A creative vision for generative music

Explore the Finnish springtime with sound designer and composer Joonas Turner.

Composing for games is an exciting frontier in music and one where technology increasingly plays an important role. With players guiding their own experiences, composers search for ways to bring their music to life.

Joonas Turner is a renowned game sound designer, voice actor and composer at E-Studio in Finland. He has worked on the Badland series, Nuclear Throne, Downwell, Broforce, Noita, Atomicrops, ScourgeBringer, and Tormentor X Punisher. Joonas is passionate about furthering the art of game music through technology.

In the following video, Joonas shares a composition inspired by springtime in Finland, using a semi-generative music arrangement built in FMOD. Through clever uses of randomization within a simple multitrack loop, the music generated never repeats. Multilayered phrases combined with subtle modulation of pitch and volume come together to form an independently evolving soundscape.

This generative approach is elegant in its simplicity, continuously retriggering multi instruments within a loop region. By adjusting the phrases, probabilities, samples, and timbres for each of these instruments, the music follows a theme without ever repeating.

On some of the tracks, Joonas uses an LFO to modulate pitch and volume. He similarly varies the depth and mix of a chorus effect on the master track to add a floaty feeling to the music. Meanwhile, a scatterer instrument generates an ambience of bird whistles with volume modulation, adding to the undulating movement.