Inside My Dream

This is a soundtrack to a hypothetical video game based on the picture theme given by Lone Rabbit's Seventh OST Composing Jam drawn by the brilliant @kawaakar._

Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/amasirat/inside-my-dream/s-QYA0MUCqO75?utm_source=clipboa...

https://soundcloud.com/amasirat/happy-limbo/s-mhd63mDBeaf?utm_source=clipboard&u...

Genre: Classical style, Full Orchestration
Runtime: 6 minutes in total.

There are two tracks in this soundtrack:

1. Inside My Dream: a four minute concept track. It illustrates the main theme for the entire game and recurring musical motifs and ideas throughout the game. It is not intended to be used in-game as is. It is pretty much an OST exclusive piece.
2. Happy Limbo: A two minute short piece intended to be used as music for menus or any other appropriate time in-game. It is done to show how some ideas from the first piece could be used all around the game. A flute improvisation is overlaid on top of the loop.

Tools and Software

I use musescore extensively in my composition process. The sounds used are from musescore's own Musesound library combined with a performance recording of the Flute done by me. Since the Flute is used in important parts of the piece as a solo part, I deemed it necessary to record a real performance.
Using Reaper I overlaid my Flute recording with the rest of the sounds generated by the Musesound library.

The Theme

The first time I looked at the wonderful artwork done by @kawaakar._ , aside from marveling at the beauty I noticed the obvious female figure by the little girl. More than anything that drew me to this piece even more. I thought "Who is this person?" Why is she made of the same bubbles that surround the piece? I was intrigued.

She seemed like her caretaker, or mother of some sorts to me.

So after some thinking my interpretation of this piece came to this: this girl was dreaming of her mother, a mother that is for whatever reason absent in her real life.

I felt as if that would create an extremely interesting through line to the game. It would be at the end of the day a story of coming to terms with our lost loved ones and treasuring the every moment we spend with them, so I decided to score while keeping that in mind.

Contrary to what I or you might have thought at first, It would be completely jarring to score this in a super dark and sad way.

I decided to not play to the sad connotations that I had thought of.  I believe that's just cliche and a bit on the nose in my opinion, and worst of all, it's the easy way. Screaming your intentions to the audience is a real disaster. This will be the shotgun of the game. The pivotal moment, the turning point. It should not be given away so easily at the very beginning.

 Although the game is about a little girl dreaming about her lost mother, it is not about the Loss, it is about the Dream. The loss is uncovered throughout the game as the melody and music twist and turn. For this submission, I focused on perfecting the Dream.

This was when ideas for the game formed in my brain.

The Game

Inside My Dream is an abstract game about a little girl adventuring through bizarre and awe-inspiring vistas, alongside her mother. The game utilizes stylized art direction, and minimal dialogue. It is separated into different "areas" or zones. There are no boss-fights or enemies to fight. It's just a girl and her bubbly friend sailing the world.

I am inspired a lot by Journey and Abzu, and also the works of Austin Wintory in my life as a composer. Although this project's tone is very different to both of these games,  the format I believe is really powerful. 

In both of these games, the soundtrack contains once track which is only the main theme and there is no place in the game where it is used. 
My intention with my soundtrack here was similar. The "Inside My Dream" track uploaded here is supposed to fulfil the same role as those same tracks.

If there was more than a week of time, The main motif would develop throughout the game, mirroring the emotional journey it was going to go on.

The emotional arc would be something like this:

1. Ignorance, where the player moves through the game without knowing who the female figure is.
2. Realization, Where the player realizes the truth.
3. Descent, Where the world of the game mirrors the emotional state after the realization, shifting into a more melancholic and somber tone, both in art direction and the music.
4. Acceptance, where the game shifts yet again and finds new resolve to continue. Now that we fully know that our mother is not real and this is all just in our dreams, we still move on and treasure these dreams that we've had with them. The traditional harmony of the current main theme (showcased in the C section of Inside My Dream score) would change into a new harmonic language, representing the shift from blind happiness to knowing happiness, where even though we know the truth, we still move on and find our own happiness despite it all.

But alas, I only had a week and did not manage to pull through. So I settled for perfecting the main theme and working on the main melody to make sure its direction and contour is solid and memorable.

The Process

I spent the first four days messing around with different ideas. My main mission was to find a concrete and suitable melodic motif. However it was not easy to come by.

Skipping every failed attempt, at the fourth day, I managed to find the melody and refine it.

This is the piano score for the main melodic content of the entire game written in Db Major.

Our main motif is comprised of a combination of a major third + a minor second intervals, followed by a phrase concluding on the fifth.The combination of both of these blocks shapes the identity of this motif.

For the initial harmonic language of the melody, we will have a simple push and pull between the I and the IV and conclude the melody with a IV - V - II - VI - V progression.

After this I had to decide on the instrumentation.

Using the flute and the woodwinds was I believe a no brainer. This kind of childish innocence simply begged the color of the woodwinds.

There were plans to include the harp as well, however I decided to streamline it and go with a simple woodwind + string orchestra combination.

Well, the result is here.

Now download the tracks and enjoy!