Musical influences for J.U.L.I.A.

Ab dem 11.4.2013 um 16:30 Uhr steht Jan Kavan für Fragen über die Enhanced Edition von J.U.L.I.A. hier zur Verfügung.
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MikeM
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Musical influences for J.U.L.I.A.

Beitrag von MikeM »

Hey Jan! :)

Congrats again on the success of the Indiegogo campaign, and thanks for the concert stream yesterday. It was a real treat to see you and Barbora perform live.

Can you talk a bit about the soundtrack for J.U.L.I.A.?
How many songs are there?
What inspired you in developing the musical score for the game?
Despite your musical background/experience, was there anything in the development of the music/sound for the game that took you by surprise?
JanKavan
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Re: Musical influences for J.U.L.I.A.

Beitrag von JanKavan »

Hi Mike! Thank you!

J.U.L.I.A.'s soundtrack has quite a lot of tracks. The funny part is that some of the tracks are live-generated from different layers to create less static experience. For that reason the soundtrack will be mixed down to create one of possible layer combination - the one I'd like the best. There are also static tracks and I estimate it will be around 40 minutes of music.

I was inspired a lot by ethnic music I was listening a lot to when I was working on J.U.L.I.A. I also used quite some synths, some of them as a nod to my C64 era. I also tried a new ways of music production so I hope the result shows that I made some progress in that field too. :)

For me the composition for video game (especially background music) is some sort of an ego challenge. It's always hard to keep ideas under the hood so they don't interfere with the game itself. The music apart from set points whould never get in the way of narration. I will have to fix a few things in that respect in Enhanced Edition.

So I am not surprised by composition but more by the application of the tracks. One has to be humble and do revisions to better fit the game. Not the other way around.
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MikeM
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Re: Musical influences for J.U.L.I.A.

Beitrag von MikeM »

JanKavan hat geschrieben:J.U.L.I.A.'s soundtrack has quite a lot of tracks. The funny part is that some of the tracks are live-generated from different layers to create less static experience. For that reason the soundtrack will be mixed down to create one of possible layer combination - the one I'd like the best.
This sounds very interesting.

Can you elaborate on this? Are you talking about muting/unmuting parts of the arrangement in real-time based on in-game activities? Or are you talking about having seamless loops of different lengths playing in tandem to create more of a morphing soundscape? Or something else?
JanKavan
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Re: Musical influences for J.U.L.I.A.

Beitrag von JanKavan »

The soundtrack uses layering and algorithm for choosing complementary musical objects. So it varies in time and prevents the looped feeling. :) This will be much more used in EE. Still the musical source are fixed audio clips due to technology limitation.
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MikeM
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Re: Musical influences for J.U.L.I.A.

Beitrag von MikeM »

Very cool. I can't wait to hear it in action, and am very much looking forward to the whole soundtrack. Thanks for answering my questions!
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