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No Man's Sky - out August 10 for PlayStation 4 and August 12 for PC - may be the biggest game ever made: an entire universe of 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets. To score something so impossibly vast, developer Hello Games turned to Sheffield-based math-rock band 65daysofstatic.
"Procedurally generated music is something we've been interested in for a while," says band member Paul Wolinski. "But the way it tends to play out is that most generated stuff in computer games tends towards ambience: quite granular, soft, synthy stuff [because] the music's never sure what action it's about to be soundtracking."
Read more: No Man's Sky director: 'everything is to the wire, we work all night'
With a game as sprawling as No Man's Sky, that problem increased exponentially. "We decided on a two-pronged attack," Wolinski says. "We recorded linear stand-alone compositions, because we want the record to be worthwhile in its own right, but at the same time we collected a big sound library of individual sounds, instruments, melodies and beats."
Like No Man's Sky's in-game planets, the music is procedurally generated from the band's recordings as players move through the universe - it's composition by algorithm.
For the band, Wolinski says, creating No Man's Sky's soundscape has been energising, allowing them to experiment and explore new musical spaces. The band will release the music as a concept album on August 5, with collector's editions available here.
"We really enjoy being the kind of band that turns up where people don't expect bands to be."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
