Sorry if that got a little too musicological.)Īfter that initial breakthrough, the rest of it was an academic exercise in songwriting. Then one evening, while walking around, trying to clear my head, I hit upon the idea to set ‘Baba’ to a pair of strongly accentuated 8th-notes in 4/4. (Although maybe someone out there would find it interesting that when I originally came up with those notes, it was in a flowing 12/8 meter. I wrote and rewrote day and night, trashed a lot of sketches, and finally came up with the sequence of notes that was the theme of Baba Yetu. I knew that the stakes were pretty high, and that this would be my only chance to make a first impression to the game industry. To lock myself away for a week and only emerge with four bars of music is almost embarrassing, but at the same time, it’s a testament to how badly I wanted to get it right. When working on film scores, I’m used to writing two to three minutes of music a day. By any measure of productivity, that’s a snail’s pace. At the end of that, I emerged with the opening four bars of Baba Yetu. After seeing the visuals, I locked myself away in my studio for a full week. The rest of the music took considerably longer, however. That opening theme, sung by the alto ‘oohs’ came almost immediately. Right away when they showed me the opening shot of earth from outer space, I knew that I wanted to start with a low female vocal–something serene and motherly. Oftentimes you’ll see something–an image, a film clip–and the notes will just immediately start flowing. They were looking for something that was cinematic, with an African feel, and Soren knew of my work back at Stanford with the multi-cultural singing group Talisman A Cappella.Ĭiv IV was in fact the first game I ever worked on, but the process was pretty typical of any scoring project–Soren described to me the visuals of the opening menu and opening cinematic, sent along some rough images, and gave me an idea of what they were looking for musically. I got involved with Civ IV after Soren Johnson, an old Stanford roommate of mine, contacted me about doing the music for the opening. It is about music, games and, importantly, the creative process. There is no way that I will find another article to use this material soon, but I wanted to publish it (with his consent) before I forgot about it. Tin was good enough to send a very long answer since, he explained, it was a long flight. Tin except by reputation (though we both know Soren Johnson), and I’ve recommended Calling All Dawns to just about anyone who would listen to me. I needed a quote (I was really near the desperation stage with this story) and didn’t expect much. When I asked Christopher Tin for a brief comment on how he came to compose the opening for Civilization 4, I caught him on his way to Europe. Things that are interesting but don’t work in the way you want the article to go, or that you don’t have room for or that are taking the questions well beyond the point where you can actually use this information. When you write a long form feature story, you get a lot of stuff you never use.
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