Gaming
Music
How to soundtrack a universe – in five easy steps
UK post-rockers 65daysofstatic talk their “infinite” soundtrack to upcoming video game No Man’s Sky.
No Man's Sky
© Hello Games
No Man’s Sky is an upcoming video game on a massive scale. Currently under development by the UK studio Hello Games for PC and PS4, it’s a sci-fi exploration epic featuring 18 quintillion planets that would reportedly take a humble gamer in the region of 5,000 million years to fully explore. In short, don’t book a week off work and expect to finish it.
The score for the game has been composed by the instrumental UK group 65daysofstatic. To find out how they approached such an enormous task, Red Bull UK spoke to the band’s Paul Wolinski, who walked us through his five steps to creating the sound of a universe.
1. Make a song that catches the attention of God
God in this instance being Sean Murray, the head of Guildford-based indie developer Hello Games, and the song being Debutante, a ominous, driving and alien track from 65's 2010 album We Were Exploding Anyway, which the studio wanted to use for No Man's Sky's new trailer.
"It was an unsolicited email from Hello Games," explains Wolinksi. "They sent us through some screenshots of the game. As soon as we saw it we said 'Yes, of course you can use Debutante and, um, we should probably do the soundtrack...'"
The actual agreement was a bit more complicated than that – but not much. 65 asked Hello Games if they had a composer in place for the game's music and met with Murray to discuss the project.
It took about two minutes, then we just talked about sci-fi.
"It turned out we were both pitching for the same thing. I went down there going 'Right, can't be too self-deprecating, I've got to explain why this is the perfect project for 65'. And he was thinking the same - 'Ah, great, 65 might do the soundtrack, that would be brilliant.' It took about two minutes, then we just talked about sci-fi."
2. Do your research
Wolinksi moved away from playing games after teenage years spent with an Amiga. In catching up with the medium and its music, it wasn't the games themselves he and the band were initially struck by.
"What we were taken with was how similar Hello Games were to us as a band - that sort of indie approach they had. Though we might not follow games, we certainly follow composers – and we had seen a shift of people like Hans Zimmer and Clint Mansell moving from films into games."
"The music industry has been crumbling for years now, right? I always wonder what it was like in the 1970s or '80s when these small indie labels still had the means to be really exciting and build their little DIY communities. It feels like that's what's happening in the games world. Games have developed enough as a form - it's no longer a niche thing or a weird cultural phenomenon, it's part of everyone's lives."
65Daysofstatic
© [unknown]
3. Write everything. Fast
The practicalities of games production presented the band with tough deadlines, as Hello Games needed at least an early version of the soundtrack - locked in terms of length - in order to continue making the game.
"Normally when we go through writing a record we'll do a loads of demos, then record some of them to a slightly higher level. It never ends until the record is mixed. But with this they needed things to not change after a certain point. They needed to know what was coming."
Wolinski says the band had spent around 18 months writing and recording their last studio album, Wild Light - much longer than the initial writing and recording for No Man’s Sky.
"We first met Sean in early 2014 - there wasn't much to show us and they weren't ready to tell us exactly what they wanted. I think it was late summer, maybe even September when we had a big meeting and it became a lot clearer what we were working on. And it was January when we went into the studio. So three or four months - super, super intensive."
4. Pretend you’re not making a soundtrack at all
The band had experience of putting a soundtrack together, having written a new score for the 1972 film Silent Running in 2011.
"It became clear how different it was to making our own records. Although we’re an instrumental band, and quite cinematic in our sound, it feels very different when we’re writing a proper 65 song because we want it to stand alone, to be the focus of someone’s attention. When we first pitched Sean we thought it would be like writing a soundtrack."
I don’t want you to write a soundtrack, I want you to write a 65 record
But at the band's big sit-down meeting Murray made it clear that was the opposite of what he was after. "Sean said ‘No - I don’t want you to write a soundtrack, I want you to write a 65 record. I don’t want you to overthink it and come up with all these space opera orchestral swells. We want it to be you, and your songs.”
But the band weren't sure what that meant either. "We try to make all our records different, and approach them differently. So after Wild Light everything was heading in a noisy, experimental direction, and we knew Hello Games probably didn’t want that. There was a lot of double-think going on."
5. Also, definitely do make a soundtrack – and make it infinite
Because the action in games is dictated by the player, soundtracks are often procedurally generated, shifting to follow the tempo and atmosphere of what's happening onscreen. But neither Murray nor 65days wanted to write music this way.
...we’re going to write proper songs.
"All of those things are a barrier to composing. The thing about most procedural music is that it’s often quite ambient or granular – fuzzy, because it never knows what it’s soundtracking. Our approach was: we’re going to write proper songs."
On top of this core of traditional music - the straightforward 65 record that Murray wanted - the band also started compiling a “library of sounds of songs and sounds in songs” to be fed into No Man's Sky's audio engine.
"If there’s a song with one big melody line, then when we’re writing we’ll have tried hundreds of different melody lines to find one that fits. If we were just making a record that stuff would be lost forever, but here we kept different melodies, or alternative ways that chords could work under the melody. We’d do lots of sampling of textures and sounds we created - if there’s a particular guitar sound, when we went into the studio we wouldn't just record that part of the song. We’d record other stuff as well and put it somewhere else in the library."
By providing Hello Games with what Wolinksi describes as a "palette" of sounds based on the motifs and signatures of the concrete record the band is putting together, 65daysofstatic are both making a soundtrack, and not. They've assembed a suite of sounds that, when combined with No Man's Sky's software, will stretch into infinity, scoring an entire universe.
Nathan Ditum boldly listens where no man has listened before. Follow him on Twitter at
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