| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #2 | 4.773 | 4.773 |
| Composition | #18 | 4.273 | 4.273 |
| Overall | #19 | 4.145 | 4.145 |
| Impression | #24 | 4.136 | 4.136 |
| Quality | #41 | 3.955 | 3.955 |
| Storytelling | #62 | 3.591 | 3.591 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description
This was made for LoneRabbit's 'OST Composing Jam 9', and the prompt was quite tricky: "Songs From a Forgotten World". After a while of brainstorming, I wondered what it would sound like if a microorganism street jazz group played a setlist of songs, considering that it would be music from a forgotten world, a world so microscopically small that we tend to brush it over and not think much of it. I completely went off from the game soundtrack idea and intended to make a "live" recording of a bacteriophage street band, wondering what if microorganisms were just as intelligent as humans, living lives, displaying cultures, and going through their own societal and worldly problems? Applying the fact that there are almost millions of microbe species and the fact that there are billions upon trillions of locations they can reside, it could mean almost quadrillions of different and unique cultures and art. Microbe jazz, or the term I'm going with this somewhat 'newfound' subgenre of jazz fusion, only applies to this one particular society of bacteriophages in one incredibly specific location. I hope this serves as inspiration for you to make your own "microbe music" and expand from the generic human music to the unconventional experimental stuff that might be normal for a society completely different from ours.
It was planned to have four songs in the setlist, but I became sick and my thumb began to hurt after the fingernail dug into the side of my finger, causing it to bleed and ultimately preventing me from working on the two other planned songs. I had to submit what I had, so I came up with the idea that the 'archivist' wasn't able to correctly extract and recover the second half of the file. I apologize, but the other two songs, a ballad and the set finale, will be made later when I'm feeling a little better.
When I was making the first two tracks, "Vopele'e" and "Kige-Jhinca", I was trying to figure out the instrumentation. I wanted to keep the standard piano, bass, drums, and saxophone, but I just couldn't find a good enough saxophone VST and I didn't want to write or shove immensely complex sheet music for my jazz combo's sax player to record. To solve this, I decided on a synth because I didn't want every instrument to be a human-made one. To keep this strange alien sound while making it sound different from human instruments, I tuned everything to A=450 Hz instead of the basic 440, added a modulation flanger to the piano, and added a deep flanger and chorus to the bass. I recorded everything on separate project files and then combined them into one master file where I would provide the illusion of a live recording.
On this master project file, I didn't want the crowd voices to sound human either so I added a pitch shifter to pitch it up a couple semitones and added a ring mod to give it that alien feel. I also added some convolver and decreased the dry mix on everything I wanted to sound far away, adding some tight delay for that enclosed space. In order to make it seem like it was recorded by a bystander, I stood outside for 15 minutes, recorded the wind brushing the microphone of my phone, and threw in an unintelligible crowd ambience, and recorded a bunch of crowd noises.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy listening to these microbes play their six limbs off.
TRACKLIST:
1: Vopele'e
2: Kige-Jhinca
3: Eila (not made yet)
4: Boro Boro (not made yet)
Theme
Number of tracks2
Genre
Soundtrack use permission
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