Hello everybody,
In our previous Feature Focus videos we talked about our vision for Humankind and some of the game’s core systems. This week we will turn our attention to another aspect that will help players immerse themselves in the game: The Soundtrack.
Check out the videos below, or read the summary in the blog.
We think many of our long-time fans will be happy to hear that the soundtrack for Humankind has been arranged by Arnaud Roy, who previously created the Endless soundtracks under the name of FlyByNo.
Arnaud is quite excited to work on Humankind, because it truly constitutes an epic challenge to create music for 60 different cultures from different historical eras. To cover the breadth of cultures and to tackle this daunting project, he worked with ten different solo musicians, each one being an expert in different styles of traditional music as well as instruments.
The cultures represented in the game were divided into several cultural groups, and roughly 8 hours of music pieces were recorded for these groups in total, all based on either traditional compositions, or improvisations by the musicians themselves. To give a few examples, you will hear Mesoamerican flutes, the guzheng (also known as the Chinese zither), the oud, a baroque string trio, and a replica of an ancient Greek cithara (played by Arnaud himself) when listening to the music of Humankind.
In addition to the traditional pieces, Arnaud arranged about 90 minutes of orchestral music. This music attempts to evoke nature and a sense of exploration through its musical direction, for example the prominent use of wind instruments. These orchestral pieces also feature performances by the traditional instruments used for the different culture groups, as well as choirs, which have almost become a signature of Arnaud’s work for Amplitude. The lyrics for these choirs are drawn from classical literature in Latin and Greek this time, for example Ovid and Sophocles.
We hope you enjoyed learning a little more about the soundtrack for Humankind, and invite you to check out the main theme: