Music for a Mist-Shrouded Mystery

Umibozu is set in an undisclosed location in waters surrounding Japan, and part of the aesthetic goal is the idea of approaching something mysterious. While interpreting the game design and adapting to its development, our team decided to focus the entire experience towards the idea of presenting it as a mystery shoot ’em up game.

Music (and sound in general) plays a vital role in influencing emotion and immersion when it comes to any form of entertainment medium, be it games, films or theater, and with that in mind, I began composing the music for Umibozu early in its development.

Prior to beginning the composition process I broke down the following key elements I wanted to portray with the theme in Umibozu:

• Japan
• A voyage
• A mystery

The music of Umibozu’s gameplay is played in the Japanese scale han-kumoi with the root of D, which shares a scale structure similar to D minor except it omits the C and F notes. I made a deliberate choice to use the han-kumoi to portray the key element of Japan because of the scale’s origin from that part of the world.

To simulate a constant voyage, I gave it a slow tempo of 70 Beats per Minute and a repeating pattern of 6 bars, on a steel-string guitar which all other instruments play against in the entirety composition.

The repeating pattern is there to give it an endless feeling of constant motion without change, in the same way that the player’s avatar is surrounded by mostly water and mist without much change in the environment except for the occasional obstacle or hostile encounter.

The key element of mystery was something that required further interpretation but while composing the theme I had assembled 2 steel-string guitars, one playing the repeating pattern mentioned above and another plucking chords against that pattern. However, there was something missing. At the time, the piece only portrayed a calm and constant repeating motion without any mystery or menace of something unknown. To further define that aspect of the music, I added a lower range to the track with the use of a cello with a coarse and raspy sound, that plays against the two steel-string guitars with a regular sense of underlying dissonance to portray this feeling of something mysterious, eerie or menacing awaiting ahead of the player.

There was a final issue with the composition that needed to be solved before the track was ready. The motif was extremely short and with a constant repetition of 6 bars, it would have been too short and the constant repetition without change would likely annoy the player more than it reinforce the mood for the game. I expanded the track into a 4 time repetition of the 6 bars that contained 2 steel-string guitars and a cello. They were subjected to no changes during this process, and instead a 12 bar woodwind melody, along with 6 bars of high-pitched harpsichord were added as variations to the repeating pattern in order to expand upon the track without sacrificing the constant underlying flow.

The track was then exported as independent virtual instrument tracks based on the midi composition made using Guitar Pro 7, mixed and made able to loop in Audacity, with the following results: