Aether & Iron Interview with Christopher Tin and Alex Williamson
Released on Steam last week, Seismic Squirrel's Aether & Iron is decopunk narrative RPG. It puts players in the role of Gia, a smuggler in an alternate 1930s New York City, which has been transformed after the discovery of an anti-gravitational technology called aether. RPGamer was given the opportunity to put some questions to composers Christopher Tin and Alex Williamson about how they crafted the music for the game.
Alex Fuller (RPGamer): For anyone who may be unfamiliar, can you give a quick introduction to yourselves and tell us what you've worked on in the past?
Christopher Tin: I'm primarily a classical concert music composer, working in orchestral and choral music, as well as opera. In the video game world, however, I'm probably best known for my ongoing work with the Civilization franchise, having written title theme songs for Civilization IV ("Baba Yetu"), Civilization VI ("Sogno di Volare") and Civilization VII ("Live Gloriously"). My theme for Civilization IV in particular was noteworthy in that it won a GRAMMY Award in 2011, which made it the first piece of video game music ever to win a GRAMMY.
Alex Williamson: I'm a composer working in film, television, and now primarily games. I had been working mostly in commercials when Chris reached out, maybe 10 years ago, to start collaborating on games. Since then I've worked on a variety of game projects, from turn-based strategy titles such as Civilization VI and Old World to the PGA Tour 2K series and Splitgate .
RPGamer: What are some of the main goals you look to achieve when building the soundscape to a game?
AW: It can vary from project to project, but this time around it was important to establish a sound that blended authenticity (to a time period, or at least an alternative vision of one) with the expectations a modern player or listener might have. It needed to fit in with what we imagined people expected to hear based the game's setting, without leaning into pure imitation 100% of the time. What that ended up meaning in practice was mixing styles from slightly different ears with some more contemporary writing tropes, going with a modern production sound, and balancing out jazz instrumentation with the traditional orchestra so that it didn't end up boxed in as a 'jazz' score, or sounding so authentically "Old Hollywood" that action-packed moments fell flat to modern ears, or sounding too modern at the same time.
RPGamer: How does composing for a narrative RPG differ from your previous projects?
CT: Most of my work in games has been in the turn-based strategy genre, which meant that I was given a lot of freedom to create pieces of music that weren't attached to particular characters or situations, but were more to provide an overview of the world in which they were playing. Aether & Iron was a compelling world that offered a novel dimension for me to get creatively excited about, and it gave me a chance to work with Alex on a more collaborative level. Our overall approach was that I would churn out a wealth of thematic ideas -- sort of a library of moods, melodies, ideas, and sketches -- many more than would ultimately find their way into the game. Alex would take these ideas and arrange them into more fully developed pieces to match the narrative of the game.
AW: I can say that for this particular narrative RPG the main difference was the collective decision not to just compose discrete musical cues for individual places, characters, and situations that would loop, but to create a soundtrack that treated the game like playing through a novel (as Chris put it). That meant trying to support the gameplay as much as possible through near-constant underscore that was still versatile enough not to wear the listener down through repetition. Though there are cues composed for specific people and places, the music was composed more to fit into certain moods, and likewise to be able to transition smoothly in and out of cues as conditions change. But the pacing and dialogue really lent themselves well to letting the music breathe! Most other projects I've worked on have been more straightforward and itemized -- each civilization gets a five minute theme, we need a looping battle cue here, compose a battle victory cue, that kind of thing.
RPGamer: How closely do you work with the development team on ensuring the music matches up with the rest of the game?
AW: Very closely! We met frequently, particularly in the early stages, to make sure that ideas and sketches were lining up with expectations in terms of style and tone. And of course, we had to establish a main theme early on, as much of the rest of the score refers back to it. Early on, my contributions were definitely trending a little too contemporary with their sound compared to what the team was looking for -- too "modern cinematic" and not enough Golden Age of Hollywood. We got a collective sense of where should end up balancing things, between jazz and orchestra, vintage and modern. As we went along we would keep re-assessing if we had the right balance of different moods, based on gameplay testing. In parallel, we worked with the development team to make sure that the editing of the music was working well when implemented, specifically the way most cues can start and finish at various points, sometimes with their main melodies, sometimes without -- again, with the goal of creating as much variety as possible.
RPGamer: Are there any particular inspirations you've been drawn upon for the game's score?
AW: So many! The creative team pointed us to a few sources of inspiration, and for a while I really immersed myself in those scores. A mix of classic Hollywood scores from the '30s and '40s (composers such as Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, and Bernard Herrmann) and later period film scores that were more loosely inspired by those earlier eras, such as Chinatown and LA Confidential . I also discovered a bunch of composers who worked in the '30s and '40s who I'd never heard of before. They were doing some really interesting stuff, and it was definitely a source of inspiration, especially outside of our straightforward, thematic cues and the melodic jazz pieces. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't listen to LA Noire quite a bit!
CT: As Alex mentioned, "cinematic noir" was a sound world that we were both pretty heavily invested in. I may have also leaned a little more into a Romantic-era operatic sound in certain moments, too -- so a little bit of Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss.
RPGamer: What are some of the main goals you look to achieve when building the soundscape to a game?
AW: It can vary from project to project, but this time around it was important to establish a sound that blended authenticity (to a time period, or at least an alternative vision of one) with the expectations a modern player or listener might have. It needed to fit in with what we imagined people expected to hear based the game's setting, without leaning into pure imitation 100% of the time. What that ended up meaning in practice was mixing styles from slightly different ears with some more contemporary writing tropes, going with a modern production sound, and balancing out jazz instrumentation with the traditional orchestra so that it didn't end up boxed in as a 'jazz' score, or sounding so authentically "Old Hollywood" that action-packed moments fell flat to modern ears, or sounding too modern at the same time.
RPGamer: Are there any unusual instruments or styles that you've looked to employ?
AW: I guess you could say jazz in general is already pretty uncommon in game music. Incorporating jazz instrumentation with an orchestral foundation, like in Chinatown , isn't anything crazy, but you don't hear it every day, and it can lead to some nice results. I'd say what's most unusual is the harmonic language, which is really meant to evoke a completely different era. Conventions that you don't hear much in film scoring anymore, let alone games. Working with a very musical creative team that had a very particular style in mind, we definitely went further and further back in time until we got there, ending up with something really romantic in its sound, but still unusually dissonant at other points.
RPGamer: Are there any particular challenges or opportunities for experimentation that you've found while creating the music?
AW: The approach Chris came up with, where we create a varying, constant underscore by composing pieces that can transition into pieces with different moods smoothly depending on gameplay, created the main challenge. First there was the straightforward work of creating multiple (sometimes ten or more) intros and endings throughout each piece, which meant composing transitions that were custom written for wherever they occurred in the track. Then there was the more creative challenge of choosing those moments carefully, and trying to make it sound like those elements (the endings in particular) weren't just slapped on as an afterthought, but fully intentional and natural. A totally separate bit of experimentation was creating layers for the combat music, which increases or decreases in intensity based on how the encounter is going. That's a pretty common approach to combat music, but there was quite a lot of experimentation when it came to gauging intensity levels, and how changing instrumentation could affect things.
RPGamer would like to thank Christopher Tin and Alex Williamson for taking the time to answer our questions, as well as to Vincent Abel and Plan of Attack for facilitating the interview. Aether & Iron is available now for PC and Mac via Steam .
The post Aether & Iron Interview with Christopher Tin and Alex Williamson appeared first on RPGamer .
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