Background
The development of the game's soundtrack was headed by Lorien Testard. From an early age, Testard was interested in video games and their music, having been introduced to them by his father. [1] He began teaching himself musical composition at the age of 16 for roughly three years, after which he attended a formal music school for another three years. [1] He began posting his music onto SoundCloud at a rate of approximately one track per week for a year. [2] [3] He has since named the scores of series such as The Legend of Zelda , Super Mario , Xenoblade Chronicles , and Ori , as well as the songs of Joe Hisaishi composed for Studio Ghibli films, as among his personal favorites. [2] [4] [5]
Expedition 33 was Testard's first professional video game for which he composed music. [6] [a] He became connected with the game's director Guillaume Broche in early 2020 after the latter listened to one of Testard's SoundCloud tracks he had posted onto an online forum dedicated to indie games. [2] [8] He was subsequently asked to join the project, at the time titled We Lost. During this period, Testard was employed as a guitar teacher, composing for We Lost in his free time. However, the COVID-19 pandemic struck early into development, rendering him unable to instruct his students. This provoked him to quit his job, allowing him to work on the game full-time. [4] Past an early script and conceptual artwork for the virtual landscapes, Testard had little explicit direction when composing the game's songs, given relatively free reign to "really do whatever [he] wanted" to adapt the story's atmosphere into musical form. [1] Both Broche and Testard had large ambitions on the scope of the score; their initial benchmark was to compose three songs, one custom battle theme, and one custom boss theme for each in-game environment. [9] Although he attempted to limit the influence of other musicians on his songwriting in order to make the game's soundtrack feel distinct, he has acknowledged subconscious inspiration from the French artists he was exposed to throughout his life, including Alain Bashung. [8]
Composition
"The first time Guillaume told me about the project, he said something like: 'You arrive at the beginning of the game after the heroes have already lost.' That set the tone."
— Lorien Testard, on the greater narrative atmosphere of Expedition 33 that shaped the framework of the game's score [2] Testard placed heavy emphasis on making the soundtrack feel dynamic and unique, responding to the player's—and the greater world's—activities as the game's narrative progresses. During combat, accompanying music is designed to soften during long-winded periods of recuperation and to gradually intensify to compliment the fight's climax and conclusion. [10] Compensating for the overall unpredictability of the player's actions was cited by Testard as among the most challenging aspects of composition. [7] He examined the emotional core of every specific battle, location, and character in a vacuum, guiding him as to what mood each song ought to elicit. This led to an assemblage of distinct genres and musical styles, including jazz, rock, neoclassical, and electronic dance music. [11] [12] He would later work with over forty specialized instrumentalists during recording, additionally utilizing hundreds of other synthesized instruments through the digital audio workstation (DAW) Nuendo. Such instruments included the guitar, saxophone, cümbüş, bawu, piano, and bass. [2] [7] Avoiding repetition was a key goal for Testard; he explained, "... even if a player doesn’t connect with one particular track, it won’t become repetitive — they’ll move on to a new environment and fight with a new musical atmosphere as their adventure continues." [10] He also sought to occasionally make more comic and lighthearted pieces to offset the game's more melancholic themes. For instance, the theme of the in-game mime enemies, titled "In Lumière’s Name", was composed using accordions to the effect of making them catchy and memorable, [13] while the music associated with the fictional Gestral species was deliberately arranged to sound "quirky" and high-octane to match their "chaotic, goofy energy." [3]
Testard made use of leitmotifs for both characters and explorable regions as a means of strengthening the story's emotional themes when invoked. [11] [13] In particular, the motif for the city of Lumière, whose plight is at the center of the plot, can be heard extensively throughout the game, symbolizing the connection the main cast have to both Lumière itself and their ultimate quest to save its people. [8] Among the earliest tracks he composed were the theme songs for individual characters, feeling that they were paramount to conveying the "soul" of Expedition 33. An exception was the theme for Gustave, which was the second-to-last song orchestrated overall. Testard attributed this to the narrative importance of Gustave's death at the end of the game's first act, taking extra care to "find the right melody." [13] He approached the composition of character-driven themes largely through instinct, molding their sound to compliment the characters' complex personalities, [9] and he described them as the most enjoyable songs of the score for him to write. [1]
About a year and a half into development, vocal musician Alice Duport-Percier joined the team as co-composer to assist in both singing and writing the game's many vocal tracks. [2] Testard discovered Duport-Percier through videos she uploaded to YouTube, and they initially communicated over email. [14] Testard chose to include lyrics in his songs because he believed that the human voice could best communicate the full range of intricate emotions exhibited by the characters, along with establishing a link between the real-world players and the virtual world of Expedition 33. [3] The narrative's themes of creativity, especially in regard to painting and music, guided him during songwriting. [8] Aside from English and French, Testard also wrote certain tracks in an invented language made specially for the game. [13] One such song is "Alicia", the main menu theme. According to Testard, this was born out of a desire to give the song a universal appeal, as it would likely be the first players would hear, and did not want to attach it to a specific, real-world language. Meant to symbolically convey emotion, the lyrics are not necessarily intended to be translated word-for-word. [5] In total, over thirty musicians and a nine-person choir collaborated on the soundtrack; [15] contributors include Victor Borba, who previously sung numerous tracks for the 2019 video game Devil May Cry 5 , mezzo-soprano singer Axelle Verner, and Ben Starr, who also voiced Verso in Expedition 33. [8]
