House of Ashes and the Science of Sound

Welcome to this feature over House of Ashes, launches today for Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S in the Xbox Store! I’m Barney Pratt, Audio Director here at Supermassive Games. Today I’m going to explain our cinematic approach to music for this game and the rest of the series, and how we developed a signature motif that can span space and time.

Each of the Dark Pictures anthology games encompasses a completely different world, time frame and story, and that’s why we want to deliver a completely different musical score. Regardless of whether it is about character topics, location topics, unconscious hints or deliberate misdirection, the music is the strongest audio element to track and advance the moments and the further narrative arcs in the course of the characters and the story.

We have developed a complex hybrid system of film and game music techniques to completely immerse the player in the cinematic experience of Dark Pictures. We create and edit bespoke music cues to precisely tailor the on-screen action not just for a precise event, but also for each related event in the further story arc so that themes can repeat, expand, and change depending on how the Narration pretends. We need to deliver a completely seamless cinematic musical journey through all of the options, choices, avenues, dilemmas, and major turning points in the story, so the difficulty here is to make each musical cue so that it transitions and flows without the player even realizing it while he does it stage their own story.

The musical style choices come straight from the narrative, and we get a real buzz developing various instrumentations, cues, and themes that really help make this story better. To the Man of Medan, we looked at the youth, the surging waves of the sea and the wild, violent brutality of the coming events. To the A little hopeFlashbacks to the dark times of the Salem and Andover witch trials of 1692, we took a historical approach and explored the instruments of that time. Those lonely solo instruments played as a lament for these dire events, and delivering the cinematic mechanics of a horror game with such a thin and constrained score was a great challenge, but we stuck to direction and played with volume and proximity to get it activate the horror. For the main character theme in A little hopeJason Graves composed a simple 6-note motif on an old piano that provided a deep explanation of the main character’s role in the story and hints of his emotional journey and outcome (no spoilers!).

We work with Jason as early as possible and that is critical to the strength of the score. When it came down to it House of Ashes, we were presented with a narrative that had a consistent element, something that deserved its own recurring musical phrase. We called this our “signature sound”, which had to work in several musical genres and deliver a wide range of emotions, from subtle and unsettling to more dramatic situations that are representative of the most important narrative moments in the game.

At first this was thought of as an organic layering of the music, and I remember Jason sending through early samples that included a low “coo” of a pigeon. A bird’s larynx vibrates so quickly that the sound it produces is incredibly pure and can withstand a lot of manipulation in terms of pitch and stretch in the audio mix, so this was an amazing place to start, but it didn’t quite give us enough control and variety. We knew it had to be simple – subtle and smooth enough to emphasize conversation and dialogue, but also harrowing enough to scare the player.

With this original sample as a kind of template, Jason got to work and followed with a great musical arrangement, a simple phrase, establishment, pitching, diving, rolling, warning, something that could be played on multiple instruments, in different keys and in different tempos, layered, morphed and repeated, but never identical. Each variation corresponds exactly to the level of fear, fear, or power of that narrative element in the game at that moment, but is nonetheless representative of that characteristic sound that is played throughout the game and is therefore fully recognizable.

Its simplicity allowed it to be very versatile, played on instruments that represent Sumerian culture, through orchestral instrumentation, to a synthesized arrangement that implies the technological advancement revealed in history. We were able to transpose the technique into different keys and tempos to give it more kick, more intrigue, more drive, whatever we wanted.

This was completely in sync with the broader musical direction and the advancement of the score as the story unfolds. The game begins in a historical setting about 2000 years ago with a matching percussive soundtrack, and as the horror begins to develop we switch to a timeless horror orchestral instrumentation, later when the narrative reveals an additional twist we switch to the synthesizers to emphasize the knowledge for the player.

I hope you enjoyed this insight into the audio world of Dark Pictures and how we create the soundtracks for the players. House of Ashes launches today, October 22nd, and we can’t wait for you all to play!

Thanks for listening.