Hey Legends!
Since the reveal, there’s one thing you’ve talked about a lot: the soundscape of Fading Echo.
So today, we’re pulling back the curtain on the person shaping all those eerie vibes and soaring themes: our deer composer, Maxwell Sterling.
In a game where atmosphere and emotion do a lot of the heavy lifting, music had to be more than just background noise: we tried to make it a core part of the experience. So we sat down and asked Maxwell about the creative process, the challenges along the way, and how he turned the mood of Fading Echo into sound.
How did you approach the atmosphere and tone of Fading Echo through music?
I was blown away from the earliest screen captures and images of Fading Echo as well as the brilliant text documents and bible.
As a composer, the more information about a project I can get before I start writing, really allows me to go full detective mode and dig deep into what the sound of a world, character, and tone could be. It felt interesting to play with genres and context of certain musical styles and popular culture, as a means of subverting them or reimagining them to amplify One’s view point and the full ecosystem of Fading Echo.
My style of writing mixes classical music with heavy digital manipulation and analogue synthesis, all of these ingredients I wanted to draw upon for the score. Take the theme for The Quarry as an example: here it felt right to almost evoke a western style of music but mutate this and push it into a new futuristic dimension to match the epic visuals. Taking instruments like pizzicato strings and putting them through resonators, Karplus-strong delays, and feedback allowed me to paint a more vivid sonic picture of what that landscape feels like.
Were you given a clear direction, or did you have creative freedom from scratch?
For me, it was the best of both worlds :). I was given a stellar direction from the team as well as lots of visual material to inspire me, but ultimately I was allowed to explore openly in terms of my approach. This made the experimentation process super fun and rewarding!
We sometimes found that one idea that was originally intended for a certain environment might actually be better suited for a different one, if we just tweaked certain elements and balance. I was really encouraged to push the envelope with the music, which felt like such a breath of fresh air and allowed me to try and match the singular vision of Fading Echo and its characters.
Having not done a ton of scoring in the game world, the team gave me all the encouragement to be me and guided me along the way to make sure that the music was fitting the collective vision.
What challenges did you face while composing for the game?
The main challenge (which was a good one!) was crafting the music to work for gameplay as opposed to a film or other media.
Initially we built the music to be more loop-based and to be triggered to certain actions, however this didn’t yield the best results so we had to explore another route… We landed on having each theme of music be continuous, not looped, but how this becomes interactive or iterative is by the addition or subtraction of layers.
This was a fun challenge as it pushed me to write in a different style. With loops, you can more easily change a key, let’s say from major to minor, or from F to F#, however with our approach we had to think more continuously and think about how emotion and action is achieved through the collaging of layers.
To me, it reminds me of when Miles Davis moved from Bebop to Modal jazz - a change in which he described moving from vertical to horizontal - in the simplest of terms, making music less about big bold harmonic changes and more about implied melodies, changes in frequency, and rhythm.
The balancing of tension and calm was fairly straight forward as we quickly established that for most pieces of music we should have a “calm” base layer and then have several “tension” layers. The most exciting of which was creating the sonic identity of the Corruption. For this, I was encouraged to delve deep into distortion and how that can be used creatively. There are so many flavours of distortion, not all of which are heavy rock guitars, but some are more like static interference, low bit rate and sample quality. For me, the latter of these has a cool psychoacoustic effect on the gamer/listener and can help create a sense of change or WTF feeling.
What was your favorite track or moment to compose for Fading Echo, and why?
The whole journey has been super enjoyable, and each composition has informed the next, it’s been quite linear in that respect.
But my favourite would probably have to be all of the cutscenes :). These are being written after most of the main themes, so I’m able to pull in ingredients from, say, the Bastion or The Big Tree but really ramp up the drama to fit the narrative climax of the cutscenes.
Because the cutscenes feature some stillness in the characters themselves, I feel that the music can go that extra bit nuts to amplify their actions, therefore these have been the most creatively pushing I would say :)
What do you hope players feel when they hear the music in Fading Echo?
I would hope that the music for Fading Echo helps the player instantly feel a sense of place and environment, almost like a compass of sorts.
My aim was to create a kind of psychogeography of these beautiful dystopian vistas that the team has created - when the player hears a certain note or tone, they instantly know where they are and have an almost kinaesthetic feeling of the locale.
My hope is that there is not just one emotion that the players feel, but many. The system we created, by having multiple emotive layers per track, hopefully allows for the player to quickly latch on to the theme but be guided into the different shades of that state: calm, distress, combat, low health, winning, etc.
Huge thanks to Maxwell for taking the time to share this creative journey with us!
We tried to make the soundtrack of Fading Echo something you don’t just hear. Hopefully, it is something you will also feel. From haunting melodies to rising tension in combat, it’s all designed to pull you deeper into the world.
We can’t wait for you to experience it more fully the next playable version of Fading Echo.
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