Welcome to the fourth developer blog for Burning Empires!
This time, i'd like to Introduce our music composer for the poject, IVLIANVS:
Hey everyone, so glad to be here! I'm Julien Monette, also known as IVLIANVS, and I'm the composer in charge of the score for Burning Empires. A little bit about me - I'm primarily a film and game composer, since I find those mediums most interesting, and among other things I've worked on some music alongside the folks at Anvil Games Studios for Holdfast: Nations at War.
We've got some exciting new music to share with you all! Those of you who saw the trailer seemed to be enraptured by the music featured in it, which serves as the main menu music for the mod. That track and six additional others are now available on a SoundCloud playlist, linked below, which you are welcome to stream for your auditory pleasure whilst you proceed to burn empires in the alpha.
OFFICIAL SOUNDTRACK PLAYLIST: soundcloud
I'll talk a little bit about the way I composed these tracks and will be composing future tracks here as well. I'm classically trained in piano, so I naturally lean towards more orchestral music due to the wide range of colors and sounds a skilled orchestrator can bring out. I also love the art of sound design, so I tend to complement a lot of my acoustic instrumentation with subtle synths, and even color some of my instruments with various filters and effects to help the sounds mesh more.
As a composer, I'm lucky enough to be gifted with a combination of perfect pitch and synesthesia, which essentially means that I can hear any note and identify it with both a letter name or frequency and a color. So when composing, I tend to use sounds, especially pitch collections, that reflect the visuals of what I'm composing for - this is usually more demonstrable in a film setting, especially when using tints or other color filters. For this mod, I've been applying these skills towards concept screenshots and previews of settlements, as well as player screenshots, to derive my color palette for each composition.
An example of inspirational imagery:
I also study a wide variety of popular, ethnic, and historical music outside of the classical-art-academic-music idiom, and I'm working to bring elements from each area into this score as well. Considering that the information database regarding the musical traditions of other cultures is only growing daily, it makes perfect sense that we composers should explore not just the boundaries of sound but the boundaries of culture as well. You'll notice this most prominently in the track "Ceremony of the Damned", where I combined elements of traditional Polynesian Islander drumming with melodic ideas taken from the Viking "lokk", a form of signal or message singing endemic to the Australian Aborigines, Japan, Polynesia and Finland.
Herculia VIllage exploration with the track "Doom of the West":
Hillfort exploration with the track "On The Borders Of Civilization":
Lastly, due to the limitations of the Bannerlord modding tools, adding in custom music hasn't been possible to directly implement into a module yet. The most simple way of doing it is directly replacing game files, which we'd prefer to avoid if possible. The likely scenario for music moving forward is that it will be available on SoundCloud, as well as featured in the trailers, and remain an external add-on until such time as the modding tools allow for adding music via module.
Roman Battle sequence with the track "In Their Hour Of Need"
Germanic raid on Cambodunum village with the track "Barbarian Hordes"
That's all for now on the music front! Stay tuned for more tunes, and feel free to shoot me any tracks from other media you'd like me to listen to - one can never listen to enough different types of music, especially for a project like this one which requires the composer to authentically represent so many different cultural groups without appropriation or stereotyping. Fight on, burn down your local magistrate's villa, but most importantly, have fun!
OFFICIAL BURNING EMPIRES SOUNDTRACK: soundcloud
OFFICIAL BURNING EMPIRES YOUTUBE CHANNEL: youtube
IVLIANVS' youtube channel: youtube
(buried)
A composer who believes in the political concept of "appropriation" which belongs to a well-known ideology was not what I was hoping for. You realise that making music as you make for the mod is automatically "appropriation" since you do not belong to most of the tribes and ethnicities you make music for? That's what logic would dictate, which I'm aware is currently out of fashion.
Needless to say that stereotyping is a useful genetical(!) behavior with the purpose to predict the behavior of people you meet for survival and other reasons.
I have a suggestion: what about you just create music for the mod without telling us about your political beliefs?
Bro it's just literally a single line mentioning that in the very end of the text, you are giving it too much importance xd
You do realise that his fear of "appropriation" does not help him make the best music since it's self-censorship? That means he stops himself from making music he would make otherwise if he did not believe in this illogical concept and simply cared about quality.