1,060 words
Music, effects, and the problem of silence — which in a game set mostly in vacuum is the central design question rather than an aesthetic one.
The silence problem
Space is silent. A game that honors that is authentic and, handled badly, feels broken; a game that ignores it sounds like every other space game.
The resolution: everything you hear is something you could plausibly hear. Every sound in the game is one of four kinds, and the player is never asked to accept a sound with no source.
| Kind | Heard through | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Structural | The hull, by conduction | Thrusters, the reactor, the drive spinning up, an impact |
| Atmospheric | Air, when there is any | Wind on a surface, the airlock cycling, atmospheric entry |
| Interior | Your own suit or the cockpit | Breathing, gauges, switches, fabric, footfalls |
| Interface | The ship's own annunciators | Warnings, scan completion, lock tones |
Vacuum is genuinely silent, and the transitions across that boundary are the most important audio moments in the game: the airlock cycling down, the wind dying, and being left with your own breathing.
Structural conduction is the trick that makes it work. You hear your own drive because it is bolted to the hull you are sitting in. You do not hear the other ship's drive at all — you hear it only through your instruments, which is why the contacts panel has a sound and the ship does not.
Music
Sparse, ambient, and mostly absent. Long stretches with none, which is what makes the moments with it land.
| Game state | Music |
|---|---|
| Under burn | The drive through the hull — low, industrial, felt more than heard. Under it, sparse tonal pads. The dominant state. |
| The flip | Everything stops. Four seconds of hull noise and breathing, then the drive relights. The score does not fill it. |
| Arrival in a new system | A single motif on the discovery scan resolve. Eight seconds. Then silence. |
| Surface, first egress on a new body | A low sustained drone; texture, not melody |
| First discovery confirmed | One chord. Not a fanfare. |
| Combat | Percussive, low, and it fades out as soon as the threat resolves — including when the player runs |
| Anything else | Nothing |
Adaptive triggers are on state, not on timers: entering an atmosphere, falling below a heat threshold, acquiring a lock, completing a scan. There is no looping combat track and no background music bed.
Reference: the ambient work in Elite Dangerous (Erasmus Talbot) for the in-space register, and Outer Wilds for the discipline of using very little. Not No Man's Sky — 65daysofstatic's score is excellent and it is continuously present, which is the opposite decision.
Effects
| Principle | |
|---|---|
| Every mechanic has a sound before it has a UI element | A player should know the heat is climbing before they look at the gauge |
| Warnings are pitched, not loud | Three annunciator tones — advisory, caution, critical — distinguished by pitch and repetition rate, never by volume |
| Physical objects have mass in the mix | A sample core set down sounds heavy; in low gravity it sounds heavy and slow |
| The suit is always audible | Breathing, at a rate that tracks exertion and oxygen. It is the on-foot layer's heartbeat and it must never loop audibly. |
| Nothing is stereo-panned that should not be | Sound conducted through the hull comes from everywhere, because it does |
Voice
Flight and Survey correspondence have no performed narrator. The Planetarium's optional Guide is an explicit exception.
This is a scope decision and a tonal one, and they agree. All correspondence is text. The Survey communicates by message, not by radio, which is both cheaper and more consistent with a setting where the nearest other person is usually several light-years away.
The Planetarium guide performs an explanation when the visitor asks for one or starts a tour. Its delivery can vary in rhythm and emphasis, and its silence gives the view time to register. Voice starts with a deliberate action and an AI voice disclosure. Muting the guide preserves readable explanations; muting the microphone and pausing the tour remain separate controls.
The guide speaks in one voice: GPT Live listens and talks, and delegates the thinking to a backend model, so a tour and a conversation are the same voice with no clip to hand off to (ADR-0042). Speaking interrupts the guide, and the microphone remains available. Because there is no separate speech source, the only honest signal that a stop has been heard is the voice the visitor is already hearing: the browser reads the level of the remote audio track and treats a stop as spoken once the words have played and gone quiet. Provider access, pronunciation, device behavior, and listening quality remain measured acceptance work, not properties established by a model name.
The ship's annunciator has twelve fixed synthesized strings.
The annunciator is an instrument and sounds like a machine. Its fixed delivery is independent of the Planetarium guide's performance. Real aircraft do this for the same reason it is wanted here: under load, when you cannot look at a gauge, a spoken word is the fastest channel there is.
The twelve: life support, hull breach, thermal critical, fuel reserve,
drive offline, reactor overload, pull up, terrain, collision,
lock warning, oxygen, pressure. Flat, unhurried, and identical every time.
Budget
The whole audio requirement is roughly 120 effects, 8 ambient beds, 6 music cues, and 12 annunciator tones. That is achievable with a licensed library plus targeted recording, and it is deliberately sized to be one person's work over a few weeks rather than a discipline.
Procedural audio is the leverage. Thruster and drive sound should be synthesized from actual thrust and RPM state rather than sample-triggered, which is both cheaper in assets and dramatically better in a game where thrust is continuously variable. The Web Audio API is well-suited to it and this is one place the browser is an advantage rather than a constraint.