Ambient / Chill
RIYL: Ambient Video Game Scores
By Anthony Saia
Award Winning composer Siddhartha Barnhoorn is responsible for the musical scores for over 70 films, including many documentaries, games, commercials and more. But he is most known for his music for the games Antichamber and Out There and usage of the track The Floating World (from his solo album Pillars of Light) in the game The Stanley Parable. One of his most viewed works is the public service announcement Embrace Life – always wear your seatbelt, which went viral on YouTube in 2010.
Today, we have a score Barnhoorn has done for the video game Thin Air. An EP of music composed for the demo of the surreal, narrative adventure video game. It follows the journey of a lone woman, The Seeker, on a hallucinogenic spirit quest.
For this soundtrack Barnhoorn says he experimented a lot with sampling with the Casio SK-1 and processing the sounds through the Roland RE-501, Lexicon PCM70+PCM80, Flux Effects Liquid Ambience and later post-processing with plugins. While the developers were in The Netherlands visiting and in his studio, they did a jam session from which some elements were created that they eventually used in the game itself. Lara Ausensi also recorded some of her vocals which was later used in the track “Spirit Quest”. Barnhoorn recorded a lot of instruments like singing bowls, kalimba, other percussive sounds plus woodwinds like the duduk and bansuri.
What we get is a sweepingly beautiful soundtrack that ebbs and flows with supple ambient soundscapes, that soothe you, but also might pique your interest to see where the songs might have been used in the game.
While this is a release slated to have an official street date of Friday, April 6th, you can stream the entire EP above prior to it’s release.
