Inner sanctum is something else!
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The Lost City of Tzal [HOST SUBMISSION: Disregard Placement]'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #1 | 4.492 | 4.492 |
| Correlation to Theme | #1 | 4.682 | 4.682 |
| Composing Quality | #1 | 4.409 | 4.409 |
| Sense of Atmosphere | #2 | 4.682 | 4.682 |
| Execution | #2 | 4.545 | 4.545 |
| Overall Uniqueness/Creativity | #3 | 4.409 | 4.409 |
| Listenability | #4 | 4.227 | 4.227 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Link to Streaming Service
https://soundcloud.com/alkan23/sets/the-lost-city-of-tzal?si=dad9b1c9a8954a86956be9f8b8ac76e2&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Description
I worked in a project I've been working on for a long time for this jam.
Track 1 - The Shrine in the Vale
On the way to the Lost City, this is a traversal through a valley/canyon with steep walls and dry climate vegetation, i.e. juniper shrubs. The protagonist is rowing, and the sounds of the rowing is echoing off of the canyon walls.
High on a hilltop sits a shrine, and at the end, the gong rings, filling the vale.
This track is the most polished of the three.
Track 2 - Arrival at the Lost City
After all of the tribulations of the adventurer, they experience the victory of finally finding the Lost City of Tzal.
Track 3 - The Inner Sanctum
In the center of the city is the Sanctum, the holiest place in the city. This music plays the musical style of the people in the illustration. The style is an improvisatory throat singing, raspy and and slow. One voice leads - the voice on the right you hear. The other follows in improvisation and harmonizes his spirit with his improvisation partner as an offering.
Screenshot of DAW
https://imgur.com/a/yMvi7W8
Description of Setup (Optional but recommended)
I'll go over the first track:
I set up all my reverb by going to a send. I varied the delay on the send so that I can place things in space. I used DearVR to compute the L/R/Forward back positions.
The majority of the sounds are live vocals and live instruments. The following were virtual:
- Female vocals in second track is from East/West.
-The strings in the second track.
- Deep drone in the first track and the really deep gong were East/West.
-The last track, the drone instrument is from MNTRA/Oracle X.
Real instruments:
-Tongue drum
-Kantele (made myself)
-Bamboo flute I got for 7 bucks
-Peruvian flute I got for 10 bucks
-Singing bowl
-I clicked the wooden decorative ridges
-Frame drum
Vocal techniques:
-Kargyra throat singing, the deep throat singing in the first track
-Khoomei/Xoomei style where I stylistically alter it to make it more raspy. This is the style of throat singing I've been developing for the group of people in my setting. To prep to do those really high overtones in throat singing of Altai/Tuva/Mongolia, you squinch your throat, which reduces some of the fundamentals. I added some vocal fry to this technique as well to create a variation.
-I also took inspiration from Middle Eastern singing techniques where it's more loose and less defined.
I did use downloaded sounds for the nature sounds, the birds and the water.
Track 1 details:
To make the frame drum sound more real, I actually had three reverbs. I had one reverb within the DearVR plugin that was a closer reverb that made the drum sound deeper, clearer and louder. The second one was the reverb that all the other tracks were tied to. The third was a big Valhalla reverb that has a delay on it and is very low frequency so that the sound expands out into a deep space. I was inspired by analyzing the Dune soundtrack for this.
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