Just recently they were asked by the City of New York to create the music for a 60 second spot for a bid for the 2012 Olympics - an amazing piece we hope to show you in the near future as well as scoring the music and sounds for A Tale in the Desert, The Second Telling.

The last time we spoke you’d just finished the opening music for A Tale in the Desert, the Second Telling, and had placed some new sound effects into the world. What have you been doing with the game since then?

Chris Peterson: A lot of the subsequent work we’ve done has been on the trailer. Because of this, we haven’t populated the world with that many more sounds.

But we have worked on a few new sounds. One of them was a saw - we needed to create a saw that was obviously not powered electrically. But the sounds that we had on hand were all hand-held power saws with the high-pitch whine. And we didn’t know what to do? There were no lumberjacks in the greater New York area. If there are any out there we’d love to hear from you!

So, we took the guy with the longest fingernails in the studio and scraped his nails across a metal music stand, reminiscent of the chalkboards in elementary school. We recorded it on the mic, tweaked it, looped it and it sounded like an old-time saw.

What in ATITD2 are you working on next?

Chris Peterson: We’re taking recommendations from game masters who are in turn taking them from players about what they’d like to have in the world. One of the biggest pleasures we’ve had in working on this game was seeing this world just ripe for plucking - just ready to populate with sounds. And we feel as if we went through and did the most prevalent and important sounds first - like walking. We have 6 sounds per terrain over seven types of terrain.

We’ve done the first sweep and put in the most important sounds. Now, we’re going back and finding that "oh, this is cool, let’s do some sound for this" or some GM’s want to hear sound for something. It’s one of the greatest things about working on a persistent world - it’s not just do the work, burn a CD and it’s out the door. It’s constantly updating and making it better.

Are Wind and Water sounds coming? It’s odd to be standing in grass up to your waist next to water and its all moving with the wind and you hear nothing.

Chris Peterson: We could do that. Is that an official recommendation?? It would help bring people into the world. That would be nice.

People build next to water for resources and to fish but now it could be for the nice soothing sounds of lapping water to put them to sleep!

Have you started working on any of the sounds for the Trials?

Chris Peterson: We’re looking for a direction on that because we don’t want to do the later trials now and then have people doing earlier ones and not having any sound. So, the GM’s have been helping us prioritize which of those we should attack.

You’ll have masonry sounds on things you have to cut, etc?

Chris Peterson: Exactly. We want those to be immersive experiences that have a real payoff for the player. We want them to hear what they’re doing and regard them as a goal. They’ll want to get through this trial because it’s such a fun audio/visual experience .

Have you decided about music regarding that? For instance as they reach the end of the trial it increases the tempo as they reach the end to create a level of excitement?

Chris Peterson: There’s been more talk about doing theme songs for the Universities. A primary theme song for the university and then a stripped down underscore for it’s supporting schools. That seems to be where we’re heading. We’re going to the university themes because people hit that before they hit anything else.

That seems it would be hard. University of the Thought. University of Art. All in an Egyptian theme.

Chris Peterson: Yes, how do you abstract that into music? So, since the player hits the school first we want to have the music available. We’re just trying to stay a few steps ahead of the players so that by the end they say "wow, there’s a lot of music here". (even though there wasn’t yesterday)

And it’s not as if these songs write themselves. They’re not a blues jam over some rock changes. These are Egyptian themes using uncommon scales. We use what’s called a Phrygian Major scale. We have to take these weird scales and make them emulate Art, Leadership, etc. **starts making really odd twangy Egyptian-like instrumental sounds**

Are you playing the game?

Chris Peterson: Yes, we are. I’d like to be playing more. But most of what we do is not sequential advancing through. It’s going to things that we need to score, experiencing them and then working on them. We go to the object we need to score- like a Kiln. We take video of that out of the computer into another computer and save the video as a QuickTime movie and score that movie and then place that sound in the game.

What exactly does a kiln sound like?

Chris Peterson: It’s cool. When the door of the kiln is open, the roar of the fire sounds bright. *makes a roaring sound* When the door is closed, then you’re listening to it as if through a wall. So, the high frequencies are cut out. *makes a muted roaring sound*

There’s so much music to write it rather a daunting challenge. It’s such a big world. I wish I could say I was playing more as character but we need to get to the items so we can score them. We’ve got to blip around them as quickly as possible. It takes some 6 hours to run across Egypt and if we had to run that distance can you imagine how long it would take for us to complete this?

I like the idea of taking the direction of music for the schools first so the bulk of the people can experience the music right away, them moving into the tests.

We also did something really fun with the moths that are needed to produce silk. And we needed to make the flapping. How do you do that? We can’t take a moth and take its wings and flap them back and forth - dead moth! So we went to the microphone and did this *takes his shirt and flaps it back and forth on his chest* Then we layered it, looped it and thus spoke the moths. We do a lot of Foley sound - which is taking objects to make the sounds that you want. And that’s what we really love, it’s really part of the artistry of what we’re doing.

We have so much fun working on these kinds of projects. We can get silly and bang on pots and pans and really have fun. We’ve also got the whole city outside our door. If we need nature we can go to Central Park or if we need water we can approach the water. Yes, we will approach the Hudson River for your game!

New York is really a great place to be to great sound like that. Do you know the kinds of sounds you can get in a subway station? It’s ear-shattering when these trains pull in, squeaks on the tracks, metal on metal, the booming echoing, steel drum players, people squawking - it sounds pretty alien It would be a good alien landscape.

Will you have music only when you’re at the school or will it be as you approach it, it becomes more prevalent?

Chris Peterson: It depends upon on how Andrew would like that to go. I’m not sure how that would work compositionally. But, we’d probably rather the music started once you get to the school because the fade in might not sound very good. After that I like the sense of accomplishment from completing a task.

And alter maybe some ambiences when you’re running around the world.

You recently completed a commercial for New York for a bid for the 2012 Olympics. This is quite an accomplishment. Was this something you had to bid for or did they come to you?

Chris Peterson: One of our favorite producers to work with, Scott Kemper, called and asked us to score 60 seconds of orchestral music to a beautiful montage he had put together. He’s got a great eye and we’re always excited to work with him. His piece really tells the story of how New York has been giving immigrants a shot at the American Dream for 400 years, but now it has a dream of its own: to host the 2012 Olympic Games. He used a combination of old film footage, computer generated images and dramatic photography to communicate this message clearly and eloquently. He brings real energy and character to his projects, so it’s always fun to work with him.

The way we completed it was through the use of some new equipment we’d just bought called GigaStudios - basically an orchestra living in a PC. We had a live trumpet, flugelhorn and violin as the main theme and this was done all live in our live recording room. The supporting orchestra that is filling it out is the Giga Studio, which is the "industry standard" for orchestral composition. It’s the next best thing to having an orchestra in the studio. And it sounds so powerful, and so real.

We’re particularly happy about the spot because it shows what we can do orchestrally which is a very popular type of music for games. We want to bring that to gaming. We’re glad that we can be known for that type of music as well as the cutting edge rock and electronic stuff we like to do.

It was great to work on, it was wonderful to work with the agency. We’re behind the cause, we’re happy to donate our talents. It was all pro-bono and we’re glad that we could donate our time and efforts to the city.

It really put our Giga Studios to the test. The job came in about a week after we received the equipment and Neil and Dave decided that maybe it was time to turn them on and plug them in somewhere!

Something we’re proud of is that as soon as we finished it, it started running on kiosks in Athens. We finished it right before the games started, it went on an airplane to Athens and then started running right away. It’s part of a series of spots, one of them is Jerry Seinfeld the other was Billy Crystal, so they were the humor. We were the dramatic spot that pulled at the heartstrings with the idea that immigrants come to New York with a dream and now New York has a dream - to host the Olympics. It was an honor to work on. Being a new company it really felt like the city’s been good to us and we wanted to give something back.

Have you gotten any other work this year because I know you’re really just off the ground?

Chris Peterson: This year we’ve done a lot of work with Gillette - with all of their products. We’ve also done some spots for AT&T - national and local. We’re glad that we’ve been able to put a lot of time into ATITD2 because it’s a huge task. Most of the sounds we’re making you’re not likely to find in a library.

Is there any kind of project that is like and ideal for you?

Chris Peterson: One that allows us to be as experimental as we want while still working with the developer. Something that allows us to be "really out there". Where we could use our core orchestral skills - being a musician’s musician but then doing some really wacky out there stuff as well.