C&C 4 - The Sound of "Nod" Music

[Sonic 296]

The third and final blog in a series about the music of Command & Conquer 4, written by Audio Director, Nick Laviers has been posted on the Official C&C Site. In the Sound of "Nod" Music he covers the work done on the Nod soundtrack by Tim Wynn, who was the composer in charge of coming up with a sound for the Nod music. Here's part of it.

 

Going back to our early ideas on the music and the mind-map that I gave you in Blog #2, we decided that the NOD music should sound weird and alien (due to NOD's connection with the Tacitus and alien technology) with an ethnic element to reinforce the cult-like character of the faction. We also decided that the music should be capable of expressing the same range of moods and emotions as the orchestral GDI score. So we set ourselves the lofty goal of creating a completely new and very expressive style of music!

 

In Blog #2 I mentioned that we originally conceived the NOD score as being totally electronic. To clarify this a bit further, we planned to make it out of acoustic instrument sounds that had been processed and distorted in some way. So 'electronically processed' is more what I mean. We also planned to make the music rhythmically very 'fluid' with lots of tempo and time signature changes to reinforce its alien nature. To this we would add a lot of weird ethnic vocals like Tibetan throat singing and Bulgarian female choir.

Click here for the full blog.

[recover 2]

The music in C&C4 actually isn't that terrible. I mean, it's much better than C&C3.

[Malevolence 6]

As I said before, the Nod music tracks are no doubt strange and weird, but its highly addictive.