Cantata
I’m honored that Cantata was nominated for Best Sound Design in an Indie Game at the 2024 GANG Awards.
Cantata did what all my favorite sci-fi does, which is make me feel small. I’m very fortunate that lead developer Kyle Kukshtel let me get weird with it. I did.
I worked on character vocalizations for dozens of creatures across four different factions, essentially: human imperialists, native humanoid “aliens,” sentient machines, and a secret one that I don’t want to get in trouble for talking about. Each faction vocalizes in a different musical key, and the aliens take this concept further by communicating information to each other (about their movements and actions) through a shared tonal language.
This is where things went off the rails in the best way. I sampled friends’ voices and ran them through a granular synthesis tool to produce the sound of a machine that houses ten consciousnesses within itself, which are constantly locked in (internal) debate. I recorded snippets of Bach chorales, which became melodic vocalizations for a robot character named The Psalm; upon taking damage, it sings “Und ob ich wandelt im finstern Tal,” or “Though I wander in the dark valley, I fear no misfortune,” naturally. (Psalm 23, BWV 112)
I also implemented and tested hours’ worth of Royal Teague’s incredible soundtrack. This project gave me a lot to be grateful for, but my close collaboration with Royal might be at the top of that list. We were in lockstep:
We gelled so bad that I convinced Royal to let KHORIKOS sing on the album.
This is me advocating for a holistic audio process. Music and sound design are separate disciplines, but a cohesive and emotional audio experience depends on a real collaboration between your composer and sound designer, *whether or not* that is one person.
