Genesis Noir is a video game that blends a film noir-style detective story with astrophysical theories surrounding the creation—and potential destruction of—the universe.
When its developers Feral Cat Den invited us to make the music and sound for the 6hrish experience, they must have sensed that we weren’t only going to make the music and sound; we pride ourselves on being not just musicians and sound designers but creative thinkers who use music and sound to tell stories.
This time, our storytelling approach involved exploring the scientific concepts behind the game’s narrative. Here’s a few examples where science made its way into the audio of Genesis Noir.
Gravity & The Shepherd Scale
Each character in Genesis Noir represents one of physics' universal constants. Miss Mass, for example, is the embodiment of Gravity.
To express her infinite allure, we gave weight to the music by employing a Shepard Scale; an auditory illusion that sounds like it's endlessly descending.
Used in game when our protagonist No Man falls into Miss Mass’ arms, you will notice the descending piano notes seem to just keep going down and down forever.
Shepard Scale and Shepard-Risset Tone
It’s actually quite simple: by playing two descending piano lines an octave apart. By gradually fading the higher line in and the lower line out, you don’t hear the sudden octave jump as the line starts again from the top.
An actual real recording of the Big Bang
Genesis Noir starts before the birth of the universe. In fact, we witness its birth. We see (and, importantly, hear) the Big Bang depicted as a gunshot. The challenge was to imagine how this unimaginable event would sound.
Luckily, we didn’t have to. After some clever clogs scientific research, we found actual audio recordings of the Big Bang, itself.
The Sound of the Big Bang
Now, of course, we’re being a little misleading here. We weren’t out there, nearly fourteen billion years ago with a microphone. No sound recordist gets up that early in the morning.
What we’re actually hearing is University of Washington physicist John Cramer’s audio recreation of the beginning of our universe; a sort of ‘fossilised fingerprint’ of the Big Bang, using temperature variation data from the cosmic microwave background.
God knows what that means but the sound was so low that he had to boost the frequency 100 septillion times—that’s 100 followed by 24 more zeroes—just to get the recordings into a range where they can be heard by humans.
And now they’re being heard by players of Genesis Noir.
Wave Tuner
The interaction at the beginning of GN’s Improvisations level is a radio tuner, scanning the radio waves of the universe for clues.
For the soundtrack release, we took the concept a little further. While scanning around, we hear a DJ, some cosmic ad jingles and some actual IRL recordings taken from onboard NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the moon.
Golden Boy and the Golden Ratio
GB is the embodiment of the Golden Radio so we worked in as much golden number stuff as poss:
A mathematician might notice the cowbell knocks out the first few fibonacci numbers. We also planned song sections & events using golden ratio
The shape of the motif was partly inspired by the curl in the character’s hair. The way it arcs up then curls down and spirals back on itself, it’s our musical interpretation of the spiral.
More Making Of
Read more about our processes creating the music and sound of Genesis Noir
