Theodore Wohng is our composer and sound designer. In this weeks Developer Friday we discover where he found his inspiration for the music of our game!
- Who are you and what do you do on "The Ball"? My name is Theodore Wohng, I am the composer and sound designer of the game.
- When and how did you join the team? I joint the team in September 2008, the game was still at its initial stage, it has changed a lot since then. Sjoerd and I exchanged some correspondence in regard to the art direction and the overall atmosphere of the game, armed with some screenshots and concept drawings, I set to work.
- How did you start out with music? I started writing in the late 90s, my mother used to be a luthier and a piano tutor, music has always been around in some kind of form or another. At the beginning I wrote tunes just for fun to replace the music in certain scenes that I didn’t like in the films I watched, that was how it all started.
- What has been the most challenging thing you have done on the game? The most challenging thing was creating the sound of our game, Aztec music that you hear in present day simply would not suit the game; ancient Aztecs did not have a notation system that could be written down, their music was handed down through generations and next to nothing survived after the Spanish conquest. Nowadays their instruments are locked behind museum glass, with more of an archaeological value rather than a musicological one. It was certainly a challenge to do the research with no music to look at and listen to. So I redirected my focus on the symbolic nature of Nahuatl language and the artworks that they produced, trying to imagine what would the painted scenes in the pictographs sound like as if I had a scope looking through time. Then I realised that if I go back far enough in time, there are universalities that all ancient cultures share, as various civilizations have their very own musical interoperations and textures to describe earth and desert, yet they shared some resemblance, same as the cave paintings around the world, so I started studying those musical similarities, they became the building blocks of the music, based upon that I constructed with those elements for our game, the result is quite symbolic and shamanistic, which suited the game’s mysterious atmosphere.
- What do you like the most about the game? I enjoyed working with the team, although we did not work in the same building, their works are very inspiring in every way. I like the world we created in every detail, as you venture through the game, it almost feels like you have a different measurement of time where clocks tick differently, it is a very unique and instinctive adventure.