Phones on silent while recording, please!
Posted March 02, 2021 with tags #music
I stumbled upon a annotated release of the soundtrack to the video game Journey. The game was a favourite of mine when I was younger, and I still regularly listen to the soundtrack out of nostalgia.
My favourite song, The Road of Trials, scores a particularly iconic moment of the game as the player character surfs through a valley of sand. However, the most iconic moment to my ear is a note attack from the flute that’s near-indistinguishable from the “email received” notification sound of Apple devices.
So when reading composer Austin Wintory notes about writing and recording this soundtrack, I was surprised to see the musical moment mentioned around 25 seconds into the song.
No, that was not your iMail sound! Apparently, a flute playing F# is very similar, but being an Android user I never noticed! We caught it during the mix and removed it from the game. It remained on the album… perhaps a mistake ;)
So there you have it, a tidbit of musical trivia for your day!
You can also listen to a direct comparison of the two sound bites from Journey’s music editor, Ted Kocher. You can also buy a complete copy of the soundtrack from Austin’s Bandcamp shop.
