folks Mouth Sounds Pack

・Pocket Gamer: de Jongh 紹介記事

・Hidden Folks - Official Trailer — The Hidden Folks Universe 公式 YouTube

・Steam: Hidden Folks

・Images are screenshots from the Steam store page. They could not be visually checked in this environment, so captions avoid asserting what is shown.