The Sounds of Laya’s Horizon

Celebrate the release of the official soundtrack of Laya’s Horizon with a special Q&A with Wobblersound.

Across all of our titles, sound has played a significant role in immersing players in a moment of zen and adventure, providing both an exhilarating yet soothing escape from their daily lives.

Since releasing Laya’s Horizon, so many fans have reached out to share how much they’ve been enjoying the serene soundscapes of the island and how it’s encouraged them to keep coming back for more. Throughout each biome, you’ll find that every forest, cave and village has its own unique sound that was meticulously crafted by the dynamic duo that makes up Wobblersound.

Today, we’re thrilled to share that you can finally bring the captivating sounds of Laya’s Horizon everywhere you go! Stream the Laya’s Horizon Official Game Soundtrack across all your favourite platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp.

In this special Q&A, you’ll take a peek into the creative minds behind the sound and audio design of Laya’s Horizon: David and Markus Zahradnicek.

David and Markus are two brothers based in Vienna, Austria who have worked on audio production and implementation of Indie titles including Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, Loot River, Steel Circus, Rifter and more. You can take a look at more of their work on their website at http://wobblersound.com/ or follow along on social media @wobblersound.

Tell us about yourselves!

We (David and Markus) create music and sound design for games under the name Wobblersound.

It all started when we were kids and began to make music together. Down the road, we had multiple bands and music projects all while touring around Europe. We then dug ourselves into music production and sound design more and more. With this knowledge and David’s background in programming, it ultimately led to the founding of Wobblersound.

For Laya’s Horizon, Markus took care of the music and composition and David did sound design and audio logic work. But sometimes we tend to tell the other person what to do differently, haha.

When you were first asked to come onto the project, what would you say inspired your approach to giving the island a voice?

The naturalistic, yet somewhat “magical” environment and the way the Windfolk use their capes to fly through this wonderful landscape made it clear what direction the audible world would go. For the music, we aimed for a somewhat world-music-ish & folk-ish style whilst trying to not make the music assignable to a specific part of the world. Funny enough it was the very first music sketch we created that would end up in the game as the main theme.

We wanted Woodwinds to act as a main driver for melodic parts in the music. Their literal airiness just made perfect sense for us in this game.

For the sound design, we tried to capture the “light” and airy feel of the flight as well as the magical aspect of the energy that you collect and utilize. So you can hear the wind that flows alongside you when you race across the island but without being overly present. So you can still enjoy the landscape and its animals while clearly hearing all the crystalline magic elements.

Did you collaborate with any other musicians or composers? For which elements of the game in particular?

Woodwinds are a central part of all the music pieces in Laya’s Horizon. As woodwinds are an instrument section that we cannot really perform ourselves properly, it came naturally to us to collaborate with a flutist.

Through a friend, we got to know Veronika Vitazkova, a super-talented flutist who specializes in world woodwinds and is living in our hometown Vienna. We knew this was exactly what we were looking for so we called her and invited her to our studio.

We were stumped when she literally brought 35 different woodwinds to our first meeting. We spent a lot of time figuring out which instrument would work best for which part and sometimes also had to figure out where to add pauses for actual breathing (the curse of initially composing Woodwinds with MIDI).

We ended up using a wild mix of a lot of different woodwinds from all over the world. The soundtrack features woodwinds like Quena, Dizi, Ocarina, Bansuri, Fuera, Transverse Flute and a lot more.

It became a soundtrack from a place that doesn’t exist but still has something familiar to it.

The soundtrack of a video game often plays a crucial role in enhancing the player’s emotional connection to the story and gameplay. Can you discuss the emotional arc you aimed to achieve through the music in Laya’s Horizon? Were there any particular challenges or unique opportunities you encountered while composing for this game?

In the first call we had with Jason, Creative Director of Laya’s Horizon, he said one sentence that stuck with us the entire production: “Laya is a wingsuiting game — but to the Windfolk wingsuiting is more like going on a hike.”

We really loved the difference between being in full speed flight versus doing a pull-up, spreading the cape and overlooking the beautiful island. It was clear that those gameplay elements should be closely reflected in the music and sound.

The music needed to be subtle and smooth enough that it would not get overpowering since changes mid-flight could happen really fast and also in fast succession yet still have enough energy to give players this feel of energy and speed when rushing down the island. This also meant that the audio logic and implementation part would play quite a major role in making all the things work smoothly. A lot of the creative decisions were made whilst implementing the actual audio in the middleware, potentially also finding new ways to use the source files.

One opportunity as well as a challenge was that Laya’s Horizon is an open-world game. For us, this meant dealing with a lot of seamless transitions from one situation to another at any given time. But it also gave us the freedom to create one big coherent free-flight track that underlines this vastness that you experience as a player.

Another challenge due to the interplay of sound and music, was the proximity system: the energy streams that you collect when flying near obstacles. Obviously, we needed to give the players an audible feedback for this. Proximities could happen simultaneously multiple times (left, right, up, down or almost any combination of them) — so it was quite tricky to make it not overpowering at times.

The sound itself is very musical (a heavily processed mixture of strings and woodwinds plus a magical sparky sfx layer) playing a variety of different notes in tune with the music. In the end, it enriches the music but is still easily recognizable for the player.

Laya’s Horizon boasts an expansive open-world environment with dynamic weather systems and day-night cycles. How did you approach the challenge of adapting the music to seamlessly transition between different environmental conditions and maintain a consistent mood throughout the player’s exploration? Can you share any innovative techniques or approaches you employed to achieve this?

There are quite a couple of metrics that steer the sound and music in the game. One of the inputs would be a parameterization of Laya’s flight conditions (how fast am I going, how high up am I, am I pulling up or diving down, am I boosting or braking and a lot more). We used a whole bunch of those parameters that we squeezed through our audio logic to make the audio react to the flight in real-time.

All of the input was fed into FMOD. Depending on the combination of these states we would alter the music. For example, add or remove layers, or alter the volume of different instruments on certain occasions. Beat and percussion would punch in and get louder if flying fast or close to the ground. If Laya would pull up and go high enough overlooking the island, we would drop out the beat. Vice versa if Laya dives down or goes super fast we would raise the volume of some percussive elements.

We also had a dedicated section of airy pads that would only be heard when high above the ground thus making the moments when high up in the air feel wide and open.

As a counterpart to this, we had something that we called “speedy strings”:
a set of strings that would punch in once you go fast enough and are close enough to the ground.

Another obvious visual distinction was the different biomes. We split the island into four logical biomes, each having their own unique instrumentation. Basically, this also meant re-creating the composition for the main flight track 4 times — each time with different instrumentation. Upon entering a new logical biome, we would seamlessly switch from one instrumentation to another.

In the beach area you can hear a French Accordion and a Mandoline. Electric Guitar and Contrabass Flute in the dark cliff region. In the snowy biome Glockenspiel and Synthesizers take the lead to achieve an icy feel.

Are there any other ways that the game’s audio evolves throughout the island?

Since you play many many runs in Laya’s Horizon and some runs might be rather short, it was important that the music would stay fresh for every new jump off from a perch.

Markus took it to heart and created 12 different intros for the main flight tracks — that means 12 intros for each biome, which makes 48 intros in total. That sheer amount did scare us a little for a moment but it was definitely worth putting the effort in. When playing the game there is always a moment where we think “Oh wow I feel I never heard that intro before” and almost can’t even remember producing it.

Also, across the island you can meet different persons of the Windfolk, each having their own music theme. There are 11 major Windfolk characters that you can interact with and we wanted to underline the emotional backstory for each of them. All of these “dialogue themes” are written in the same key and tempo as the main flight track, to be able to transition into and out of them at any given time.

Another “detail” we added was Voices. Each NPC, and obviously Laya, has their own voice. The NPCs have 5 basic emotional states (one of them being “silent” haha) that could be used to create a specific callout for their dialogue lines. Laya would react with different callouts depending on which aerial move is currently performed, e.g. if Laya flies through a speedy wind canal you could potentially hear an excited shout. Laya was greatly performed by Darcey Baker, who did a wonderful job giving Laya a voice.

As a composer, you often have to consider the technical limitations of game consoles or devices when creating the music. Can you discuss any interesting or unique methods you employed to overcome these limitations and deliver a rich and immersive audio experience within the constraints of the game’s platform? Were there any specific technological hurdles you had to overcome while composing for Laya’s Horizon?

We needed to be smart about how to cope with voice limits as there is more or less no visible loading happening. So CPU load and memory were something that had to be considered — especially with a lot of different sound sources in the game, as well as the amount of music tracks, sound effects and layers. With smart compression settings and being thorough when it came to voice limiting in FMOD, plus some logic on the unity side for managing sound instances and their loading & playback behaviour it all worked out well. Also, we had a wonderful tech team at Snowman we could work closely with. Working with them was really smooth and it didn’t even matter that our clocks are 6 hours apart.

How did you navigate the balance between creating a memorable musical identity for Laya’s Horizon while avoiding the risk of overshadowing the gameplay itself? In what ways did you ensure that the music seamlessly complemented and enhanced the player’s experience without becoming distracting or overpowering?

One thing that is important when creating game audio is that you can only judge your work properly when playing the game. You can’t judge it isolated from the game or even music isolated from sound design.

We tried to get sounds and music (sometimes even in a very rough state) as early into the game as possible. For one to be able to come up with ideas for how to develop the logic for our audio but also to know if the music does enough (or too much) and if certain sound design elements would fit the game’s pace in certain situations.

Since we have worked together since our childhood, we have developed a kind of a “language” for all these things and know what the other person means.

David also kept mixing the game over the course of the whole project. Sometimes it’s a matter of one audio-part making space for another in certain situations. Often when you hear sound design or music isolated you’re like “yeah that works out” only to find out that in the game it’s just not clicking. So it’s not only the parts themselves that need to sound good but also to give them their space at the right moment.

As said, the key to a lot of these challenges is to play the game. With FMOD we could connect the audio logic to the game and alter things in real-time while playing the game which is a huge time saver when it comes to mixing.

Do you pull inspiration from any of your creative endeavours outside your current work? Do you find these experiences manifest through your work and process as audio producers?

Yeah, definitely. Sometimes it’s even hard to not have a — how to put it — “sound designer’s ear” when listening to everyday noises and trying to come up with some use case for it or resisting the urge to instantly record that noise.

We have a lot of influences that we think find their way into our work. We have always been influenced by independent or underground movies, music and games. Our background as indie rock musicians as well as different electronic music projects formed our taste and also our process quite a lot. Our writing process is very intuitive and often based on jamming.

Also, our kids are such a great inspiration and they really teach us how to look at (and hear) the world from a new angle.

What’s something a lot of people may not realize about the soundscape for Laya’s Horizon?

The interplay of sound design and music. Everything we considered to be a “magical” part of the soundscape — so something you wouldn’t come across in the real world (flight-proximity, energy pick-ups, challenge rings) —would always be in tune with the music. Some of them would even play little ever-changing melodies during your flight to accompany the music. But also some of the “real” world objects — like the church bells — would play little melodies that get more accentuated the closer you fly by them.

Also, the basic flight sound of Laya alone consists of 15 logical layers driven by 11 real-time parameters, haha.

On behalf of the Snowman team, it was such a pleasure working alongside both of you and we’re so honoured to have spent the time working together on this project. Are there any moments during your time with us that you think you’ll take into your future endeavours?

Thanks, same 100%!

This project had so many unique and interesting challenges and the team was awesome to work with. I think we all grow with each project that we work on. The feedback-loops with the Snowman team were always great. We would have a video call together and play the game. So we could actually see “live” what is happening on screen, listening to the sounds and discussing what we see and hear.

Laya’s Horizon was a great project to work on and it became a wonderful game, where a close interplay between sound, music, gameplay and visuals worked out really well in our opinion.

From the bustling town of the Bazaar to the roaring waves of the Dark Cliffs, we hope that this special look into David and Markus’s creative process provides you with a fresh perspective to the island Laya and the Windfolk call home. We look forward to sharing more news about Laya’s Horizon with you all very soon!

Join the conversation and chat with our community on the Snowman Discord server! For all upcoming news and updates, follow along at @layashorizon on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

If you’re a member of the press who’s interested in chatting about this release, please contact press(@)builtbysnowman(dot)com. You can view the press kit here.