Hey everyone, we’re super excited to announce that Momentum is set to be released on August 12, 2016!
In the meantime, you can find wallpapers here, and (in case you missed it) you can listen to the soundtrack below:
Thanks for your support, we hope to see you on the 12th.
(the soundtrack will have new music on a weekly basis until August 12th, so check back soon.)
Momentum is really close to finished. Right now we’re working hard to hammer out a few last details. We’ll announce soon when the game will finally be released.
In the meantime, we’ll be periodically releasing music on soundcloud. The complete soundtrack (titled “Improbably Fatal”) will be available for purchase on bandcamp upon release of the game.
Thanks everyone!
Ladies and Gentlemen–my last blog post was quite lengthy. I hope to keep this one a bit more condensed.
Today, we’ll open with the feeling of the song.
Temporal Analysis was initially written in late winter/early spring. I was a bit nostalgic for the snow when I wrote this, and when I hear it, I feel frost on a window, snow on the grass, and the inevitable change to Spring. The name came, in part, from wildly flipping pages in a dictionary until we found some words we liked.
I’m going to go a little more into depth on the composition of this one, but try to make the post as a whole shorter than the last one, but first, I’m going to introduce you to the instrumentation.
Instruments:
Kick drum–Normally, I like a tight kick drum, but this song called for a big ol’ floppy kick. Normal kicks simply weren’t what I needed, so I mixed it with a dejembe. No eq, just compression.
piano–a bit like the piano in “natural Science,” but more dreamlike. No compression or eq. interestingly, nearly all the piano notes are just 16th notes, with just a bunch of reverb to carry them through.
bass– the bass synth in this song is quite similar to the one in “Natural Science.” Not much else to say.
pad–mix of a square wave and a weird organ pad, with some percussive tines for an attack. Both the organ and the tines have a delay on them.
percussion–The aforementioned kick, a fairly simple snare, some toms, and a high hat.
Air–The other song I used a wind type sound in the background, besides “Natural Science” it is fairly different from the other wind sound, but it was modeled on the other. Reminds me of a snowbank getting swept up by the wind.
Composition:
Notable things include:
Melody–The melody goes back and forth between the piano and the pad–in some places the piano plays quietly along with the pad for an entirely different sound (0:16 is a good place to hear it).
Metronome bass– The bass in this frequently attacks on the downbeat with the kick, and it makes a metronome, or clock-like feel.
Give it a listen, maybe give it a like, leave a comment, and have a great day!
–Isaac
Hey, first let me apologize, I’ve been trying to decide what format to use with these posts, but we’ll go with this for now.
This excerpt is from a song initially called “Natural Philosophy.” We changed it to “Natural Science,” because it just sounded better to us.
First, let me start by saying that I’m not going much into the composition, lest this end up like the other post, full of me waxing elegant. Suffice to say that I wanted make the song simple.
That being said, one of the compositional ideas in this piece (and the only one I’ll get into detail) is the idea of three measures of stuff, then one measure of nothing, with only the momentum of the previous measures to carry it through. I wanted this to replicate that kinda feeling while you’re on a swing set and you get to the top of your swing, then just… hang there for a moment, feeling weightless.
I really like that feeling.
But now on to instrumentation.
Piano–As noted before, I wanted this song to be simple, so the piano part isn’t complicated at all. It isn’t compressed or eq’d, and has a bunch of reverb on it.
In this excerpt, I only really have one synthy synth (every instrument was computer-generated, but this isn’t based off an acoustic instrument). It is the boop kinda noise–it has an arp function on it that makes it automatically repeat every xth note, as well as a filter on the signal which makes it change from a soft boop with a low cutoff to louder beep with a higher cutoff. Also, it has a cool little delay on it, which I often reinforced rhythmically (that is, I put the same notes at the place where the delay was going to hit). I also decided to use the same synth to make a quiet melody, by stopping the note before the filter changed it (the haunting sounds at :30).
Bass–I had initially composed nearly the entire thing without a bass part, just to make it so the melody/harmony didn’t suffer because of an awesome bass part (I’m looking at you, dubstep). I added in an acoustic bass partway through the song, then we decided to change it to be a more gnarly synthetic bass. Also, during part of the song, the piano doubles the bass part to make it just a bit thicker (listen to :24 ish).
Like the bass, I initially didn’t have any percussion in this song. But we did decide to add in a very light percussive part in later–just a couple high hats, a ride, a kick and a snare. I pretty much just sampled it all from a loop, then eq’d and compressed it to taste.
The snare though, took some work–I ended up processing its signal twice, in parallel. Each signal went through some seriously heavy eq and some careful distortion and bunch of other stuff. Both were heavily compressed and some solid reverb went into them as well.
Then, of course, there’s the sssSSHHT (:09). When it first went in, we liked it so much, that we kinda put it everywhere. It was the sshtiest song ever. After a week, we listened to it again and we both went “whut.” It took ages to figure out where it was appropriate, where to replace it with a different sound, and when to remove it all together.
Moving onto the other stuff.
The reverb. it’s is all long and… reverby. In this song, I had a couple different reverbs on the piano at the same time. I also had some on the other important instruments. One of the reverbs I used detunes the signal, which I kinda liked. It fit the mood, as well as making the reverb more… thick. I had to be careful with it though, lest bad stuff happen.
An oddity in this song, is that many of the instruments are panned to several places. What I did was I panned an instrument somewhere, then, in parallel, I swapped the stereo panning and turned down the signal, so they’re panned both to the one place, and also a bit more quietly opposite that. Normally, I would steer clear of stuff like that, but in this song, it worked.
Another oddity about this song is the kinda windy sound that goes through a majority of the song. I initially put it in because, at the time, so little in this song had a lot of high frequency content, and I felt that it sounded empty. For a time, I removed it when I put in the percussion, but found that I liked the song better with it in. I had tried putting it in a few other songs, but it felt wildly inappropriate.
Anyways, that’s all for now. More later.
–Isaac
Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Isaac, and this is the first of several blog posts in which I’ll be discussing the music in Momentum.
Our music philosophy started simple: make it chill, so that people aren’t likely to rage and break their compy.
This idea, however, needed to be refined. As I began composing, our design quickly evolved into something more. I wanted to let people get lost in the music. I wanted people to be fully immersed into a simple place; a puzzle world in which, to reach your goals, the world bends to your whim–you simply close your eyes, and let yourself fall.
Additionally, I felt that to have anything in particular be a driving force would be a mistake–it would be conflicting with the gameplay. Instead, I felt that the music had to feel as though it was falling–that the force moving the music about was as unyielding and inevitable as gravity.
This feeling, of course, would change from song to song, but the touch of it had to be a familiar one.
So I had to consider a few things.
We began with the space. The space had to be enormous, abstract, and awe inspiring–a kind of foreign space that you can get lost in, but find yourself at peace. A place that you can marvel at the grandeur; where one can see the vastness of the universe, and our own small place inside of it.
Next, I considered the overall tempo. We decided it had to be graceful–I thought of it like a leaf, or a waterfall. It had to take it’s time, be unhurried; neither rushing about nor dragging it’s feet, It needed to get where it was going at precisely the right moment.
Music theory, I decided, was to be entirely ignored. I neither tried to adhere to, nor break any rules. I simply let myself write, and let the notes fall where they would. It would be another day that I decided if the song was bad or good.
And, admittedly, there were a lot of bad songs.
Anyways, now that I’m done being poetic, you all should join me later for some thoughts, oddities, and other commentary, as well as a preview of each of the songs in Momentum.
–Isaac
Projectile Entertainment 