BEHIND THE MUSIC OF STARFIELD, 29 DE ABRIL 2022

Audio Director Mark Lampert and Composer Inon Zur on the music that inspired the Starfield soundtrack. Listen to a selection of songs chosen by the team.

01🚀What does a journey to the stars sound like?

🧭Music is essential not only for the player’s experience but also the development process at Bethesda Game Studios. Audio teams and composers work closely to create a unique soundtrack that charges gameplay with emotion. Music shapes the story and it’s a constant companion on your adventures.

🧭Last year, the London Symphony Orchestra performed Composer Inon Zur’s “Starfield Suite” during the 10th Anniversary TES V: Skyrim Concert. Now, Starfield’s Audio Director Mark Lampert reflects on his time working with Zur and shares a few of the bands, musicians and movie soundtracks that inspired the sound of Starfield. Lampert and Zur have also put together a playlist with music from these artists, which you can listen to on Spotify.

02🚀MARK LAMPERT’S PICKS

01🧭Einstürzende Neubauten

These guys have been around since 1980 when “industrial” was more of a pioneering term in music. They use a lot of junk percussion, hand-built instruments and other “found sound” kinds of devices. 

I’ve sent a few samples here and there to Inon over the years because that kind of non-traditional percussion sound has always appealed to me, and it’s a great way to have something unique without immediately using a synth. 

I just feel like truth is always stranger than fiction, and there’s nothing like the real thing. To quote the band’s bass player, Alexander Hacke: “Instead of recreating the sound of breaking glass, just break glass. It's a lot more fun! You can also get much more expression by hitting things live. Every time you hit a metal bar, you hit it differently.”

02🧭The Heat soundtrack – Kronos Quartet

Kronos Quartet can be found all over the place in film soundtracks, and Heat is one of my all-time favorite films. I still watch it a couple of times a year, and so I’m very familiar with its score. 

There were multiple samples from the Kronos Quartet cues in the Heat soundtrack that I passed to Inon as reference points, usually involving long, sustained, or very slowly evolving string passages without a lot of moving melody lines. That kind of stuff is always a great reference for creating a mood and setting a scene.

03🧭The Fallout 76 and Fallout 76: Wastelanders soundtracks – Inon Zur

These past two game projects with Inon really show some of his best composition work, especially the Wastelanders soundtrack where the exploration music took on more of a narrative tone, telling a longer story but not overwhelming you with detail. 

Every time Inon keeps things simpler – fewer notes, lingering on chords a bit longer, repeating a few more times rather than pushing the music to take a turn and then another turn – I find his work is most effective and really hooks me. Less is more.

04🧭True Widow

True Widow is a three-piece from North Texas who play with an exceedingly downtuned and downtempo kind of metal, and their big, dark, warm sound swimming around in massive amounts of reverb is something I wanted to use as a reference point—there were a few samples here and there from their albums that I included as references for Inon. 

And, of course, the big, black vastness of space. It was Inon who’d first suggested that maybe the music should sound like it’s coming in from the darkness and then continuing out again into infinity. That’s where the “big passing chords” at the top of the main theme came from, which were also Inon’s idea.

05🧭Jason Moran

Jason is a jazz pianist based in New York City, and some of his solo piano recordings have a certain sound to them that just really grabs me. Check out his album The Sound Will Tell You. 

Part of it is his style – he uses a lot of really dark chord voicings, spending a lot of time in the lower and darker registers of the keyboard, plus a lot of sustain pedal so that things are really reverberating and blending together. The other part is that it’s a gorgeous recording with lots of room sound. 

All of that warmth and airiness really appeals to me, and I think that kind of sound works really well in Starfield because it lets the music add to the mood of the game while not getting too much in the way of the action, and all of the UI feedback, the dialogue, the combat and just the general quest-related “foreground” activities that players are involved with.

06🧭“Saturnalia” – Steve Moore

This is a very sequenced and arpeggiated synth tune from Steve Moore that has an obvious sci-fi sound to it, but still manages to be very warm and soft as opposed to cold and edgy. You can crank it up, and you don’t feel pushed away by any harsh high frequency synth. 

The music really fills all of the lower frequencies and provides this big, warm backdrop to the game without fighting all of the foreground sonic content.

07🧭The Blade Runner soundtrack – Vangelis

Well, obviously. But again, a lot of the synth work in this film isn’t trying to cut through the mix too harshly. 

Everything has a pleasant, soft edge to it, even the higher melodic notes. There’s also a lot of very sound design-y elements going on in many of the tracks, just pleasantly filling in a lot of the space in the music with texture – all kinds of sparkles, twinkles and electronic elements that really blur the line between the music and sound design texture. 

I love that kind of “coloring outside the lines” approach between a game’s sound design and its musical score.

03🚀INON ZUR’S PICKS (NOTES FROM MARK LAMPERT)

01🧭The Revenant soundtrack, “Main Theme” – Ryuichi Sakamoto

Those big chords in the strings that sort of come out of the darkness, swell up and then fade off into the darkness again. I think you’ll hear that influence right away in Starfield’s main theme introduction.

02🧭Johann Johannson

Another very moody composer, Johann uses a lot of the instrument groups in very dramatic ways, choosing certain moments to just pummel the listener in a way that still really adds to the film and isn’t trying to completely distract you.

03🧭“Ocean of Sounds” – John Cage

There’s an interesting parallel here between this piece and the Jason Moran album. The long, arpeggiated chords and heavy use of the sustain pedal, the big and airy sound of the room in the recording. 

I definitely hear the influence of this piece of music in much of Inon’s work for Starfield, particularly the altered notes here and there which introduce different musical “modes,” really bending the sound of one scale into another.

04🧭Adagio for Strings” – Samuel Barber

Here’s an influential suggestion from Inon that I didn’t realize I already knew so well, most likely from the famous sequence in Platoon. 

It just shows you how you can let the music completely take over, pushing the sound effects and other sound design elements almost completely out of the picture. 

In the case of Platoon, the result is far more powerful than if the filmmakers had tried to make room in the mix for both. It’s like, “forget it, let the music carry the weight here, you can just let it go.” This piece has that kind of Shepard tone quality to it as well, where the notes are perpetually climbing, climbing, climbing. That’s a pretty good image in itself for Starfield.

04🚀Zur also shared some of his thoughts on how he composed the music for Starfield:

“As far as inspiration for the music I wrote, it is a very wide array of music, composers and styles. 

We can start with John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, who provided the first and immediate inspiration as the main composers for epic sci-fi films, but then I went past them to seek more inspiration from Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and other classical composers. 

Then I turned to some more synth-oriented scores. For example, the score for Blade Runner. I was inspired by the way they worked in the synthetic elements. 

I also turned to listen to composers like John Cage to bring in some of the minimalistic elements he uses in his music.

And after all that, I just thought about how I wanted to hear the sound of the universe—how I can put together all these elements but give them the very unique touch that is the sound of Starfield.”

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