I knew someone would ask me to honk. Um, but yeah like honk.
My name is Dan Golding and I made the music for Untitled Goose game.
So I think the appeal of untitled this game is pretty well summed up in its tagline.
It's a lovely day in the village and you are a horrible goose.
It is a lovely day in the village and you are a whole horrible goose.
Like, there's not a lot more to it than that you're a goose that
rampages through a of sort of English/British style village
which is funny because everybody who made the game is from Australia.
And you play as a goose kind of ruining, you know, not terribly not really harming anybody but ruining people's days stealing their food.
The way that we thought of it when we were making the game was that it should sound like
there is a pianist, like in the old days of silent movies, sitting over your shoulder,
watching what's happening on screen and kind of commenting on the action with their piano playing.
so i met house house when i was running a games festival here in uh melbourne australia uh called
the free play independent games festival um they had just started to make their very first game
called push me i think i sort of knew them vaguely from you know just around events and
stuff like that but i got them to show their game at a couple of events and one of them was
in the big sort of public square here in melbourne where there's a big screen we set up like a little
um living room in the middle of that square with like a couch and a rug and a lamp and played local
indie games on the big screen and one of them was theirs and they hadn't finished making it
yet but it was done enough so that we could have a whole bunch of kids just walking past going oh
hey what's that like and start playing uh and you know when you're doing that kind of thing there's
a lot of standing around and waiting uh and during one of those periods i was just vitally chatting
to them and was sort of like what are you going to do for music in this game and you know they
had some ideas and i had some ideas and i was just kind of like i think i could probably do something
and they said all right let's give it a shot and so i gave it a shot and they liked it and
i did the soundtrack for pushmi pudding and that was released i think in 2016
and then a few years later they got in touch about this new game they're making with the goose
and the rest is the rest is what it is the rest is history yeah
so yeah the the using debussy in the game was pretty much happenstance we you know originally
the members of house house thought that debussy might sound nice on the gardener's radio for the
trailer um and when we put that together when jake um strasser who's one of the people who works at
house house edited that trailer so well a bunch of commenters on the internet well i think a lot of
people who watch the trailer were sort of like oh great this is how the music isn't going to work in
the game we're all sort of like oh we really know how dynamic music works at all let alone how we're
going to convert like these more than 100 year old pieces that so how do you how do you do that
how do you convert this music into something that works for a gamer but yeah so then i did
yeah two performances of each of the preludes one that's kind of what you would expect if you
were a debussy mega fan going to a concert of his preludes and one that was way lower energy much
slower much less intense the you know the the way i was hitting the notes was was much less powerful
um and then went through and split both of those performances up into the same what we called stems
i think that in a way the game and what you're seeing does a lot of the work
for me it makes me look you know quite literally it makes me look good um
during early stages of making the soundtrack i considered whether it might be possible to
use that same stem process of splitting the pieces of music up into different
little beats but identifying particular ones for particular like moments so you might have
one that was kind of like the victory bit when you succeeded you know in a task or you might have one
that was kind of the slapstick thing you know like kind of really very specific moods associated with
the the little bits of debussy but you know i sort of tried that and it was immediately clear that it
wasn't going to work um we just kind of took a gamble that actually these debussy preludes
would be funny because what you're doing in the game is funny and it's the juxtaposition between
this rampaging goose and these poor villagers with this kind of you know this music that
is a little bit funny we deliberately chose bits of debussy that was the you know was the
funniest bits and the most appropriate bits but that it was that juxtaposition
as i've kind of said i mean my background is in cinema studies that's what i teach um i
i did a phd on video games that's definitely true so i'm not completely outside of the
the games arena but i mean i've written a book on star wars um i do a radio show for australia's
national classical radio station about film and tv music
like i kind of you know i think all of us have such involved backgrounds in such a wider variety
of culture than you usually see from a small indie studio that i think when it comes to
thinking about the kind of games that they make at househouse and the music that i make
i think it's just it's it's part of slightly different conversations you know it's part of
slightly different trains of of thought and and ways of of thinking about an audience i suppose
my favorite composer in general certainly is a sort of classical sense would undoubtedly be
igor stravinsky i think the rite of spring and the firebird still just speak to me in a way
that i think so few other music does they're just so so powerful and i i really admire the
way that he uses the the color of the orchestra and these just so bizarre rhythms they're just
just so incredible but i don't know i am genuinely one of those people who like you know you you meet
at a party and you're like oh what's your favorite genre of music and i'm like oh i really like every
type of music and usually you meet that kind of person you're like yeah but really you don't like
country or you don't like hip-hop like whatever no like actually i think i have a banjo here i love
bluegrass like i i've been playing with 808s recently and trying to get that really trappy
sound for like a couple of projects that i've been working on like i love so many different types of
genres and i just you know like my favorite thing with any kind of music project is when someone
says here is a style that i want because it allows me to really get inside a particular moment in
time a particular type of music that maybe i wouldn't have necessarily spent a lot of time
in before like to me that kind of prospect is the most exciting thing that any brief ever offers me
you