In a utilitarian sense, music and sound effects are tools. Their use is to set tone and provide feedback to player actions. The right music underscores and surrounds both the narrative and game-play, bolstering the intended mood of any given moment. It can also be feedback in terms of winning or losing, as with Final Fantasy’s “Victory Fanfare”. Sound effects have less nuance: they’re better for direct feedback when the player does an action. Swinging a sword needs a whoosh, breaking a pot needs a crash, and so on. Having the right sound effect at the right time can make the difference between feeling like nothing happened and feeling like your actions have had consequences.

So, what are the “right” sounds for Kenoma? Between music and sound effects, the latter is much simpler to figure out. Yet it has more immediate nuance in its design.

Kenoma is not trying to present a realistic environment. One look is all it takes to know this. Abstraction is the name of the game visually, and so it should be the same in terms of sound effects. The impression of sound, not necessarily what something would ‘really’ sound like. Most video games have sound effects of this ilk already: there is no special sound for jumping in real life. But even deep into abstraction, some core of the real sound must remain. Otherwise, how else can you know what it represents?

There are two basic ‘tricks’ to Kenoma’s sound effects: white noise and rising or falling tones. They combine in various ways, or sometimes remain totally separate, to produce almost all the sound effects in the game.

White noise is purely atonal and can cover the entire spectrum of audible sound. This means that it’s everywhere in the real world, and most sounds have some of it in them. So when making a sound from first principles, this is usually the “anchor” that binds it to reality. It’s therefore a powerful tool in Kenoma’s belt, and has a presence in many of the sound effects. Most impact sounds, the low rumble of a fire, explosions, wind, and so on, are primarily driven by white noise.

Rising and falling tones are more abstract; they play on our proclivities for pattern recognition and some kind of inherent capacity for metaphor. People generally expect a rising tone to indicate something turning on, entering, or otherwise some kind of beginning. A falling tone indicates the opposite. Pac Man’s mouth opening and closing has a rise-fall-rise-fall audio pattern, for instance. I don’t really know why people expect this, or why it’s fairly universal. But it works, and so is an integral tool for more abstract sound. Kenoma utilizes it for entering and exiting buildings, jumping, opening a small cage, uncorking a pot, and so on.

In terms of music, we’re in a less utilitarian space. The music must convey the proper emotion of any given scene, but it also needs to feel right. To match with the visual aesthetics seamlessly. String quartets do not quite match with Super Metroid, do they?

So what fits Kenoma? The music should be sparse and stark, for one. That’s the best way to match to the core visual style. And there should be a casual depth to it, both intricate and able to wash over you. This so that it both fits the visual-asset design and so that it looping tens of times does not start to grate on people. There are a few genres of music that fit this description, so I decided to combine aspects of several: ambient, minimal synth, and dub.

Ambient comes in to provide a structural backbone. Partially so that there is always some sound, because having a score typically means not having ambient sound effects, and partially because of it being a good general fit for soundtrack music. These ambient structures are derived primarily from Music for Airports, where much of the intrigue comes from asynchronously looping progressions. To achieve this in a digital context, Kenoma’s music often plays with time signature and ‘riffs’ (to borrow a rock-and-roll term) of varying length. Elements of each song therefore go in and out of phase with one another while the whole remains cohesive.

Dub is primarily present in the bass and accent-notes of the music. It brings both a staccato, spacy feel and a real swing to the instrumentals, keeping them from becoming tasteless and monotonous. With the bass taking such an active role, most of the other parts are able to take a more floaty and ethereal approach. They follow along with the pacing and structure the basslines provide, but remain generally ambient in nature. The bass being so large and forward in the mix makes for a clear audio parallel to the large amounts of empty space on screen at any given time.

Minimal synth is the final secret ingredient of this soundtrack. If everything I’ve said before was done using real-world instruments with a huge budget for production, it would feel odd playing over these rudimentary pixelated environs. By using unadorned, simple sounds that come straight out of a synthesizer, everything coheres beautifully. This choice also drove me to the core self-imposed limitation of Kenoma’s soundscape: all the audio in the entire game was made with a single software-synthesizer. The bass, the pad, the percussion, even all the sound effects.

A final thing I’d like to discuss that make’s Kenoma’s sound somewhat unique: unaltered sine waves. Most music does not utilize pure, unfiltered digital sine waves. In most circumstances they are rather flavorless, and at best typically come out sounding like a hitherto unknown woodwind instrument. But for Kenoma, that flavorlessness is exactly right: we need as much intrigue as possible without distracting the player. Plus, their rarity elsewhere gives an excellent boost to the “weirdness” factor of the soundtrack.

In the interest of transparency, much of this is a post-facto examination of the final shape the audio of Kenoma has taken. In the moment it’s more a process of feeling things out, much more iterative than what it might seem as detailed here. However, I did make these choices for tangible reasons. And though I did not iron them out in a clear and concise list, they were essentially the same as what’s described here. Just messier, less easily understood. I believe it all comes together to form quite the cohesive whole.

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