http://blogs.ign.com/silicon-knights
IGN's latest SK blog entry talks to composer Steve Henifin and how he's going about making the Too Human music.
Steve's Studio
Here's the short sample (and conceptual apparently) opening intro track which was made using the synthetic vocals. Though it seems that the real deal will use an actual choir.
http://xbox360movies.ign.com/xbox360/audio/article/715/715437/Titan.mp3
Even synthetic, it sounds pretty neat.
IGN's latest SK blog entry talks to composer Steve Henifin and how he's going about making the Too Human music.
Too Human is unique in that it blends ancient with the futuristic. This brings up many possibilities when creating the music. When first conceptualizing the music for Too Human, I wanted to feature the human element and make vocals as a large part of the score.
The soundtrack for Too Human itself is centered on ancient sounding instruments and Nordic themes, and for the choral parts I wanted a choir to sing actual Norse words and phrases.
In an effort to keep the authenticity of the Nordic language, much research was done into both male and female vocalists from Finland, Norway, and Scandinavia to provide the sound we were looking for.
Before enlisting an actual choir and record their vocals, we first used samplers and sequencers to give us a good sense of where the music and vocals were going and how the entire track would ultimately sound in the end. This was done by taking Norse words and converting them to individual phonemes (the building blocks of sounds that make up the sound of speech) then sequencing the phonemes to form word parts.
Pretty cool that even the music gets the utmost detailed treatment from SK, going so far as to study the languages and so on to make it more authentic.When combining these elements together with other choral samples, the synthetic choir takes on a more lifelike quality, as heard in this very first concept recording of the opening intro track- Titan (link to track below)
The vocal arrangements throughout the soundtrack range from serene backdrops to fierce battle chants and through the use of technology we can emulate this in very convincing ways while a live choir can produce a wider range of expression, energy, and unique articulations that can only be captured at that very moment of recording.
Here's the short sample (and conceptual apparently) opening intro track which was made using the synthetic vocals. Though it seems that the real deal will use an actual choir.
http://xbox360movies.ign.com/xbox360/audio/article/715/715437/Titan.mp3
Even synthetic, it sounds pretty neat.