I was in charge of sound design or music creation in our group, and one of the things we planned was to create space-themed music to go along with the alien dialogue. In fact, music in space is a space without air as a medium for sound, so we had to use our imagination to create the sounds that space would make.

First of all, it sounds strange to have a specific melody in space, so I thought that I should use improvised chordal connections and sound textures without a melody. For this purpose, I mainly used ambient sounds, and I composed a total of four sounds to suit each role among the ambient sounds provided by Ableton Live.

The first sound was called Ambient Feeling, which by default produces a low-mid bass, has a slow attack, and grows and fades over the sustain of the sound. I used this sound as the main sound for the space music because it’s heavy, muffled, and ambiguous.

The second sound is called Ambient Pad, which fills in the missing midrange frequency and also adds to the sense of space because it has a slow attack and pans back and forth at a constant rate. This sound supports the sharpest sound in a similar range, which will be described right after, and helps to balance the ambient feel of the sound with the sharpness of the sound.

The third sound is called Bells & Thin Pad and has the sharpest and brightest feel of the sounds used in the previous section. If this sound gets too loud, it becomes awkward to call it space music, so I turned the volume down and played it once in the back of the sound space to create a sense that something is constantly changing throughout.

The final sound is the ASMR Cave Texture, which originally had a similar feel to the third sound, but when turned down, it just sounds like a tickling noise. This was used to implement the sound of photons moving quickly in space after a previous group meeting where it was mentioned that it would be interesting to have the sound of photons moving quickly in space. The presence of this sound breaks up the overall sound, which is too steady, and makes the music a little more cosmic.

I improvised and recorded each sound over midi for 14 minutes, creating different flows within the process, some lighter and some heavier, so that the executive editor could pick and choose which ones fit the flow and mood when quoting parts.