The Music of 'Tchia': Channeling the Soul of New Caledonia

[Music] hello and welcome to the music of chia channeling the soul of new calonia I'm John arer mats and this is GDC 2024's audio track before we get started uh they asked me to remind you to silence your cell phones your pages your cool watches other the other cool noise makers that analog pocket you've left in suspend mode for too long turn those off for now thank you uh let's dive in so who am I uh like I said I'm John Robert matz and I'm the composer on Chia uh I've also worked on games like ambition a minuette and power a uh late Baroque slant Classical period score with a game for a game set on the eve of the French Revolution uh mythgard a cyberpunk meets mythology Fusion of electronics Orchestra and weird hybrid sounds uh for the king and for the king too a fantasy score uh with a soul made of early music

Renaissance Medieval music uh instrumentation and Harmony and uh fossil Echo the first game from Chia developers aasb a Fantastical spiritual journey with a lot of interesting vaguely World music inspired sounds but relatively unfettered from any real world equivalent cultures now as you can kind of see from this I'm no stranger to different sounds and styles but Chia required a different approach the core development team at aasb hailed from this little island country between Australia and New Zealand new calonia they wanted to make something that really spoke to their culture that highlighted their mythology their geography their natural world their customs and traditions and and this is where I come in their music now you may have noticed something I'm not from there uh I'm quite possibly the whitest kid you could ask to do this uh I'm from the Chicago suburbs I've barely even seen the sea never mind swimming in it or sailing on it the phrase that came to mind as I was

writing this was that I was probably the most uniquely unqualified person to write this score I think I asked them a couple times like are you sure you want me to do this uh but they did want me they loved what I did on fossil Echo so much that they had to have me back for their second outing leaving from this linear relatively simple 2D handdrawn platformer to a sprawling open World adventure loaded with activities cinematic sequences and tons of nooks and crannies to explore scattered across this huge archipelago a fictionalized version of real life new calonia I had to do this right thankfully I had friends and artistic collaborators to draw upon the first step was research it was time for a deep dive I spent months researching like probably six n months just watching documentaries reading musicological journals digital Museum exhibits all manner of things almost all of them in French a language

I do not speak I must have asked a million questions of Phil Creo our lead developer and traded dozens and dozens of musical examples references Etc all working towards getting a grasp on what made new Caledonian music distinctly new Caledonian there was a real fear and to be fair a real danger that Chia would be perceived as indie game Moana uh and we really didn't want that uh nor did we want the score to lean into anything that felt particularly Moana is as such I tried to consciously steer away from anything that felt particularly like a uh big Hollywood Sound and do my best to integrate as many uniquely new Caledonian tambers and musical elements as I could Now new calonia is home to a host of interesting types of music but a distinct genre that we'll focus on here one that began to form in the 1970s and really flourished into the 80s and persists to today keka music is a homegrown genre that blends a lot of elements from other genres with

traditional new Caledonian sounds and rhythms elements of reggae rock Soul music even rap and Funk kind of Infuse it and lyrics can touch on anything from the challenges of everyday life to politically charged speech pushing for social change from the outset one of the things that Phil wanted to feature in our musical landscape were several licensed tracks from notable new Caledonian artists Guru J and Paul wamo so everything that I wrote had to complement those while feeling distinct enough to not tread on their featured status keka music features prominent vocals with close-knit harmonies guitars drums Keys all your normal band of stuff if you will plus a healthy dose of elements of traditional new Caledonian folk music [Music]

traditional new calonia music is heavily influenced by The Wider music of melanesia but has a lot of distinct elements that distinguish it from the music of its Island neighbors uh Colonial events uh of the 1930s seems to have expunged a saddening amount of native musical Traditions from the record but several do persist and are alive and in performance practice today and as such are pretty well documented the notable elements we decided to incorporate were the peu or Temperance Rhythm sometimes just called rhythm or kanak Rhythm it's this distinct motor that runs throughout nearly all of the traditional ceremonial dances that remain in practice you can boil it down to basically a sort of dotted ath 16th pattern with strong downbeats emphasized either by accents or just more instruments being brought to bear like this varies a bit depending on where you are on the islands but that core sound runs through just about every bit of traditional music that has a

steady pulse so here's an example that's particularly emblematic of the [Music] [Laughter] [Music] Trope it shows up everywhere and even gets woven into the cona genre of music I touched on earlier sometimes with traditional instruments sometimes with drum kit and percussion more idiomatic to the reggae influence of the other genres as well speaking of traditional instrumentation let's touch on some of that obviously we have human sounds like foot Stomps and claps but there's a ton of other percussive elements in play pounding bamboo is used as a sort of a bass drum kick while bamboo logs are hollowed out sometimes made with slots or tongues to give different pitches when stuck when struck with stick beers and then as we can see in the picture on

the right here uh tucked under this gentleman's arm you see one of the more fascinating hand percussion instruments the bonep is absolutely everywhere in new Caledonian music both in traditional music and modern music it's sort of a bark beater uh if you will a peeled bark is folded and stuff with coconut fibers or other plant matter and formed into this sort of triangle shape to be beaten one against the other as a pair we actually made these into a playable instrument for one of the music sequences in the game some larger more Circ types of beaters exist as well called aay uh which are basically these giant balls of leaves uh glommed together and bound with uh uh which are usually played by just striking them with your open Palm think of it it's like a beefed up Clap the sonai on the other hand are basically a sort of cowbell uh bundles of dried seed pods are tied on the dancers's feet and add this characteristic clatter or rattle sound as with every stomp that they make again we made playable instruments of these that Chia can use for some of the musical scen quences and finally leaves

yep you heard right these little dried Fern leaves are so ubiquitous in new Caledonian music that Phil went so far as to bring some back home to France with him after visiting his parents over the holidays specifically to record them so we could put them in the game they also 100% break down into just tiny little pieces as you play them so by the time we got our samples done they were gone but I think the results [Music] [Music] work I appreciate them having the

particle effects of them just disintegrating as you play [Music] them now I'm a brass player primarily so winds come fairly naturally to me and I wanted to find a way to incorp some sounds that I could replicate myself the traditional kak flute is a transverse Flute made of bamboo with a relatively limited range and a curious mode of [Music] playing it's frequently used almost as more of a rhythmic element than a melodic one think of it almost like beatboxing now unlike most of the wood bamboo and

plant-based instruments the wesle which we see here on the right or whistle is made of metal and actually began Life as a shipboard whistle from European sailing vessels modified and incorporated into traditional music you can actually hear the aay in the background there just like the flute it's used to drive and lend a piercing rhythmic motor to the traditional musical Ensemble while while we were able to use some recorded uh phrases of flute kanaka the score I needed something a bit more flexible that I could that still had the same kind of bamboo transverse flute character and I was fortunate enough to find one uh an instrument that fit the bill perfectly from a small maker when I was in LA for a conference a while back I used that to voice our villain mayor's theme something Mystic mysterious and creepy [Music]

on the flip side on a complete whim I may tried an experiment I took a metal slide whistle I had I tuned it to the correct bass note of the real whistles and ran it through some Pitch shifting plugins and was pleasantly surprised at the [Music] results hey [Music] works right so finally we get to the vocal element my favorite New Caledonia has a rich tradition of song both homegrown and influenced by the musical Traditions imported from Europe by missionaries there are more than 35 different languages and dialects spoken on the islands but the two most represented are French and dreu and those are what all of our songs lyrics are written in thanks to Marilu Lopez

Aguilera our Lyricist close largely homophonic harmonies and neat rhythmic text declamation typify a lot of the new Caledonian Coral tradition [Music] [Music] [Music] along with improvisatory Asado elements frequently using the a pattern of [Music] vs along with elements of call and response little barks and shouts usually

used to cue dancers if used in a p setting and trilling cries to punctuate and add extra interest so how do we how do we bring all this stuff together step two the process so I've touched on a little of this so far but actually making all this happen on an indie game budget no less was a real challenge obviously there was the trick of getting a lot of the unique new Caledonian percussion sounds and we were fortunate enough to be able to record some of the more idiomatically new Caledonian instruments leaves sonai Etc from proper new Caledonian sources the ones that Chia needed to be able to play were turned into audio assets and implemented in fod by our audio team over at a Shell in the pit uh and because I can't let something that useful go to waste I also made custom contact instruments out of them as well which got used throughout the score guitars are ubiquitous in kanaka music uh and we knew we wanted to feature guitar prominently an instrument that at least at the time I started working on the score and arguably if you talk to any

guitarist I still do not play um but I was unfortunate enough to get to work with some of my friends uh Eric Peabody AKA Viking guitar and Grant Henry AKA stemage who knocked everything I threw at them uh out of the park for everything I didn't record myself we recorded individual players and built up entire sections out of them Andrew Stefan uh over here played our violins and violas Andrew Stern played cellos bases where Travis Kindred uh I played all the trumpets and horns uh trombones were Daniel rer tuba was my good friend Alex Hill uh we even got some harmonic in there from Peter Jones uh Andrew Stefan uh even went so far as to use multiple violins and violas to help further mitigate the kind of phasing problems you get when you multitrack yourself and give a realistic variety of Timbers within the upper string sections and finally the most important part the vocals which required honestly the most unique approach of all the process for writing all the songs was similar but uh it took a bit of

refinement to get it all down things start from the script understanding where the song takes place in the story what is in response to what the general feel of the song is supposed to be from there I'd have an idea make a sketch sometimes something as simple as a voice recording uh and I'd send it back to Phil who would approve it or come back with notes apologies for the aquarium sounds in the background [Music] o lovely right anyway so if he liked it maril would get

to work on lyrics and I'd start adding them in sending back more examples to Phil who' sometimes suggest little tweaks to text setting to make it more correct and naturalistic uh again remember I don't speak these languages and checking and triple checking and quadruple checking with people who do was Paramount from there we' create the assets for the singers and the recording studio in new calonia and get things packaged up which it turned out had even more challenges we realized very quickly that at least for the choir there really wasn't much use in preparing scores they learned everything by roote which meant creating mockup stems for every voice part in every queue in Dru or French and singing every part myself and packaging them all up with lyric sheets and performance instructions that would be translated by Marilu for the CH his director and recording engineers at the studio in New Caledonia basically starting from here with me singing all the individual

[Music] parts and ending up here with the final recordings now while I wrote a lot of specific Parts six or more sometimes in close harmony etc etc one of the things that really brought everything together and honestly something core to a lot of new Caledonian uh Coral tradition is improvisation whole counter Melodies rhythmic ideas nonsense syllables they made them up during the sessions and we ran with them because much like the orchestal recordings our our choir was recorded peac meal uh there were only about six singers in total multitrack usually no more than two voices in a stem I had pretty much total control over the material which was great for fixing tuning or timing or making blend tweaks and melodine but also they were able to just send me whatever other cool

ideas they happen to come upon during the recording sessions to be used or not used as the case may be in fact there was one cut scen score that provoked enough improvisational ideas that I wound up spinning all those off or a bunch of them off into uh another piece and wrote an entire new queue around them that's what you're hearing here [Music] it's nice just want to like live here for a while I could not use [Music] this so let's take a look at one of these score cues that kind of puts all this stuff together combining vocals Native Instruments score or orchestral elements and really the whole kitten Kaboodle [Music]

so here we have that peo rhythm going on we have some of the percussion elements that we talked about some of the shouts claps in response some of the improvisational stuff that they came up with during Coral sessions there's your flute beat boxing in the background the flute K the kind of vocal trills and responses to that as we kind of build back up [Music] more of that cool flute stuff and now we're into the stuff where we're having Coral parts that I've actually written [Music] again and now we bring the orchestra back in all right so kind of putting all that stuff together to something that hopefully has the emotional impact while still being true to the music and the

culture that we're trying to uh to respect and convey and celebrate but wait there's more it's only 4:20 we've got we got lots of time Chia is a musical uh yeah uh it's also a rhythm game 10 interactive musical sequences are spread throughout chia's Story featuring our voice cast pulling double duty as singers and letting the player perform ukulele and a variety of other native New calonia musical instruments alongside in a rhythm game fashion songs take place in a variety of story contexts with a rotating cast of characters instruments and an increase in difficulty and complexity as the game progresses but there's one thing that we kept in mind as we designed these and you can see it here on the tutorial screen for the First music sequence you can't win or lose at music just have fun that was our mantra for all these

systems and to facilitate that we decided no fail states only note accuracy percentage tallies after each song you can't lose at music right in fact when you're playing a pitched instrument we actually lock the default notes to the notes in the scale of the piece so even if you're completely wrong it won't sound terrible more about our actual instrument mechanics uh shortly in addition we have an autoplay system that you can switch on or off at any time with which disables the rhythmic playalong mode and turns it into basically an automatically performed music video This helped bandage otherwise unsolvable challenge as well subtitles since every song in fact all the dialogue in the game has you know is entirely done in Dru or French and a notable amount of our players couldn't be expected to speak either language having the means for them to turn off the gameplay elements and just free their eyes up to read the subtitles felt a bit more important I know it's a bit of a hacky solution

but it let us at least have the option of having our cake and eating it too if people couldn't multitask and play and read at the same time that way we could do that without compromising on the cultural linguistic vision of the game as a whole songs begin simple with the First music sequence which we looked at earlier being our introduction to timing and rhythm with only one button press being required to play originally the next song was designed to introduce and teach the player how to juggle note selection with the left stick and rhythm timing with the face buttons she alternates between sonai and wjps uh selecting the instrument by pushing the stick up for wanp or down for sonai and pressing any of the face buttons to play unfortunately for my idealized tutorial goals the sequence ended up falling so soon after the first sequence if in the average play experience uh that it felt too much like too much too fast literally a month or so before launch we decided to move it to a flashback sequence later in the game it was the correct Choice it was the right flow choice for the game and it all adapted

just fine moving directly from leaves to ukulele in the third sequence now apologies for my ADHD it this feels like the right time to do a little walkr of how the ukulele in the game is designed and functioned so we can then talk about how it functions differently in the song sequences and how those were crafted afterwards at any given moment after a certain point in the story Chia can unsling her ukulele from her backpack and play it then very very early on Phil knew he wanted to give players a musical tool to interact with the environment and the ukulele was the Natural Choice melodically capable popular across Polynesia Oceana and small enough for a kid to carry with her it was the ideal Choice the pitch wheel for note selection was the first thing to go in [Music]

you use the left stick to select a note and then the Two Face buttons play either the low or high octave after that we had to figure out how to fit well just every other thing you could do with a ukulele onto a standard controller piece of cake right so the uh the system is a bit uh uh complex but at the end of the day it works uh like this note selection is handled with a left stick default C to c a c major scale which works super well for ukulele music face buttons control single note chord low sorry single note low octave single note high octave chord strum down and up when designing the chord system we stuck with simple Triads omitting extended chords like sevens 9es 11s Etc

because at the very least having only a Triad would never present a clash and people could always add notes to imply extended harmonies if they wanted to with single PLU if they needed to chords are by default dionic to the key in question so C Major D Minor E minor F major G major a minor and B diminished and then of course the octave and now this is where it gets fun for each chord we strum we can shift the chord quality on a spectrum with the bumpers either left making it for smaller intervals if you will or right making those intervals larger so using C major and pushing the left bumper gives us C minor conversely using the right bumper takes us to wider C augmented this applies all the way up the scale or down the way this chart

shows it C can be minor major augmented D can be diminished minor major e can be diminished minor or major F can be minor major or augmented G can be minor major or augmented a can be diminished minor or major and B can be only diminished or minor which I admit was a little bit of a hard cell to not have a third option but sticking with the correct music theory kind of convinced them yes now that we've all covered music theory 101 let's let's move on here uh now I can hear you saying that's not every possible chord or even every possible note which is where I say I know because we've still got triggers so the triggers uh on our ukul they control two things or one of two things uh if pressed after a note has been played they let you pitch Bend up or down by half step kind of like a whammy

bar sort of thing it's cool uh you can even do some vibr with them if you're clever if you press them before a node has been played though the entire the entire circle shifts up or down a half step now between that and exploiting the magic of enharmonics we've got every possible try that we could want all functioning and playable on a standard controller layout and that's our ukulele thank you we uh I think I must have been on like four different calls with Phil for an extended period of time which is like why you have that incred he drew that incredibly sweaty picture of himself there in the corner like as I'm like describing how the music theory needs to be to make we got to cover everything he's like what about this I'm like don't worry it'll work it was great anyway that that gives us a fully functional instrument you can play any Melody any chords with a solid amount of variation tons of round robin recordings

across the entire range of the instrument also it was super lovely as I we kind of hoped secretly to see so many weird covers uh like pop up of people playing popular songs and like you know like like the last of us and all kinds of other weird stuff it was great uh anyhow back to songs and thank you for putting up with my ADHD degression which is really like an entire chapter in a book anyhow for the actual musical sequences we had to tweak the free form music system of the ukulele somewhat for starters we would gearshift the note wheel into the key required uh with the note options becoming dionic to the key in the piece in this example we are in D Major so if the player misses notes even if they miss notes they'll still be playing in D Major and it can't sound that bad because remember you can't win or lose at music just have fun so once we'd spell out the notes and chords in the key I'd prepare the MIDI files for Ben uh Benjamin deor uh the programmer who helmed the rhythm game system I'd start with writing the ukulele part on just one midi track or as just one midi

track then copy paste it into all four adapt it breaking phrases up against across four different midi tracks one for each of the possible articulations low octave pluck high octave pluck cord strum down and chord strum up one note for each note in the game's Rhythm sequence those files combined with a chart showing BPM the BPM for every song is fixed by the way any kind of rubato or rentando stuff is entirely fake like there is a locked BPM we slow down and we speed back up and it's fine no one knows it's good uh we can technically have those Tempo changes but I kept them to a minimum and they really only happened at the end of pieces I'd have to like SMTP lock everything and it was it was a fun time anyway so Tempo BPM meter pertinent count off information about syncing all the note and cord key signature info and all the pertinent notes on each music sequence went in a document and got sent over and then we were good now the cool thing about our system is that they breaking up all the articulations into separate midi stems

the actual Rhythm gameplay becomes just all about using the stick to select the right note at the right time and pressing any face button with it auto selecting chords strummed up or down or individual notes across both octaves without the player having to really do anything all they got to do is choose the right note press the right button remember also we got some bonus stuff out of this that autoplay system I described so we wouldn't have to necessarily play and just enjoy the music video yeah when it takes over it just automatically triggers the midi data for those tracks in real time so the hand positions oh by the way all the ukulele hand positions are correct and accurate so they all match what you to have for real ukulele chords Etc uh and so like music notes all that stuff you just get it for free now it's super cool uh so switching it on and off can happen in real time and she continues to play the correct notes and they all animate correctly cuz it's tied in systemically now there's a lot more material to cover about about how chia's open world was broken up into musical zones for each

biome tons of interactive activities or uh or even take a deep dive into the fod powered uh interactive music systems that make our open world and stealth combat encounters feel vibrant or I could spend another 20 minutes of talking about how we designed uh the walk-in voices uh for these strange wooden creatures with a combination of blown bottle sounds percussion instruments and weird wood noises but time is a little bit short although actually I think I've been sweating and going fast up here that we have more time than I thought so I want to end our talk on one of the music sequences this was originally written in the manner of one of the French folk songs but uh Louise here has spent some time translating it for CH uh and as such when we hear it in this reprise in dreu I Incorporated more of the Native New Caledonian rhythmic elements uh let's listen [Music]

go [Music] the we me [Music]

with youe [Music] you can hear the the P elements the kanak elements coming into the background during this section [Music]

[Applause] thank you very very much uh that was uh that was elidan uh singing there she played Louise and just a wonderful adorable voice uh it just uh when I got the first recordings back for that that just made my day all of the all of the voice cast was tremendous and all the choir members were wonderful and it was great to kind of get to feature them in so many ways um but yeah that's basically it uh it was an absolute joy to get to work on something as special as Chia and collaborating with so many fantastically talented folks from all over the globe to make this happen was a once- in a-lifetime opportunity and one I would not give up for the world and now I think uh we have time for some questions if we want to hit them uh I'm gonna cheat because I'm I've

been standing this whole time I'm gonna sit over here but if we have questions we could line up here by the mic uh and hit me with them okay unless I've answered everything [Music] preemptively wonderful talk just wanted to say uh my question uh well slight preface um I'm currently working on a game that has elements that tie to a particular country and unfortunately I kind of got more of this information late into development but um the work that you've done and having the amount of time that you were given at the start of the project is that something that you often get like do you normally try and like how how common is it for you to get you know half a year to do this amount of preparation before diving into a project like this that that is I mean it it can be rare like this is a lot of the indie

game projects I've worked on have had a extremely long uh like development time and I've been brought in very early so I first heard about this game I think in 2017 and I think I wrote the main theme for it in 2017 but like getting all of the uh like all of the tambal elements in play getting everything else the melody was there but dialing in what made it correct uh and proper for new calonia was a a process and took a lot of research Etc um as far as time like usually you don't have that kind of time I would imagine but ideally you know what it is going in you know like I said when I got asked to do it I was I really straight up ask like is is you sure you want me to do it like maybe we can like maybe there's you know maybe there's someone better for this and barring that that was the choice of either I need to put in the work to make this happen and find the people to collaborate with to bring this to life properly or I would

feel real bad about like I don't know like faking it whitewashing it what have you so whatever you can do to try to make and find that time to do the research on it you know find people to collaborate with is a good I don't want to say shortcut because there's no shortcuts in this but it's a good way to like have the authenticity to have someone to work with who does know about that you know that would be my advice in that sort of situation okay appreciate it thank you cool no problem yes hi hi thank you so much for that that was incredible and your music's so so beautiful thank you so much um so I'm curious the instruments that you hadn't uh written for before um that were new to you did you have access to those instruments did you um get to play them and and so the the percussion instruments and the other things or so I didn't actually uh like those uh those we basically we were able to record in new calonia and like I sampled and broke out like some like the leaves literally like we brought that they were brought home a cardboard box so that we could record them and brought home by Phil so

they went to France not to uh not to America and I'm like okay can we get like up and down strokes this many times and then like do some rhythmic stuff and maybe we can use that uh and like trying to emulate the sorts of things that you know that they you know use that stuff for to get the right sound um like the other instruments are like okay this is a very simple Bamboo Flute I literally like some of the um during the process I was like watching documentary footage in French of of a guy like building one of these floods like oh going out literally like find a piece of bamboo that works properly and build it like okay I see how you make this and there's a ton of variety so much that's one of the things that really was remarkable is so much of the uh of the like the native instruments are literally just like I don't want to call them like found instruments but it's like we've we harvest the the plant that makes the right shape and then we modify it and like craft it into something and now you have a flute or or a drum or whatever else and so it was like okay we can see

I can see how these are made how can I emulate that here with the things that I have or can I acquire things that will do that or can we sample the real thing and then turn it into a virtual instrument because you know during the process of this game like there's five and a half hours of Music in this game uh and it took a and a lot of that like spun up as we went along we didn't know when we were starting out how big it was going to be and it got way bigger as as we went so having virtual instruments or instruments that I had access to to just kind of sit down and go I need to expand this uh what do I have that I can use that will still have that authentic flavor and the right sound like that was the stuff I went to and picked up every time yeah okay cool thanks so much you're most welcome any other questions yes thanks for uh thanks for the talk John that was great I kind of wanted to piggy back off of the first question if you had to like pick like two or three techniques when it comes to composing

music that are most valuable when it comes to making a soundtrack feel let's say authentic or from a period right could be any sort of composition technique anything songwriting whatever Music Choice what would those like top two or three be for you so like what would be the top two or three like techniques that I would use to to like add authenticity to something yeah Techni te whether that's in songwriting or choice of instruments or or anything really gotcha um uh boy that's that's a really complicated question um I mean the F the first thing for me is to understand like is to understand like the the kind of breath of the cultural the music in question uh like one of the things I I mentioned like there is uh there it's surprising when you look at like a lot of the folk music of new calonia because there is like some stuff that happens in the early part of the 20th century where they lose a lot of their it seems like looking at the records they lose a lot

of their cultural uh musical Heritage and only some sorts of things get preserved and Contin so it almost is like a necking down of like a more broad uh background like understanding like okay what do we have that we can definitely use that will connect authentically with this and like finding an elephant in this case it was like the the P Rhythm which is just everywhere DT D D D D and in only and like literally like every example I can find it's almost like within 10 BPM of that Tempo and so I'm like okay that has to run through this like the lifeblood of this score because that is a thing that gets used in you know the traditional music that is a thing that gets used in keka music you know it's like you're listening to something that sounds almost reggae but there is that pulse throughout it because that is the thing that they use so you find the thing that is like if you could boil it down to like one thing what's it going to what's it going to be and then on top of that I would say like look for instrument mentation that can tie you to that place as well so one thing you know and

ideally you want more than one thing here but but those are like the first things I would look for okay that's a hard question to do but hopefully that answers some of it yeah appreciate it thanks no problem yes sir yeah I just because I just had a question regarding when you're writing the music for the choir um how was it was it kind of difficult to help them vocalize what you wanted or did you have help along with um I guess your assistant when when I get the recording with them cuz you mentioned about them doing their vowels really easily with that and he sounded really good too as well so thank you I I basic basically like you know the first thing I did was like I wrote um uh I basically like for some of the song for the songs for the main cast where they're singing solos like I gave them sheet music and I gave them mock-ups of me singing it and that worked pretty well for the choir though like we very quickly realized they don't read sheet music and they they basically learned everything by root so I was um I

basically did my best to sing in dreu to sing this stuff correctly uh and I know I know I didn't do it right sometimes because I would get back them singing it correctly like well I botched that consonant completely uh it is a fascinating language and the way that has been uh like you know because they've converted you know this to like Latin characters you know uh to to write it out you know I I assume this is something that comes from you know this is this is the French figuring out we're going to figure out how to write this using our characters suddenly it's like okay I don't know why they chose some of the characters they chose as someone who can sing in French it still doesn't make a connection so like I would have to go back and like double check to see I was pronouncing it as close as I could to correct and then make these mockups so that they could sing with that and like individually stemming out every bit and they would I in in in in the sessions they would just like listen to it listen to it and then sing uh and I would put

all the expression that I wanted things to be in you know into my performance and it was basically just I'm going to model this and then they're going to embellish on what I've done and and and the nice thing about having uh everything broken up into like one person at a time recording or two people on a section uh meant that if there was something that wasn't quite right or a note that wasn't perfect I could change it and it was one tiny bit and melodine is really good for making that kind of like granular alteration if you have the small pieces no one can really tell and so you can tweak stuff if they sang A A minor third instead of a major third Mudge and you're fine you know so um but yeah it was it was an interesting process and I wish like there were things I wish I could have done differently or done better you know because there was no high-speed internet to like dial in and watch while they were in the studio so it was very much like I wrote out as many instructions and notes as I could and sent them over there you know and they were translated

and handed off and then I get back stuff that was pretty darn close to what I asked for but it was like here you go here's some video of the session too just for fun and here's uh a drop box uh with all this stuff and so I'd like be in communication with them but it was never in real time it was always this like you're sending something to the other side of the world and they aren't even awake and then you're getting stuff you know I was sending stuff to France when they were awake barely and then they would go all the way to new calonia and then it would come back to me and it was this whole long process it was very I'm not going to say it was like smooth but it it was one of these things where uh at the end of the day you put in the hours required to do it to make it good you know uh because it matters the end of the day so does that answer your question yeah that answer right cool yes hello hi uh thank you so much uh for the talk uh I was kind of wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the ukulele system design and if like like

looking back at it if there's anything that you would change uh or just like overall um I would uh man sorry the the desire to to like like uh like comment on the fact like we came up we we did the system and then the last of us two came I was going to start there I was so similar in terms of the design which is why I'm wondering oh it's so funny because we we we B so a bunch of the team actually worked on a game called wandersong uh before that uh uh I actually I am the voice of The Bard in wandersong so they made my voice into a virtual instrument but the the way you do note selection in that you know which I guess if you go back like might be like there are some other games that have done a note selection with a with a stick you know is kind of similar and so that's where we started from with our design was this circular thing and then you're playing with the face buttons now if I had to do it all over again and we had infinite budget and time boy it would be cool to like have like PlayStation touch inter interface stuff like strum properly up down and tap to

play single things but I also feel like that might be very awkward to hold I don't know uh I have not played around with that very much it would be cool to have an even more granular thing but if you did that I feel like you also wouldn't get the half step and cord shift you know with the with the bumpers so the answer is I hope I never have to do it again but I'm really happy with how it worked it will it'll be great thank you so much yes hello hi yeah thank you this was a great talk this like kind of tickled both the ethn musicology background side and the music theory side of my brains which is my brain which was really awesome I I love like I I musicology is one of my favorite things and like like ethnomusicology is super fascinating you know learning about the music of other cultures and then trying to you know take that and and learn from it and also like you Incorporated is is is super neat and so this was a fun project because of that totally so my question was was kind of along those lines I have background in nothing musicology and

there's a lot of you know discourse in that field about representation and and who we're kind of centering and how we're engaging with research and researchers and and the folks that were um you know trying to represent like you know as you mentioned at the beginning um I'm wondering if you encounter you know all of that takes so much time right I'm wondering if you encountered any issues with timelines pushing back against the need for Quality research and kind of how if you did how you navigated that and advocated for the answer is uh not really like because I got into it so early and the game was so early that I was basically I basically like I had it I had a test piece and that I had this image in my mind of like this is The Melody of this of this main theme and then like my my general so my go-to when I start a new project is I usually try to figure out what the the um the pallette is that I'm working with and the way I do that is I usually like usually I have a main theme idea that is

you know like or the main character has a theme and that's the idea that I go with and I try to build the pallet around that and then I will show that to the director the developer the writer whoever is in charge or that sort of thing you know or the whole team if it's a very like you know everybody has a say kind of project which is always a bit of an exciting thing but anyway um and hopefully they like it and if they don't I try to refine it and usually I only do a little bit of it at a time to try to I abh hor wasting time so I want to do it right the first time or do a little bit of it find out it's not right and then redirect and in this case I was in so early that I was able to spend that time finding the correct thing and doing all the research that was required um the only thing I was pushing up against or pushing back against was just my own time for like you know cuz as a freelance composer you're rarely working on one project I think I had like three going at the same time and so it was like uh another failure I have to try

again I have to look at all this other stuff I you know I'm being told you know oh it's it's too bombastic you know it's like okay we're going to get rid of the tempany we're going to try to like find some appropriate percussion that you know is from you know another you know like we got good sample libraries of like these Polynesian drums which is really close you know uh in in in tambers we can use that instead we will use these other instruments you know and like tuning in like what works you know um you know the the whole you know incorporating the PE Rhythm was the big thing that like really made it stick you know like ah yes this is the this is the glue this is the this is the the sauce that brings it all together uh and like you know so really the only thing I was pushing up against was my own like feeling of like revving my engine while the parking brake is on and not going anywhere I'm like surely eventually I'll get it and then finally getting it so yeah it's it's It's Tricky but also I wouldn't want to try to do something like this in a rushed State you know so but that's but

obviously you don't always have that choice so yeah I don't want to be like crunch until you get it right but there you go anyway uh please don't take that out of context GDC thank you anyway yeah thanks so much yes hello again I don't know um my hearing your talk it sounded like you and possibly the lead developer I'm not exactly sure what their role was worked very closely in tandem to get this going I guess as someone who normally works with session musicians and hires you know folks diving into a realm where it's a country where you know um well you're dealing with a language that you don't speak how um could this have been as successful if without the aid of your developer in this like do you feel like you could have done I guess I think of most composers not really the direct needing the director's Aid to get this done it's kind of like what do you need

me to do okay I can do all of it but it sounds like a lot of this was like a partnership in terms of help and aid from a it really was it was like it was like passing a gate check it was like you got to like you know like if you ever uh if you've ever like I'm thinking about like a like I thinking in video game terms of like have you built your character correctly if you built your character correctly in this RPG this boss you can handle this boss and the boss was my boss uh so if I built the music correctly and passes his estimation we've done it right good uh but that's maybe not the right I get some feedback from him uh about things that weren't quite there but he was like trying to like find and dial in what was correct and what we needed to have for the sound that he wasn't really sure what it needed to be but he knew what it was not and he had some references and he had like Coral references from like uh like the choirs the melanesian choirs and like The Thin Red Line soundtrack for example and things like that like that is stuff that you get over there these you know church choir tradition from you know that come out of like uh you know like out of like uh you know U

uh you know Catholic Church missionaries heading over and and teaching people how to sing uh and that kind of stuff so we knew wanted some of that stuff in there we knew you know we had these other influences that we wanted to have in in in the score but it really was a matter of like you know working with Phil really checking with Phil to see if uh I had gotten it to where it needed to be you know as someone who's from there and knows the kind of stuff to see if I was replicating it correctly I think like one of the final tricks sounds and this sounds real weird and wild was instead of using any like for our mockups instead of using any choir sample libraries was singing all the parts myself in the kind of vocal tamber straight tone kind of very bright forward sound that you hear uh in in a lot of that music and that was the that was was it that was the final thing was like Ah that's the choir sound that I want where you know

was like Crossing that little Rubicon uh uh where you're like oh we we've got this uh and then when we actually had the real people come in and sing it it was a billion times better obviously um but yeah it was very much it was very much a collaborative process but I try to collaborate pretty closely with you know all the directors that I've worked with especially when it is something that is so specifically grounded in a place and grounded in a culture it just seems that especially like you said that I'm not from that I don't speak the language and everything else it becomes all the more important to do so thank you very much you're most welcome any other questions we actually have like five minutes yes sir it's not not so much a question just an observation that uh of something you said uh that that particular Rhythm takes place within about 10 beats per minute every time it shows up this is something uh this happens in Bolognese gamalon music where there's specific

rhythms that only appear at certain temples and it's really interesting because it really builds that identity of a music is knowing that that happens it's like everybody knows that when it shifts gears it's like oh when it goes here and comes up here it's this Rhythm at this Temple for this amount of time and that there's a recognizable and we don't get this so much in western music of that rhythmic identity that you hear in other things so just just wanted to pull that out a little bit if want to talk about that more no absolutely no that like very much like we get that there's actually like a lot of examples of Music where like if you take the Rhythm and you were to like notate it in MIDI and and have it being played back on midi instruments and you slow it down it loses all of the energy and the and the and the uh and the identity of it so if you're going duck like what is that it's like some real draggy swing now and nobody likes that um you know but if you you know and if you speed up it's a car engine that's misfiring but in this pocket it sounds

right and it is a thing and it is an identity of its own and you get that in you know you get that in like Latin jazz you know like if you have like that clave like the clave part if you slow it way down it's super strange it doesn't feel right you know like there's a lot of stuff where there is a pocket that this Rhythm that this identity exists in and outside that pocket it starts to doesn't have the character that you wanted to have and so like that was that was the thing like realizing that like the p Rhythm was a thing that really persisted and is in everything uh and a lot of the dance stuff is built with that pulse but then everything else happens around it like one of the one of the challenges that actually you making me do you mind if I spin like a random like side digression here from this one of the one of the fun bits in the game uh is one of the music sequences is a a peo ceremony is a is a is a is a dance and it is this incredibly beautifully choreographed thing and having watched just dozens and dozens of uh examples of this stuff by this point it was like I need to replicate all of the elements

that are in play here uh for like two and a half minutes uh of uh of this before we transition to like orchestral stuff and I get to take away things from this diagetic music effectively and go into score and trying to do that properly and get all of the different instruments and then like having the animator like writing this thing first and then having the animators go back I say animators I think really was like one person doing all that because we were a team of 12 people you know uh going back and like building the people playing drum like the the the log drum on a on a rack pounding the bamboo on the ground playing ban jeeps and doing you know sonai Stomps and stuff like that in time with the music that I wrote to match what was happening in the score at in the diagetic score after the P was a wild and cool thing to see but it was also like this is the final test can I make effectively something that is

mostly you know improvised around a form that everybody knows who does this stuff can I do that authentically uh and then you know and then weave that into score as The Scene goes along was a super difficult challenge to make happen and I'm really proud of how it came out and like having talked to and heard like on Twitter like people from new calonia talking about like how this sequence like brought them like you know you know to an emotional state that was like really like seeing this stuff seeing their culture and this uh this this ceremony like brought into video games into you know uh you front and center was like a really moving thing uh was like incredibly touching and knowing that like I I guess i' done it right like you that's that's the the uh the confirmation I guess like um and it felt really cool to see that sort of thing so anyway that's my weird degression I didn't have anywhere to put that in the talk and it felt weird just uh just staple it in but thanks anyhow uh any other

questions cool we are with 32 seconds to go we are done thank you everyone so much for coming thank you um you've been a wonderful audience uh check out the game if you like we just literally uh during the last uh the last uh period we just launched on Steam and we announced we're coming to switch soon too uh so we're out on soon like just about everything that'll be cool uh but yeah uh thank you all for coming please feel free to like fill out your evaluation forms I think they asked me to say uh if you thought I was okay maybe say it was okay I don't know uh but otherwise uh tell your friends thank you so much for coming have a wonderful GDC everyone [Music]