'Sizzlin Hot' - 35:56

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'Credits' - 41:06

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This year, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the ‘Paperverse’ community. Paperverse is an online community of members who are passionate about artistic, colorful games that draw inspiration from the ‘Paper Mario’ video game series. Every year the Paperverse community hosts a “Paperverse Direct”: A video that shows a variety of new and upcoming video games of this genre.

 

One section of the Paperverse Direct shows these games in a sizzle reel, with small clips of gameplay from each game rather than a detailed explanation like many of the games in the video. When I volunteered to create music for this, I was asked to create music for both the sizzle reels and the credits. For this project, I created two pieces. ‘SizzlinHot’ was a piece I wrote for, hence the name, the sizzle reel music.

 

When writing this piece, my three main goals were to make something that could:

• Fit the whole ‘Paperverse’ theme.

• Easily blend into the background

• Remain repetitive while still being interesting to the listener.

 

Creating music that suits the Paperverse theme was the easiest aspect of the task. The music from the Paper Mario game series is known for being quirky and fun. The franchise is mainly associated with their releases from the early 2000s, around the time when the Nintendo DS console was the most-used device to run these games. Because the DS  had such little memory, the music of the games created had to use low-quality sounds that either loosely resembled real instruments or were synthesized. When deciding on instrumentation for this piece, I made the intentional choice of using some poorer-quality MIDI instruments alongside some synths. When trying to create music in the desired style, I decided to start with a funky melody that catches the audience’s interest, while not being too repetitive as it is frequently used. To ensure that the sizzle reel music didn’t stand out too much against what was happening on screen, I tried to use instrumentation that would blend somewhat well with each other, like piano and pads and orchestral instruments playing together.

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My compositional process and techniques used can be found on the annotated score.