Excellent work and fantastic mixing for such a short time frame! Really reminds me of the Minecraft soundtrack with its bit-crushed percussion and lovely ambient synths.
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Synlyfe - Longing Freedom's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Quality | #11 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Overall | #22 | 3.853 | 3.853 |
| Composition | #24 | 4.050 | 4.050 |
| Impression | #31 | 3.883 | 3.883 |
| Correlation to theme | #32 | 3.650 | 3.650 |
| Creativity | #67 | 3.517 | 3.517 |
Ranked from 60 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description
Wanted to work off of the sombre tones in the picture and lean more into a melancholic longing vibe. Did this by running the piano through some heavy processing, then filtered the final output to keep it a little crispy and muddied by a driven low-pass filter, with some resonators to really bring out and excite some key frequencies.
The piece has some pensive melodies and rather simple supporting instrumentation, leaning heavily into ambience to set the overall tone and drive the track forward. The majority of said instrumentation is rather clean, barring the sine wave from Serum which is being run through similar processing as the keys. Originally planned to do more elaborate string sections but ran out of time so I opted to strip back some underdeveloped sections and supporting lines.
Despite the initial direction, I wanted to inch toward a more hopeful feeling by modulating the key to Ab in the final section. The supporting instrumentation takes a little bit more of a backseat here but the rhythms switch up to lean into a more pensive, possibly-uplifting vibe to round the track out.
As for how this would fit a game - I originally started working with a title theme in mind but then found myself leaning more into a pensive level theme, possibly for some kind of side-scrolling platformer similar to Celeste or even the likes of Hollow Knight. The latter in particular is what made me want to rely more on ambience over outright melodies. I think the piece could be befitting of a kind of Save-Room theme; the journey isn't over, but it's OK to rest a while.
Done in FL Studio in approximately 3 hours. See "Message from the Artist" for more details.
Message from the artist
Misread the ending date for tomorrow so when I woke up and saw 3 hours to submit I realized I'd have to work quick! All in all this piece feels very underdeveloped and I'd prefer to keep some elements, dump the rest and start over but time isn't on my side. Happy enough with the result for a couple of hours work - likely won't be to everyone's tastes but that is OK!
My preferred 3rd party website Audiomack may be having issues displaying the track - I have uploaded the same mp3 to Soundcloud for now as an alternative: https://soundcloud.com/synlyfe/longing-freedom
Theme
Freedom
Picture theme
How does it fit the theme?
Despite the title and the nature of the picture, I personally found it to have some sombre tones. I wanted to lean into this kind of pensive sadness by intentionally having the keys blown out and reverberated, then applied a resonator on certain frequencies and low-pass-filtered the output while engaging some drive.
As for how this would fit a game - I originally started working with a title theme in mind but then found myself leaning more into a pensive level theme, possibly for some kind of side-scrolling platformer similar to Celeste or even the likes of Hollow Knight. The latter in particular is what made me want to rely more on ambience over outright melodies. I think the piece could be befitting of a kind of Save-Room theme.
Link(s) of the submission on streaming services
https://audiomack.com/synlyfe/song/longing-freedom
Genre
Electronic
Ambient
Experimental
Soundtrack use permission
Yes (CC BY-NC)
Any non-commercial project
Yes (Game Jams)
For game jams only
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