Transistor Composer Defines New Genre

As discussed on the PlayStation Blog, Audio Director Darren Korb, takes us behind the scenes of the music and sounds of Transistor. As it’s important for any game, audio is more often than not what creates a complete atmosphere for games-giving a completely immersive experience for players. Seeing that Supergiant Games is based out of San Francisco, and Korb resides in New York, resources became scarce. So, in light of this scarcity, Korb created a makeshift studio in his apartment.

“That’s my apartment (and dog and baby) to the right. Just about all the sounds and music in Transistor were created here. The constraint of working out of my home studio, with only the resources available to me, is a big part of my creative process. It means that all the music in the game is made up of some combination of recorded instrument parts that I play myself, as well as software instruments or samples from a sound library — and also Ashley Barrett’s vocals, which we knew would be a big part of the game. At the moment I don’t really have the means to record live drums properly (neighbors…), so I end up using a lot of samples and software instruments for percussion tracks,” Korb explained.

“I tried to create a genre for myself to work within, which I ended up calling ‘Old-world Electronic Post-rock’. After a lot of experimentation, I zeroed in on electric guitars, harps, accordions, mandolins, electric piano, and synth pads as some of the primary textures in the game. Each of these instruments tries to express some component of that genre mash-up.”

“From an implementation standpoint, I wanted to try something I had never tried before: multi-channel music! For Transistor, every piece of music in the game consists of multiple stems playing at once, which we can then manipulate individually in real time. This lets our level designers turn certain tracks on and off at will, and we can also apply real-time effects to individual channels. For example, when the player enters Turn() mode, we apply an EQ filter to the music tracks, and bring in a vocal track that is silent during real-time gameplay. We really liked how this sounded during development and ended up using it throughout the game.”

You can check out the complete Transistor Soundstrack here.