Hello everyone!

I'm Noelle, the composer and sound designer for Spring Gothic. First, I want to say that I am humbled by the incredibly positive reception to the soundtrack and audio as a whole in the game. Though I've worked on game music for a decade now, and done general sound work for about as long, this is perhaps the most intimately involved I've been in the process given that I handled the scripting and much of the direction for the sound. Thank you everyone for the kind words, and I hope to be able to deliver something even better next time.

With this said, I want to talk a bit about the process of composing the soundtrack for Spring Gothic. Given the short time frame it had to be composed in as a game jam project, practically every track was completed within a single day of work. At the beginning, Kastel provided me some general direction based on the atmosphere of the story: a tale of two close yet emotionally estranged girls, in a declining anachronistic city. Also, it's spring and there's some cats and it's foggy.

This is, to be frank, some of the best direction I have ever been given for music and I mean that very earnestly. I immediately came up with a general idea for what the soundscape should be - a mixture of synthetic sounds of the past with more 'traditional' acoustic instrumentation, evoking both the past and the present with a stark distance between them. From there, I read the full script, then began to write a piece of music for each individual scene until I had reached about five completed tracks. I would read a bit of a scene, write around that, listen to it with the script, tweak it, write a bit more, and repeat this process until the track was completed.

This process resulted in the first five tracks: Eien ni, Kawaigaritai, Kimi wa dou Omou, Nigiyakana Machikado, and Yokaze. After a short break, closer to the end of development, I wrote the remaining tracks as I felt some scenes couldn't mesh with anything I had written previously. These were: Utsukushii Yokan for Chun's opening monologue, Tsui for the first True Ending scene, and Haru no Shunkan for the title theme. The last had perhaps the shortest ratio of work to length of any track, being an improvised piano piece that was only slightly tweaked after playing, so I was honestly surprised to see so many people enjoy it given that. Oh, and if you wonder why the names are all in Japanese: it's just what came to mind as I was writing. I don't have any English translations for them in mind.

The development process of reading or playing the game and writing around that is pretty typical for how I write music, and for me, it's the best way to write game soundtracks. I enjoy looking at abstract feelings from the writing and channeling those into musical ideas; occasionally pulling from concrete theory, but mainly doodling until something I like pops into existence. It helps too that I was fueled by a desire to experiment with my new studio setup, as Spring Gothic is the first full soundtrack I've written since I moved to Brazil. Having sold off all my old music gear and having moved from Mac to Windows, the gear which was at first unfamiliar to me at the beginning - my Korg ix300, Roland XP-60, and the DAW Cubase Pro - are now something I'd like to think I understand pretty well thanks to the opportunity this soundtrack gave me.

To speak a little about each individual track now, I think the one I am perhaps most proud of is Yokaze. It's also the one that I felt really got me to 'connect' with the Korg ix300 as a musical tool. I had enjoyed it since the day I got it months back, as a wonderful birthday gift from my husband, but something about how I was able to make the gorgeous electric piano patches on it 'sing' with that melancholy melody made it click in my head: "ah, this is a work of engineering art." Everything flowed from that loving yet distorted electric piano riff, making way for the theremin-esque lead and 'ticking clock' sounds from the Roland XP-60 I had programmed from scratch. Oh, and I can't forget my shameless use of the M1's (in)famous Universe patch.

Eien ni was another track that I feel really shines thanks to the ix300's gorgeous engineering. It has a crispness and richness that is rivaled by practically no other synth using its sound engine, which brings to life the wistful evolving pads that play alongside the sampled acoustic piano courtesy of Cubase's sound libraries. The remaining tracks, I don't have as much to say about, other than I had a fun time attempting to capture that '800x600 2000s visual novel' vibe the game has. Seeing people say tracks like Kawaigaritai feel like Fate/stay night music fills me with a sense of pride.

Finally, I want to talk a bit about the sound effects. They're something which I feel often gets treated as tertiary even in high budget works from major visual novel studios, and I wanted this game to show how important they are for crafting an atmosphere. I wanted the audio to make the reader feel like the characters were actually doing what they said they were, and were located where they said they are. Sometimes, this meant bustling street corners or rustling bus interiors - and at others, this meant leaving the audio blank sans a music track and a slap sound. I don't believe I did everything I could to do so - there are places I wish I had inserted more - but I do think I managed to make the world feel 'alive' through them. And judging by player reactions, that thought does not seem to be wrong.

That's all I have to say for now. Once again, thank you to everyone who has read Spring Gothic, and a special thanks to everyone who has read this long rambling post about game music development. I hope to provide something great again with the next Prof. Lily project!