Blade Ballet

I’ve written a bit more about the music of Blade Ballet here, but one of the defining traits of the soundtrack is density, or if I’m being a little more generous, richness, especially of textures and digital instrument sounds. The sound design, and in particular the voices of the game’s ten characters, had to shine through the soundtrack, be evocative, and give important information to the player. If we had stuck with the conventional wisdom around sci-fi robot sounds (yer beeps, chirps, whistles, etc.,) those voices might have gotten lost. While testing and implementing sounds, I kept broadening the frequency range represented in the character voices, so that they’d sweep multiple octaves as part of any evocative, tonal sound that needed more pop. They ended up sounding soap opera-level expressive, because that’s the only way they’d read at all. This is the art of theater!

The other great joy of this project was working with producer Jon Bove on our trailers. We grew together from our first outing, a shameless coopting of Chopin and Bizet, toward a much more sophisticated, carefully synchronized …..shameless co-opting of Bizet.

We graduated to fully original music in time for the launch, at which point we were debating the flow of this trailer down to the individual frame. The challenge is a familiar one in the film score world: once you start mickey-mousing (syncing up cuts and other events directly to obvious points in the music) it’s really hard to stop. What we did, then, was not stop.