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I did not know that! I'll definitely give those a try, thanks for the tips!

Thanks for the feedback!! Yeahhh I may have cranked the tin drum up a little too much, I've never really mixed before and I'm still getting the hang of it. Also I kinda ended up doing this last minute lmao. I'll keep that in mind for the future though!!

Thank you so much!! The pitchshifting is based on the hichiriki which is a Japanese double reed instrument that's usually played in that swaying, haunting, sliding style. The string instrument I used for inspiration was the biwa which, funnily enough, the lake in the painting is named after! The high-pitched chords are based on the sho (circular bamboo pan flute with metal mouthpiece - very interesting instrument), and as for the regular flute I tried to make it sound a little more like the ryuteki flute, although in the end it was basically the same as the default FL studio generator for flute that I ended up using. The percussion was supposed to be based on the taiko (deep, large drum), shoko (a high-pitched tin drum), kakko (waist drum that's kind of like a dull snare) and hyoshigi wooden sticks. However I have very little experience finding good audio samples for niche instruments like this and I kind of had to make dollar-store impersonations using other samples in FL studio and then tweaking them. I did 90% of the non-percussion instrument stuff with Sytrus based on roughly similar presets, and the percussion stuff, well... I did what I could lmao. 

I guess when I read that the theme was ambient music my mind went to "ambience" and the first thing I thought of was Skyrim music, and I thought it'd be cool to make music for an open-world game in the setting of the painting where you're on the rowboat and just staring out at the lake at night. Looking back that's more "orchestral ambient" I guess. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback!! It was an interesting challenge to balance between the gagaku style and ambient music genre as gagaku can sometimes already sound ambient/hypnotic/meditative imo. I tried modulating between two pentatonic scales : (I-II-III-V-bVI, don't know if it has a name) and (I-bII-IV-V-bVII, which is a subset of phrygian I think?) to get the vibe I was going for. I've never really learned how to mix so I'll keep working on that lol.