Dream, Awake

My submission for the OST Composing Jam #7

(Project image taken from Pixabay. It is royalty and attribution free, but was uploaded by user "barbaranuvole".)

The theme for this jam is "Inside My World." For this I imagined a game involving a young girl, Arietta, who has vivid dreams which represent the events and people in her life, with each person or event making its own dream world in a similar fashion to Psychonauts (though with a wildly different vibe). I was pretty busy during the jam but managed to crank out a few pieces, all to do with two potential areas.

First is Arietta's Bedroom, a hub world of sorts and the place where all the dreams happen. Depending on the time of day the music changes, but all three tracks are based on the same theme.

Then I scored two tracks that would be used for the final level. This final world represents Arietta herself, and begins as a space battle where your mission is to rescue yourself, a hostage deep within a space fortress ("The Great Extraction"). But when you reach the prisoner's quarters, you find instead a machine. Going inside the machine takes you into a deeper dream world that involves fixing this machine, which is going rouge. I did not get to scoring this one. Finally, within the machine you find a dream version of yourself, Arietta, and enter her mind and go into an ever deeper layer of your own mind, which is a lonely road lit only by the stars ("The Heart Of It All"). The two tracks for the final level that I managed to get done have very different sounds but do use the same melodic material. Within "The Heart Of It All" is the audio from "The Great Extraction," with heavy reverb and delay, slowed down to 33% speed, and pitched down an octave, and mixed to be in the background.

Forgot to mention DAW: Studio One

I will eventually upload this soundtrack everywhere but for the duration of the jam/voting/judging portions it will only be at the following:

Listen to this soundtrack on YouTube

Listen to this soundtrack on SoundCloud