No game is complete without a catchy sound track in my opinion. In fact the more annoying the better you might say. Now I've never written a piece of music in my life. I don't read music and I don't play an instrument and I put the blame for that squarely with Mr Wright. Mr Wright was one of my teachers at junior school. He was a great teacher, the sort you never forget, but he used to tell me off for sitting with my right leg up underneath my backside. Said I'd never be a professional footballer sitting on my leg like that. Turns out he was right, and of course, that is the only reason...
Anyway I wanted to join the guitar club and learn to play the guitar. Unfortunately I bit my nails and Mr Wright thought he could teach me not to by refusing to let me join the group until I stopped. Still bite them now, I'm ashamed to say, but luckily for me, Mr Jobs invented GarageBand, so now I can play every instrument you can possibly think of without actually playing any of them which makes me as talented as just about any artist since 1989.
I'm a great fan of electronic music. I can appreciate just about anything with a synthesiser as focus. My absolute favourites are Heaven 17 and the Human League. Some may argue they're effectively one and the same, given that Martyn Ware & Ian Craig Marsh founded the Human League with Phil Oakey before leaving to form Heaven 17 following "creative differences". They could get together and form my ultimate super group, that would be perfect, if it wasn't for fact they support Sheffield Wednesday!!!!
For me though, the grand-père of electronic music is Jean-Michel Jarre. On our family holiday we used to go to the same guest house in Paignton, Devon every year. Norman & Shirley ran it. They're almost certainly dead now but I can remember rushing downstairs in the evening to bang the gong summoning the guests for dinner. On reflection, maybe I can play an instrument after all. Anyway, I can't quite remember how, but we became friendly with another family. They were posh and from somewhere down south I think, but in those days anyone from down south was posh. I remember Mr Posh (that's not his actual name) used to work for Polydor records and one summer, 1976 or 1977, brought my dad an album by some new French artist they had discovered. The album was Oxygene and the artist was Jean-Michelle Jarre. I'd be really surprised to learn my dad had listened to it more than once (he was more Dr Hook or Carpenters) but it really struck a chord with me, pun intended. Now thanks to Spotify I can listen to just about anything he has ever done and often have him on whilst I'm working or reading. In fact Magnetic Fields Part Deux is playing right now. Its modern classical music to me.
And so it will come as no surprise that when it came to the soundtrack for Hairball Henry it had to be all synths and melodic choirs a la Jean-Michelle, with a few cat sound effects thrown in for good measure and to help avoid the understandable confusion between my work and that of the great man himself! I'm quite proud of it really for my first ever composition and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating it. In fact I created a few more to use in future games, you can find them here https://soundcloud.com/simon-edmundson. Why not have a listen and let me know which to use for my next game.
Thank you to Mr Jobs, Mr Posh & JMJ for making it possible.
Labels: ambition, bucket list, composition, computer, game development, heaven 17, human league, jean-michell jarre, music, programming, soundcloud