Music: How To Get It Right?

[ingedoom]

Hi.
I'm not a professional musician nor composer, so don't judge me too harshly if you expect that kind of standard. I've studied, played and composed music for 4-5 years now, so i do know one or two things about the subject. Enjoy.


I'm sure we can all agree that music is a media of emotional and artistic expression and story telling, but it can also be used for such things as pure entertainment (pop) or manipulation of social behavior (muzak, which you hear in malls). Furthermore it is also often used to emphazise a certain feeling(dramatic movie music) or inspire a certain mood (ambient music). Yet some artists mainly focus on how they can extent the opportunities of sound (today dubstep, what will be next?) and create whole new genres with new and unknown sounds. Finally some pieces are just made for the sake of brag,(virtuosity) for the musician to show of his skills with an instrument ...
A true masterpiece has what it needs, nothing more, but it can have these different sort of purposes.

“A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.”

- Leopold Stakowski

Before you begin composing a piece of music, you have to make a clear set of ideas to follow. Start by asking yourself questions like:

• What is the theme?
  
• Which context is it meant for?
  
• What is the purpose of this music?
  

When you have these questions answered, you are able to make all the important decisions which are required in your creative process. Obviously knowlegde about music theory and agents is also quite essential, like; rythm, harmony, dynamics and form etc etc.

If you don't have any idea about what you wanna make or how you're going to make it, it's probably going to be a mess. Imagin that you have make a car and have all the components and tools to make it with, but no idea of how to use the tools or which car to make, it's probably gonna be one hell of a shitty car... So by knowing what and how, you gain control, not your creativity alone. You put yourself in charge of which piece of music that you are about to make.

Now listen to this piece of music while think about how it makes you feel and which themes you think are built-in, before you continue.

Spoiler below!

You probably already guessed that this soundtrack is made by me, and i will now talk about my compositional ideas.

What are the themes?:

• Sorrow
  
• Religion
  
• Death
  
• Love
  
• Fear
  
• Evil
  

I'm a very happy if you guessed any of those things, and now let's take a closer look on how they're actually built into the song:

The piece is played in the G-minor scale which automatically gives it a sort of sad sound, also in the beginning (0:00-1:30) the tempo is 55 bpm (beats per minute) which is very slow, relaxing and sentimental phase. Also i don't use any nodes which are unfamiliar to the G-minor scale and they are all very long, soft, painterly and legato(bound together). All these components should shape a very fragile, sentimental and sad atmosphere; we are in the domain of love and sorrow, both very enthusiastic feelings.

In the next section of the piece (1:30-2:30) i tweak up the phase to 134 bpm, which is a lot more stressful, fierce and brutal in some way. All the nodes are louder, plainer, harder and more staccato (apart/divided), also more of them are unfamalia to the scale, so they create disharmony and confusion. This section is the complete upperset of the first and shapes a more dramatic, angry and ruthless atmosphere. So here we are in the dominion of evil and fear.

What about religion and death?
Perhaps you noticed the bell which is tolling. When we think of a bell, we often think of church which leads us directly to religion. The bell tolls as if it was for a funeral and there we have death. The bell is a very strong symbol in this soundtrack, and shows how you can use sounds accociated with something in the real world to "paint" your message.


Which context is it meant for?
This is meant to the opening theme when you start the game, so i thought it would be great if the piece had something characteristic about it, something memorable. That's why i chose to make a melodi(theme) which people could characterize my mod by, and at the some time be presented to these themes, which the game also is centered about. Like the soundtracks from Amnesia itself, the piece is only made out of samples from real instruments. The reason for this is that it fits the point of time in which the story is taking place. If there had been a dubstep drop in the middle of it, you probably would have been a bit confused and it would be harder to enter into the spirit of the game.

If you need inspiration on how to build up your song and which instruments to use, then listen to some music from different time periods and eventually study the music of the certain period. It should be possible to find analysisis of music from a given period, if you don't know much about music history yourself. So always keep the historical, geographical and in-game context in mind. Take for example Bioshock, in that game they play a lot of club jazz because the plot revolves around the 20-30'ies where there also were a jazz renaissance.


What is the purpose of this music?
In my case, the purpose is to tell the story of my mod right from the beginning and this is why the soundtrack has the form home-out-home. Furthermore it is to let the player get settled into the mood of the mod, by building-in all the themes of the mod. I wanted the melodi to be "catchy" so that people would recognize the mod by it's theme and of course i wanted the music itself to be delightful to listen to.

I think i achieved all these things very well.

In this spoiler i give an abstact of the plot, so that it's more clear why i made the different choices in my soundtrack.
** THIS IS AN ACTUAL SPOILER **

Spoiler below!

Game plot
Tobertus lives as a catholic monk in St Mary's Abbey, which is located in York, and is one day sent to investigate a secluded part of the region. He comes to a small church, located next to a country road. He soon discovers that no one is around, but that there is a hidden passageway to an underground crypt. He decides to take a closer look, and enters the crypt as he is lured by a female voice. Unfortunately he gets trapped, and has no other choice, than to find another way out. Doing so proves to be difficult, and while being in the crypt he suffers from hallucina-tions, visions and nausea, but he also finds out that this used to be his home and that he ran away with his love, a nun named Celestia. When he escapes and gets back to the abbey, he discovers that Celestria has died from giving birth to their child.


Background
Tobertus used to live in this crypt before he came to St Mary's Abbey. There he lived as a monk in a secret catholic sect, and was to be sacrificed and eaten in an annual ritual, which was a great honor, and would allow him pass directly through the purgatory. The reason why he and everyone else, thought this was legitimate, is that everyone one in the sect was given a form of tranquilizer during the Sacrament of the Alter. This tranquilizer, which was developed by the self-appointed pope of the sect, would leave you in a hypnotic state of mind, as long as you took it daily. If not consumed often enough, the hypnosis would end, but would also ulti-mately cause total amnesia.
Tobertus and a nun named Celestria fell in love, and they exchanged love letters, though it was strictly against the rules of the sect. Their love grew stronger, and soon their wish to be unit-ed, overcame their hypnosis. One day they fled from the crypt to gain their freedom together, but very soon they both lost all memory of their former love and life. They had made it as far as to the St Mary's Abbey, where they once again were taken in as monk and nun. They both still held a love letter from each other, but neither of them had assigned the sender of the let-ter. They lived together at the abbey, unaware that their true love was right under their nose, while waiting for that same person, to one day come and announce themselves.
Meanwhile in the crypt, the pope ran low on supplies for his drug, and therefore he decided to either imprison or kill the remaining members of the cult. He only fed one of members with the tranquilizer, so that he had a brain dead slave to do his bidding. The reason why he want-ed to eat the chaste flesh of the monks and nuns, is that he believed it would grant him a long-er life and divine powers. 

This is meant to be a threat where you, like me, can present a piece of music you've made, and then argue for the different choices you've made in your creative process. This is one of the most important things when you make art, that you can actually argue for the choices you've made.

A true masterpiece has what it needs, nothing more.

This means that making art is as much about choosing things not to use, as it is to choose things to use. If you can't find a good reason to impliment something into your piece of art, then don't, it will draw attention away from the things that matters. Everything have to form a synthesis.


I hope you enjoyed this article and have something to contribute.

PM me if I have any spelling issues and if you have any ideas on how i can make this post more "reading friendly".

By the way can some admin move this to "normal"? i think that would be more appropriate.