arrangers:
- names:
    en: Grzegorz Bednorz
barcode: 055120185601
catalog: N/A
categories:
- Game
category: Game
classification: Original Soundtrack
composers: []
covers: []
discs:
- disc_length: '106:41'
  name: Disc 1
  tracks:
  - names:
      English: Taiji
    track_length: '1:48'
  - names:
      English: Gate
    track_length: '1:50'
  - names:
      English: Shrine
    track_length: '7:22'
  - names:
      English: Mill
    track_length: '3:48'
  - names:
      English: Gardens
    track_length: '4:28'
  - names:
      English: Mine
    track_length: '5:38'
  - names:
      English: Ruins
    track_length: '4:30'
  - names:
      English: Plateaus
    track_length: '2:58'
  - names:
      English: Orchard
    track_length: '5:20'
  - names:
      English: Gallery
    track_length: '8:17'
  - names:
      English: Graveyard
    track_length: '5:05'
  - names:
      English: Reflection
    track_length: '3:18'
  - names:
      English: Mixed Ideas
    track_length: '4:02'
  - names:
      English: Wondering
    track_length: '3:42'
  - names:
      English: Distant Wind Chimes
    track_length: '1:38'
  - names:
      English: Open Gate
    track_length: '1:52'
  - names:
      English: Enirhs
    track_length: '4:03'
  - names:
      English: Llim
    track_length: '2:56'
  - names:
      English: Snedrag
    track_length: '3:08'
  - names:
      English: Enim
    track_length: '4:29'
  - names:
      English: Black
    track_length: '1:04'
  - names:
      English: White
    track_length: '3:55'
  - names:
      English: Chaos
    track_length: '1:15'
  - names:
      English: Order
    track_length: '1:12'
  - names:
      English: Release Date Trailer
    track_length: '1:22'
  - names:
      English: Old Version of White
    track_length: '3:39'
  - names:
      English: Old Version of Order
    track_length: '1:02'
  - names:
      English: Teaser Trailer
    track_length: '1:09'
  - names:
      English: Remember
    track_length: '4:04'
  - names:
      English: Eulogy for an Expedition
    track_length: '3:49'
  - names:
      English: Pensive
    track_length: '3:58'
link: album/137171
lyricists: []
media_format: Digital
meta:
  added_date: 2024-03-05T23:08
  edited_date: 2024-03-05T23:08
  fetched_date: 2026-01-09T10:32
  ttl: 86400
  visitors: 357
name: Taiji Original Game Soundtrack
names:
  en: Taiji Original Game Soundtrack
  ja: Taiji Original Game Soundtrack
  ja-latn: Taiji Original Game Soundtrack
notes: 'Music composed by Grzegorz Bednorz (01,02,04-06,08-12,14-24) and Matthew VanDevander
  (02,03,06,07,09,10,16,23)

  Mixing and Mastering by Grzegorz Bednorz

  Album artwork by Wes Enns

  Track 13 Arranged by Grzegorz Bednorz (featuring music composed by Grzegorz Bednorz
  and Matthew VanDevander)

  Track 17 Composed by Grzegorz Bednorz (featuring music from Shrine composed by Matthew
  VanDevander)

  Track 20 Composed by Grzegorz Bednorz (featuring music from Mine composed by Matthew
  VanDevander)

  Taiji features an infinite and immersive ambient soundscape which endlessly evolves
  as the player explores. In this soundtrack album, I re-arranged the dynamic music
  of the game into a series of tracks which are finally finite for the first time.
  With this album in your possession, you will now be able to listen to the music
  of Taiji and be finished before the inevitable heat death of the universe! You can''t
  put a price on that, but we did.

  Purchase includes 7 bonus tracks, bonus artwork, liner notes, and a pdf with detailed
  info about each track.

  DETAILED INFO - INTRODUCTION TO THE ALBUM:

  HOW DID I GET THE JOB?

  Before I got this job, I didn''t think of myself as a music composer. But since
  I was working alone on my own puzzle game and I couldn''t afford to contract someone
  else to compose music, I decided to learn how to do it myself. I started learning
  guitar in January 2021, and soon after I started to compose simple guitar pieces.
  Approximately a year later, I began to more seriously learn music composition and
  production and started to compose and implement the music for my game. At some point,
  I found Taiji''s devlogs on Matthew''s YouTube channel. Taiji has certain similarities
  to my game, so I was very interested in it. In November 2021, I became a play-tester
  for Taiji and I loved the game so much that I asked Matthew if I could design an
  additional puzzle for the game. In total, I ended up designing 8 puzzles which made
  it into the final game. After designing these puzzles, I asked Matthew what he still
  had to do before releasing the game. One of the things on his to-do list was composing
  the music for the white ending. I asked if I could do that for him and he agreed,
  but he wanted to pay me to do it.* So I got my first composer gig only 4 months
  after I started to seriously learn music composition! After Matthew listened to
  the first draft of the piece, he said that it was much better than the rest of the
  music in the game. Half-joking, he said that in that case, maybe I should just re-compose
  the music for the whole game. I knew it was a joke, but I started getting a lot
  of ideas for how the rest of the music could be improved. When I discussed those
  ideas with Matthew, he was very interested and agreed that the music was the weakest
  part of the game and perhaps should be improved. We decided that I would compose
  new music for Orchard and Mill as a test and then he''d decide if we were actually
  going to replace all the music. Matthew liked this new music as well, and the reaction
  of testers and the devlog viewers was also positive so he decided that it was worth
  postponing the release of the game. In the beginning, Matthew also composed new
  music alongside me, but to be able to continue paying my contract, he had to take
  a job partway through, leaving me to finish up the music mostly by myself. It took
  four and a half months to compose the release version of the soundtrack. After the
  launch of the game I worked for another three months on remixing the music for the
  album, and replacing the "White" and the "Order" pieces. I''m aware that I was very
  lucky to get this job and I''m immensely grateful that I had the opportunity to
  work on such a good game.

  * Matthew: He had done so many good puzzles, I commissioned him to do the White
  piece mostly on a lark because I thought of it as back-pay for contributing so much
  to the game for free.

  "CHAOTIC" AND "ORDERLY" MUSIC

  Dualism is the main philosophical motif in Taiji, and I wanted to reflect this in
  the music. The approach that I came up with is for each major area of the game to
  have two main instruments: One is more "orderly" and the other is more "chaotic",
  as a reference to the chaos and order of the yin and yang in Taiji philosophy. The
  "orderly" instruments in each area play slow, traditional melodies which perhaps
  represent a player''s ordered thoughts and knowledge about the puzzle mechanics.
  The "chaotic" instruments play fast out-of-the-blue melodies with a lot of frequency
  leaps, often sounding like random notes rather than an organized melody. Their unexpected
  nature reminds me of how new ideas suddenly appear in one''s consciousness (for
  example, for how to solve a puzzle or interpret a new puzzle symbol). The "chaotic"
  instruments sometimes also play repeated notes and trills which, although orderly
  from a frequency standpoint, have more chaotic rhythms. The "chaotic" melodies were
  inspired by those from Jami Sieber''s piece "Maenam". Although emphasizing these
  conceptual ideas was very important, this had to be balanced with the initial impression
  to a first-time listener. So in some areas, in order to make the music more interesting
  or to enhance the mood, we added a third melodic instrument.

  THE HARMONY

  We chose to compose most of the music using only the notes of the D minor pentatonic
  scale*. We did this because we wanted to be able to dynamically mix together tracks
  from different areas, and we wanted the music to be relaxing and peaceful. A nice
  side effect of using the same scale for all the music is that the music feels very
  consistent. A final reason is that Taiji, apart from being a video game, is an ancient
  Chinese philosophy, and because most traditional Chinese music uses a pentatonic
  scale (although not in equal temperament), I hoped that the pentatonic scale might
  give the music a slight Chinese feel.

  The pads of each major area play different chords in an attempt to make the harmony
  differ between different areas at least a bit. The melodies played by the "orderly"
  instruments also treat the root note of that chord as their root. So we could say
  that different areas use different modes of the D minor pentatonic scale.

  Notes of the chords played by pads:

  • Shrine: C, D, F, G

  • Mill: F, G, A

  • Gardens: A, C, D, F

  • Mine: F, C, D

  • Ruins: G, A, C, D

  • Plateaus: A, C, F, G

  • Orchard: C, D, F, A

  • Gallery: D, F, G, A

  • Graveyard: G, D

  * The exceptions to the D minor pentatonic tonality are the endgame area music,
  the "Black" and "Chaos" pieces, (which all use the full D minor scale), the "White"
  piece (which starts in the D minor key and later transitions into D major key),
  and the "Order" piece (which continues the D major tonality from "White").

  VIRTUAL AND REAL INSTRUMENTS

  Due to budget and time constraints, the vast majority of instruments we used in
  Taiji''s music were virtual instruments (VST plugins). We recorded only the following
  live instruments:

  Grzegorz Bednorz – Classical guitar, Snare brushes

  Matthew VanDevander – Electric guitar, Acoustic guitar, (Voice samples for "Taiji"
  and Endgame area)

  Jamie Ramirez – Snaps, Snare brushes, (Voice samples for "Taiji", Endgame area and
  "Chaos")

  SNAPS AND BRUSHES

  In the game we always play a track with snaps and brushes close to the snake puzzles
  (a.k.a. floor puzzles, a.k.a dance floor puzzles). Snaps were recorded by J. Ramirez.
  Most of the snare brushes were performed by G. Bednorz, although some of them were
  performed by J. Ramirez. The track was arranged by G. Bednorz.

  DYNAMIC MUSIC SYSTEM AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IN-GAME MUSIC AND THE ALBUM

  Matthew programmed a dynamic music system for Taiji which could be configured in
  real-time by editing text files. These text files were later baked down into static
  data for the final game.

  The game is divided into many "music zones". Using the text files we could choose
  which audio files (called "layers" in the text file) are going to be played in a
  given "music zone". For each audio file in a given "music zone" we could set the
  minimum and maximum volume, the duration for it to blend its state between "music
  zones", the duration for a track to duck out completely, "chaos influence" and some
  other things. There is an oscillator which oscillates the volume of each layer between
  its minimum and maximum volume over time. The frequency of the oscillator is also
  changed at a set interval (usually 10 seconds) to a new random frequency. The "chaos
  influence" of each layer specifies to what degree the layer''s volume is dependent
  on the oscillator versus a separate random number generator. I''m not going to elaborate
  too much more on the music system, as it would be better to explain it in a dedicated
  YouTube video. But anyhow, there is some randomness in the mix of the music and
  we mute or change the volume of different instruments in certain "music zones" within
  each area of the game.

  For the album, I took the source audio files from the game and remixed them in my
  DAW. Most of the album tracks from the game''s major areas are composed to resemble
  an accelerated version of the player''s journey through that area. To that end,
  I tried to recreate the mix of certain of the game''s "music zones" on the album.
  In many of the following track descriptions, you will find a Sections sub-heading.
  Under this sub-heading, you can see a breakdown of which "music zones" are referenced
  in which sections of that album track. If you''d like even more info about the mix
  of the music in the game, you can actually watch the music system working in real
  time by using the music debug info in the game. To turn the music debug info on
  or off you just have to press Shift + ] twice.'
organizations:
- &id001
  names:
    en: Grzegorz Bednorz & Matthew VanDevander
    ja: Grzegorz Bednorz & Matthew VanDevander
    ja-latn: Grzegorz Bednorz & Matthew VanDevander
  role: publisher
performers: []
picture_full: https://media.vgm.io/albums/17/137171/137171-83fe70dd2903.jpg
picture_small: https://medium-media.vgm.io/albums/17/137171/137171-83fe70dd2903.jpg
picture_thumb: https://thumb-media.vgm.io/albums/17/137171/137171-83fe70dd2903.jpg
platforms:
- PC
products:
- names:
    en: Taiji
publish_format: Commercial
publisher: *id001
related: []
release_date: '2022-12-22'
release_events: []
release_price:
  currency: USD
  price: 8.0
reprints: []
stores:
- link: http://grzegorzbednorz.bandcamp.com/album/taiji-original-game-soundtrack
  name: Bandcamp
- link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/2211710/Taiji_Soundtrack/
  name: Steam
vgmdb_link: https://vgmdb.net/album/137171?perpage=99999
votes: 0
