Let’s try to explain how we navigated this question and possibly found some answers.
Hello World!
This is the first blog post of Clean Cadence Audio, hopefully being first of many to come. We are an audio outsourcing company based in Cologne, Germany, and we are freshly established at late 2023. In these articles we’ll share things like, what have we been up to lately, what we think and feel about the current state of the gaming ecosystem, and maybe most importantly our stories of crafting music, sound design and audio integration for games. Let’s begin!
In the first quarter of 2024 we started working with Swedish company, Lumi Labs AB, on their AI-driven language learning application Lingo Looper. I’m going to be honest with you, all this current craziness with the AI developments and people predicting the end of times has been somewhat overwhelming for us, so when we found out that our audio services will be a part of an AI-powered application at first we were a little bit intimated. Luckily once we had a meeting with Simon Dürr, CTO & co-founder of Lumi Labs, we got excited about the project pretty quickly.
What Lingo Looper offers in the language learning sphere is unexampled. You can basically select the language you want to learn, and start chatting with AI avatars who have their individual personalities, things that they like and dislike, professions, and you are able to develop a relationship with them while the app is giving you suggestions on how to hold a conversation about certain topics.
For us, the task at hand was to produce an audio world that would aesthetically and functionally complement and enhance the gaming experience. And we had a good starting point as a reference: The Sims!
The creative vision behind aesthetic style of Lingo Looper constitutes aspects from none other than everybody’s favorite life simulation, The Sims, but it still goes an extra mile further.
We wanted to take our musical references from The Sims, which has laidback, easy going jazz tunes, but we also wanted to emphasize the AI-powered and Language Learning aspects of Lingo Looper as well. So how should we go about translating these conceptual ideas into music?
Well we first started with an idea of having an analogue/acoustic sounding backing track. The music of Lingo Looper by all means, should sound like “live instruments”. An arrangement of groovy drum beat played predominantly with hihat and rim hits, accompanied by 60s sounding bass, and fingerpicking acoustic guitars, provided a nice, live-sounding bedrock for the lead sound which is processed, robotic vocals.
We wanted to use the vocals as an integral part of the arrangement, rather than a topping, freer melody line. While the vocals are going to be representing the linguistic part of the game, they will also provide a nuance of AI-powered nature of the app. And we wanted to make these vocals sound somewhat robotic, without being too annoying or distracting. Think about GLaDOS in Portal, take away her sarcasm, and make her sing a lovely tune in perfect pitch of the song.
So all in all, this is our composer F. Can Erdogan came up with. The robotic vocals, created with Celemony Melodyne’s pitch and formant tuning, have originally been sang by the lovely singer Hande Cetik.
Our plans for the audio world of Lingo Looper is not limited with the main theme you’ve just listened. Lingo Looper is a highly interactive language learning app, where all the aspects of the conversations with avatars react and respond to players input. You can start chatting with a barista at a coffee shop, and all of a sudden you can direct the conversation to a philosophical subject of ethical realism. The great minds at Lumi Labs, want us to create an audio world where this interactive nature of the game, will show itself on the music and sound design as well. We are talking about location specific interactive music, music changing depending on the countries, music reacting to the positive or negative mood changes of avatars, and many more features.
We are excited to be working on the game audio of Lingo Looper. Let’s see what the future holds and how this exciting app will evolve.
For now, take care!
Can from Clean Cadence Audio
