barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

A year and a half ago, I wrote the soundtrack for a video game called Void War. It was a small production, but seems to live forever in some ways. Didn't pay much, but as part of my contract, I asked for and received permission to post the full soundtrack to the Internet for public use a year after the release of the game.

Proving yet again that good music is never finished, just abandoned...

So here are the songs. All of them are designed for release with a game that had a very limited size, so they're between 2-3 minutes long. I'm also listing them in the order they were (mostly) written, so you can hear the theme develop from beginning to end. I consider Bereft to be the best tune on this collection.

All tunes were originally Ogg Vorbis format; Ogg provides smaller file sizes and higher quality than MP3. Unfortunately, due to previous complaints on this board about the goofy format (unreadable in Windows Media Player), I've gone to MP3. Enjoy the lower quality :)

Each song in this collection has an inspiration from "Das Wohltempierte Klavier" (The Evenly-Tuned, or Well-Tempered, keyboard), Vol 1 by Johann Sebastian Bach. I managed to include a little Tocatta, too... The inspiration is often buried, and if you're not familiar with the collection it will be very difficult to pick out in some cases.

I apologize that, even at high-quality, the songs have kind of a tinny midrange. This is due to the target format I was shooting for in the distribution: a 16KHz, 16kbps .ogg file. It had very limited range, so I emphasized frequencies which sounded good in that range. They made the "high-quality" recordings sound a bit off, though, and I don't want to spend hours re-mixing and re-mastering these from the start again.

Stream the soundtrack here.

• Falling Over (stream): This is the title tune of the game. Written last, but, well, played first :) No classical tune embedded.
• War Chant (stream): I made a MIDI ringtone for my phone from this one!
• Cut Scene 1 (stream): A short, loopable bit to play during cutscenes. I really want to make a full-length bit out of this tune one day.
• On The Level (stream): Never made it into the game. The feel was just wrong. This tune is really, uhh, unfinished. I may re-use the theme at some point, though. No classical tune buried in this one... I figured out that hook later.
• Death Music (stream): The original death music for the game. Threw it out, but I still think it sounds nifty (and short), so I wanted to stick it somewhere.
• Haunting Me (stream): I seemed to have mixing problems with most of my tunes; this is one of the few that seemed to presence across the full spectrum. Klavier inspiration: Prelude #3 in C# minor. Of course, I adjusted the key...
• Blood Bash (stream): This is "Haunting Me", umm, as a rap tune. I threw it over the wall to Justin to see if he could do some lyrics, and this is what he came up with. Included mostly for comedic purpose :) And yet, I feel compelled to expand on this tune at some point... kind of Enders-Game-ish lyrics. The parts that are missing lyrics need a woman's croon in there as a counterpoint I think...
• Cut Scene 2 (stream): Another short, loopable bit to play during cutscenes. It's a theme I had running through my brain for years, and it never went anywhere, so there it is.
• Gutteral (stream): Like War Chant, it started life as a MIDI before we went to OGG for in-game music. This is what happens when you combine Tocatta in D Minor with electronica. It ain't pretty, but it gets the job done.
• Dogchild (stream): Bet ya can hear Bach's Prelude #2 in C Minor, can't you? I knew you could! Initially started as "Child of Dog", because I was pretty ticked off about the whole theism thing when I wrote it. Gosh, I thought I was clever.
• Bereft (stream): My fave!

Hope you enjoy. Not exactly music everybody's gonna want to listen to in their cars, but I felt like I needed to archive it somewhere!

Rights regarding these pieces: All songs but "Blood Bash" Copyright© 2004 Matthew P. Barnson. All rights reserved. Duplication in whole or in part for any purpose is allowed, but attribution of authorship in ID3 tags or other prominent method must be retained. "Blood Bash" is jointly Copyright© 2005 Matthew P. Barnson and Justin Timpane. All rights reserved. For the love of everything holy, don't reproduce Blood Bash willy-nilly, you could put an eye out.