Over the past few months, we've talked to you more than once about the work we're putting into building the atmosphere of Among The Trolls as close as possible to our vision. And how could we do that without paying close attention to what your ears will hear while exploring the island?
Music and sound effects play a key role in telling the story of every corner of the archipelago, alongside the emotions of Anna and everyone she meets on this journey. So we took the chance to ask a few questions to Daniele Carmosino, Music Composer, and Marcello Radice, Lead Sound Designer at AvantGarden Games. After all, who better than them to tell you about the notes that will accompany you through the forest of Among The Trolls?
Here's your exclusive first listen to Endless Exile, the track you loved in the demo!
Between Two Worlds: Composing the Music of Among The Trolls
A conversation with Music Composer Daniele Carmosino
The game lives on the border between two realities: Anna's real, contemporary world and the ancient world of Nordic myth. How do you translate that duality into music?
The music doesn't illustrate the two worlds from the outside, it doesn't describe them. It focuses on Anna's inner vision, on what she feels and experiences throughout her journey and her discoveries, from family tragedy to desperate loneliness, all the way to her bond with the world and, above all, with nature. So the duality isn't painted, it's embodied in the sound itself, at a timbral level even before a harmonic or thematic one. The palette starts from real, concrete instruments (piano, cello, voices: Anna's tangible, contemporary world) that, through electronic manipulation like extreme repitching, distortion, and layering, become almost unrecognizable while still keeping their organic nature. That's the game's inner, mystical world. The source is always acoustic and "real," but what reaches the player is often a sound they can no longer place: the same disorientation Anna feels, recognizing her grandparents' island but no longer recognizing what she finds on it.
Finnish mythology and landscape are at the heart of the setting. Did you draw on Nordic or Karelian instruments, scales, or musical traditions to shape the soundtrack, or did you prefer a freer way of evoking that atmosphere?
No, and that was a decision we made from our very first conversations with Giorgio Macellari, our creative director: the music wouldn't use anything ethnic or traditional. No kantele, no runolaulu, no philological quotes from Karelian chant. We wanted to give the soundtrack a modern, cinematic feel, with a contemporary, personal sound palette. The music builds a narrative that runs parallel to the game's: it describes events from an emotional point of view and deliberately avoids any concrete, instrumental reference to Nordic mythology. At the same time, it fully absorbs its darkness and tragedy, which in the Kalevala, just like in the game, aren't seen as anomalies but as fundamental parts of the structure of reality.
In a game where tension and loneliness matter as much as action, what was the biggest challenge in composing music that accompanies the player on their journey? Is there a track or a moment in the game you're especially proud of?
These days, when it comes to physical and virtual instruments, you're spoiled for choice, so the hardest challenge was probably the opposite of piling things on: describing a huge variety of scenes and moments, from exploration to cutscenes, from dungeons to combat, with a deliberately limited palette. I tried to use as few instruments as possible: piano, cello, a Sequential Prophet 10, strings, and voices. It's a self-imposed constraint, but it's what gives the soundtrack its identity and consistency across so many hours of gameplay.
The track I'm probably happiest with is "Endless Exile," which plays at the very start, when the player crosses the forest before reaching the house. It began as an idea and a lyric by Giorgio, which I then adapted and set to music, and it's sung by Maria Chiara Argirò, a great Italian artist based in London who's been moving between jazz and electronic music for years. I met her almost by chance through friends, and her artistic path turned out to be perfect for this game. In fact, after that first collaboration, she went on to contribute to three more tracks on the soundtrack.
A game soundtrack isn't linear the way a film score can be, because it has to react to the player's choices and actions. How did you approach the adaptive side of the music (exploration, narrative, dungeons, combat), and how much did that shape the way you compose?
I don't know if it works this way for every composer, but for me music naturally works on multiple layers. There's a base, sometimes the root notes of the chords, sometimes a pad, a sustained cello note, or percussion, and depending on what's needed, I add elements on top of that base before changing it. That's basically the same logic as adaptive music, so moving to the vertical layering system implemented in Wwise was almost painless: I was already composing in overlapping stems. A concrete example: when lykky, the islands' life energy, rises or falls, the music adds or removes layers in real time. When combat starts, another set of layers gets stacked on top of the lykky layers, using the same harmonic structure and tempo as a base, with transitions quantized to the rhythmic grid. The player never notices a change or a cut, yet the music keeps growing in intensity in step with the danger and tension of the game, moment by moment. More than changing how I compose, the game forced me to make explicit an architecture that was already implicit in how I write.
Was there a reference (a composer, a soundtrack, an album, or even a memory or a place) that inspired you while working on the ATT soundtrack?
Yes, there were months of research before production even started. Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir were constant references. What interested me most about Hildur's work was her method, that idea of starting from real, concrete sources to build abstract sound worlds. But plenty of more electronic stuff went into the brainstorming pot too: Apparat (especially "Goodbye" with Soap&Skin), M83, and some of Low Roar's work tied to Death Stranding. What really defined the sound of the soundtrack, though, was months of free recording and experimentation: the Prophet 10, voices, acoustic and electric cello with the great Chris Unterberger, my Soviet upright piano, a Lirika played by maestro Mark Aanderud, and other musicians who passed through the studio. Everything was then pitched and/or reamped through guitar pedalboards, distortion, and effects chains, until the source material stopped sounding like itself.
The Forest Is Watching: Sound Design in Among The Trolls
A conversation with Lead Sound Designer Marcello Radice
The forest in Among the Trolls is almost a character in its own right: "the forest is watching." How do you build a soundscape that makes the player feel watched, immersed, and potentially always exposed to risk?
My goal with the forest's sound in Among the Trolls was to create a living soundscape, one that constantly adapts to what's happening around Anna. Each biome is defined by the calls of different animal species. Birdsong changes from day to night, and how present the birds are depends on weather conditions: they're noisier when it's sunny and quieter when there's strong wind or rain.
The forest, on its own, isn't threatening. It's present, it's alive. But things change once a Rift opens. As the world grows corrupted, the soundscape gets quieter and quieter, and the animal calls take on unsettling, menacing tones, telling the player it's urgent to restore nature's balance and save it from Hisii's corruption.
Between the natural and the supernatural, portals, dungeons, and creatures, what was the hardest or most fun sound to create? How do you give a voice to something that doesn't exist in the real world?
Without a doubt, the most exciting and fun challenge was designing the monsters' voices. The goal was to create harrowing screams for zombie-like creatures that still let their wooden nature come through. To get there, I recorded vocalizations from Gabriele Gramaglia, a death metal singer and musician. I then layered recordings of wood objects and surfaces being manipulated on top of his screams and growls, to add the characteristic texture and resonance of that material. Everything was then processed further to get the final result.
The game alternates between moments of total quiet and moments of pure danger. How do you use silence as a tool? Can taking sound away be scarier than adding it?
Absolutely. Like I said before, when a Rift opens, the forest transforms: birdsong fades and silence takes over. The sense of loneliness and threat becomes so intense that you can even hear Anna's breathing.
The forest and the dungeons are designed as places with their own identity and their own story. How does your sound palette change from one environment to another?
If the forest is a living, open place, full of nature, animals, and plants that shape its atmosphere with their sounds, the dungeons are places of death instead. Their soundscape is dominated by silence, broken only by distant echoes, the sound of dripping water, and Anna's footsteps, all of which help build a claustrophobic, oppressive atmosphere.
From chopping down a tree to the crackle of fire, from an arrow being shot to meat sizzling over the campfire: how much does the sound feedback of objects and actions matter for making the experience feel believable, and how do you work to make every action feel real?
Working on foley for Among the Trolls was a lot of fun, and the sound feedback for different actions plays a key role in the gameplay. There's a wide range of interactions, and working with the animation team to nail a convincing result for every gesture was really exciting.
The biggest challenge, though, was giving effective feedback to actions that don't have a dedicated animation. Picking up items from the ground, discarding them, combining them in the inventory, eating, or building a bridge are all actions that, for pacing and gameplay reasons, aren't animated. In these cases, sound becomes essential: it fills in what's missing visually and lets the player stay fully immersed throughout the experience.
Everything you'll hear across the archipelago comes from these choices, the hush of the forest, the silence of the dungeons, the sounds in between. All of it exists to keep you close to Anna and the world she no longer recognizes.