“The point of aleatoric music is giving the player the freedom to decide what to play within a given set of instructions. “The key to this sound was musical chance, or aleatoric techniques.” Graves explains the appeal of the scene it was a natural, acoustic sound – a normal orchestra performing their instruments – but the techniques they were using made the instruments sound otherworldly. ‘The closer to death you were, the quicker your heart would beat … Dead Space. I stumbled across the ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ typewriter scene one evening on television and thought ‘ that’s what the score needs to sound like!’” “His use of Penderecki’s music in The Shining was my lightbulb moment for Dead Space. “Kubrick is famous for implementing classical recordings in his films,” reflects Graves. You might not have noticed these things consciously … but chances are your body did.ĭead Space’s aim was to expand the boundaries of a horror experience in gaming, taking on all the action beats of Resident Evil and Silent Hill and complementing them with the psychological thriller aspects of cinema. The closer to death you were, the quicker your heart would beat. The lower your health, the more ragged your breathing became. Dead Space employed breathing sound effects and a dull heartbeat in the background to keep you physically in-step with Isaac. Graves’ technique for getting you to empathise with Isaac mimicked what the audio engineers were doing with the rest of the game’s sound.

For the entire game, you never leave his heavy, blood-soaked boots. He’s just some guy, on a ship teeming with hostile alien lifeforms, whose poor little brain is starting to unravel. Complementing the game’s extra-terrestrial, Cronenberg-esque body horror was the mental deterioration of protagonist Isaac Clarke an engineer stranded aboard the USG Ishimura. What does “horror” sound like to you? Is it the slow thump of a heartbeat, gradually speeding up as adrenaline and cortisol start to flood the nervous system? Is it the wet thwack of meat on metal as something, somewhere, gets rent asunder? Or is it more understated – a soft whisper in the ear when you weren’t expecting it, half-heard shuffling footsteps, the suggestion of a breeze when the air is supposed to be perfectly still?ĭead Space, the horror game from EA and Visceral that launched for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC back in 2008, managed to get into your head, and under your skin.

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