Self-avoiding Walk

I’m a bit late to this, but back in summer 2024 I participated in the OST Composing Jam. The goal of this jam is to compose an original soundtrack (minimum of 3 minutes) of any style for an imaginary game. While I’ve composed a lot of video game music, I’ve never created an entire soundtrack around a single concept.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I was torn between trying to come up with a story for a game to inspire the music, and just messing around with some synths and noodling on the keyboard. I did a little bit of both, but nothing really materialized.

Synth + Metal ≈ Synthmetal

Feeling a bit paralyzed, I fired up the ’ole RMG sequencer for inspiration. I saved a handful of randomized melodies and experimented with them in Reaper. After a day or two I landed on something I liked which was about the first 30 seconds or so of the second track: “Defrag.”

I love metal bands like Tesseract, Periphery, The Algorithm, Car Bomb, and Meshuggah. I tried experimenting with incorporating syncopated guttural guitar sounds with the synths. After several more days I finished “Defrag”—which also included “Kernel Panic” before splitting that into its own track. I didn’t have a clue what to do next, nor did I have a concept. Composing the rest of the music was a bit of a blur because I bounced around from song to song—iterating on the leitmotif over and over with different synths, envelopes, time signatures, rhythmic displacement, pitch shifting, and tweaking underlying chord structures.

Production

The guitars were recorded using DI with my Fender Squire and Behringer Interface. I’m primarily using the ML Sound Labs Amped Roots Free amp sim because the metal presets are fantastic and rarely need much fuss to get it sounding good. I also used Blue Cat Audio free amp sim for clean guitars.

All the other instruments were MIDI tracks either programmed via piano roll or recorded with my Arturia MiniLab MKII. I used a variety of synth effects from my library of VSTs. I recorded this music before acquiring my Fender Squire Bass guitar, so bass was also programmed.

Theme and Story

At some point I had five songs that all sounded like they could be from the same game. The theme for this particular jam was “Inside my world.” I had to figure out how I could write a story that corresponded with the theme and could align with the songs. I somehow landed on the idea of the main actor realizing his addiction to AI, embarking on a journey to “unplug.” The music reflects his path to recovery, capturing the emotional and psychological evolution as he seeks to overcome his dependency. After figuring this out, I thought it would be cool to name all the songs using computer terms that could be metaphors for the different stages of recovery.

Track listing

• Worm – In this dark and haunting opening track, the actor grapples with his addiction to AI, realizing he can no longer think independently.
• Defrag – This energetic track captures the physical and emotional struggles of the early stages of recovery.
• Kernel Panic – Menacing and eerie, this track portrays the actor’s anxiety and panic attacks as he teeters on the brink during the initial phases of recovery.
• Dæmons – With initial healing achieved, the real challenge begins. The ominous and chaotic melodies reflect the emotional turbulence the character endures.
• Time to Live – The actor, having come to terms with himself, experiences emotional growth. The heroic climax symbolizes the realization that recovery is a lifelong journey.

Album art

At the time I was messing around with Self-avoiding walks in generative artwork explorations. I felt like the whole concept of avoiding the self within the context of addiction and recovery metaphorically worked. So I tweaked some algorithms and generated the self-avoiding walk using JavaScript and the P5.js library. I then layered the self-avoiding walk over a photo I found visually interesting on Unsplash using a CSS blend mode.

Jam results

I placed around the top 50% out of over 600 entries. I would have liked to have placed higher, but despite my ranking, I thoroughly enjoyed composing the music! I’m very happy with the music, its production quality, and I also learned a lot. I would certainly participate in this style of composition jam again!