Foley Music

	The card's front face	The card's back face

Synopsis

Music exploring sounds of objects or actions.

Relationships

Context:
Music .
Makes use of:
Foley , Acoustic Ecology .

Description

Foley Music consists of Music that is produced by integrating processed Foley snippets from the game world.

By using Foley "voices" as instruments, Foley Music noticeably shares the identity of the game elements, competes to the global Aesthetic coherence, and augments the fitness to the Acoustic Ecology.

Foley Music also potentiates the distinctiveness of the soundtrack, which in turn reflects on the value of the game as a whole. Still, it is a challenge to compose a music that is not only interesting per se but also connects to the themes and textures in the game world.

Transformations to the Foley snippets avoid directly invoking the corresponding associations to their sources, whilst maintain aesthetic fitness. Actually this becomes mandatory if the Music would otherwise raise false positives during gameplay.

Examples

iGadget: The train has a prominent role in this game. The game's Music echoes that feature by resembling a train's Foley.

InFamous: Music was produced by incorporating actual sounds of objects aesthetically coherent with the game scenario (see testimonies in the external references).

Limbo: "Acousmatic music" incorporating the sounds from the environment [pending:[REF]].

[show less examples...]

The Path: The game's Music is sprinkled with Foley snippets of related motifs.

Additional Comments

There are sound designers who specialize in this kind of composition, as is the case of Matthew Herbert. One recent example of his involvement in this kind of endeavour is the soundtrack for Life in a Day project. Also, several authors have posted compositions based on snippets grabbed from games (e.g. via youtube).

External Resources

In games:

• regarding the Music of InFamous and the role of Amon Tobin.

In movies:

• scene in chapter ‘Night Shift’, in Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000) 0:37:22 – song in the factory with participation of foley;
• scenes in Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992) E.g. 0:48:16, merging the breathing of the city into music.

In music:

• Olivier Messiaen’s musical interpretations of bird songs.

Several other projects:

• Burt’s Bees – Music from Nature by Diego Stocco
;
• Matthew Herbert on Life in a Day: “I make music out of sounds”.

References