Daniel Rosenfeld is an endearingly chaotic public speaker. At the GameCity festival in Nottingham, he is supposed to be telling an audience about how he wrote the music and sound effects to the multimillion-selling building game Minecraft, but he keeps getting distracted. His sound files won’t load, then his computer crashes; his notes are on his mobile phone which seems to continually switch off. Yet the roomful of Minecraft fanatics hangs on his every word.
The music is such an important part of this crazy gaming phenomenon. The wilting, minimalist tracks, slow-paced and slightly melancholy, recall the ambient works of Satie and Eno; they drift in the background as you build, sometimes just a few piano notes sounding as night draws in on your blocky world. The sound effects are weirdly evocative too – the staccato farm animal noises and groans of enemy mobs all contributing to the game’s unique atmosphere. Where did this perfect accompaniment come from?
It turns out the minimalism was kind of unavoidable. “Minecraft has a terrible sound engine,” exclaims Rosenfeld, who grew up in east Germany, learning audio composition on cheap computer packages like Schism Tracker and Ableton Live. “Imagine a looping sound file that plays for two seconds and then just starts over. Let’s say it’s a rain sound effect and now you’re on a beach so you have wave sounds, too – but if you do that, if you play two looping sound files simultaneously, the engine crashes. And the engine only has 20 sound channels. So if you make a cow farm or a sheep farm, you can’t have all the animals making noises at the same time. Terrible.”
There were other restrictions too. Each Minecraft world is created using graphical elements known as voxels, which are great for generating landscapes quickly, but make it difficult to signpost the properties of objects within the space. “So imagine there’s a creeper in that house way over there,” says Rosenfeld. “Technically, you shouldn’t be able to hear him because he’s right over there and there’s a wall between you. But in the game, you can hear them because telling the program there’s a wall takes so much computing and processing power that it’s not worth doing it.”
For similar reasons, Rosenfeld was unable to design echo effects for footsteps and music underground – because the game doesn’t know when you’re in a cave. He also wanted to create different ambient music for the game’s various biomes – like tundra, savannah, woodland – that make up the generated landscapes. However, players tend to move so eratically between them, that it sounded horrible. There were also plans for fighting music, “but we couldn’t do that because fights usually only last five seconds and no one wants to listen to epic fighting music for just five seconds.”
The result is an eerily silent soundscape, interrupted only by stark discreet noises. Far from a hindrance however, Rosenfeld and the game’s creator Markus Perrson found that players appreciated the aural idiosyncracies – the rudimentary sound seemed to reflect and enhance the peculiar look of the world, with its endless blocks and pixelated flora.
As for the music, Rosenfeld started on it very early in the game’s development, when there were only a couple of different block types. It reminded him of the cult PC title Dwarf Fortress, a ridiculously complex role-playing adventure that uses on basic ASCII art for imagery – so he decided to take inspiration from that. “The thing about it is, you play in this terrible DOS window, but you get this lovely guitar music playing and it makes the player think, ‘maybe I should keep playing, maybe there’s more to this game’.
“I wanted to create the same feeling in Minecraft. Also, the world looks sort of 8bit, so people probably expected chiptune music, like Gameboy music, but I was like, no, I want to do something unexpected. So I decided to work with experimental simplistic acoustic music that doesn’t actually tell you anything about the game”.
It works because the slower tracks give players permission to take their time – Minecraft is a game about making stuff, and Rosenfeld’s gentle minor key songs provide a peaceful sonic playspace.
A soundtrack for every player moment
He also wanted the music to be unobtrusive enough to be easily phased out in the player’s mind. “I almost hoped that they’d only notice it when something interesting happens in the game,” he explains. “That way the player automatically identifies the music specifically with events that they themselves created. Imagine you’re building a house and the sun starts setting, and the theme the music comes in - or you go into a cave and there is lava and there are diamonds, and then the music plays. People still come up to me and tell them their story of how they did this or that and then the music came in and it was like magic to them – even though it’s completely random.”
I ask about the mob sounds too. How did he make that quite startling creeper noise? “That was just a complete accident by Markus and me,” he says. “We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it.” And the scary zombies with their horrible groans? “I actually never wanted the zombies so scary,” he says. “I intentionally made them sound comical. It’s nice to hear that they work so well on you though, wimp.”
He still uses the Ableton Live package. “However I have a ton of extra software and plugins for it,” he says. “They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I’ve got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI.”
He is currently working on a new album of original material, which may well run to two hours (“over three if I go crazy”), but he still has plans for Minecraft as the game continues to mature and develop. “I want to make sound effects for biomes,” he says. “If you’re walking along a river you hear the water, then in the forest you hear birds, but as night comes in, it becomes kind of weird, you can walk through a desert, a swamp, and the sounds merge and change with you.”
At the close of his GameCity talk, he mentions the recent sale of Minecraft developer Mojang to Microsoft – a move that has caused some concern and upset in the community. “The days before the sale went through - I felt betrayed by Markus,” he said. “I was worried Microsoft would take my music. But ultimately I talked to the lawyers and I still own it. My music is not worth $2.5bn. And also, I’m not rich.”
As for Daniel’s relationship with the Minecraft creator, with whom he struck up a bond on an indie games forum, a bond that led to their collaboration, it’s all okay now. “Markus just wants to be left alone to make little games that no one cares about. That viewpoint makes sense to me.”
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