Couldn't get a lot of time to work last week. So I won't be able to show the final version of the kitchen. Sorry!
So far, I have the "instrumental part", with the melody and the rhythmic. The kitchen is kind of the dining room backstage, so I'm keeping the same chords. But this time it's more dry, with only high pitched piano, pizzicato violon, and a bass. However, even with a battery, it seemed too quiet. The kitchen is not as chaotic as the dining room, but it is still pretty busy, with a lot of cooks running around in a constant rush. So I decided to add… samples.
Truth be told, recording them was a fun distraction. I took some kitchen tools, tried to record some noises… My goal is to get close to something like the Micmacs à Tire-larigot soundtrack. My sounds aren't perfect yet, I need a kick, and some sounds like broken dishes or honing knives. I'll have to find somewhere. Then the tricky part will be to arrange them in a nice rhythm. Then I'll be able to work on the "extra" instruments.
This is a great occasion to talk about how I'm trying to design the music. While the game is entirely textual, the music is not here to describe how a room sounds, but rather how it feels. This is why it isn't always consistent with what the text describe. For example, the ballroom is supposed to be filled with a waltz… But as you can listen above, its soundtrack doesn't really reflect that! The goal is more to evoke the size of the room, its dream-like aspect, while giving it a unique atmosphere that is still part of the global music of the game. Same thing goes for the dining room, filled with laughs and loud talking in the text.
This is why I'm reluctant to use samples to transcribe some elements. When the player click on something, they shouldn't necessarily hear a sound that this thing makes. But since it should still have some kind “musical / emotional” connection with that thing, it can be tricky. For example, there are ghosts in the ballroom. I wanted them to be some kind of weird moog with a lot of reverb… But I couldn't achieve something musically pleasant, and ended up with a noise that just sounds like… ghosts? In the end it fits well in the music, and effectively gives the impression of looking at those ghosts. But I'd like to keep those exceptions as rare as possible. I want instruments, not sound effects!
This is why in the kitchen, while I use samples to illustrate the room, I'm trying to arrange them so that they sound more like percussion that ambiant sounds. They should be structured in a way that only make sense musically, as if the cooks were using their tool to make music. I admit, it's still another exception. Maybe because the kitchen is more down to earth than the rest of the manor, I feel it should use actual sounds? I don't know. The essential is that it should sound great!
Newt week will be another week with not a bunch of free time. I expect to finish the kitchen, but I don't know if I'll have something for the lounge. We'll see.