The Music of the Dwarves

mskala · Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:04 am Post subject: The Music of the Dwarves

The cult computer game Dwarf Fortress simulates a fantasy world with different civilizations who each have their own musical traditions - scales, tunings, musical forms, instruments, etc. Sometimes characters in the game are described as playing music, and although it doesn't actually generate the music it does give sufficiently detailed text descriptions that we could imagine really writing music to meet the descriptions.

I've been experimenting with doing that as a compositional exercise. The game descriptions are sometimes contradictory or musically nonsensical, so there's a fair bit of creativity needed to make something out of them that even sort of sounds like music. As far as I know, nobody else is doing this - other people on the Web writing Dwarf Fortress-inspired music seem to be just writing ordinary human music of our own world to listen to while playing. Maybe others will be inspired to try recreating the dwarves' own music.

First piece: "Blameless Turquoise," an example of the Paints of Jade, recorded on a Roland D-05. Second piece: "We Spoke of Centimetres," an example of the Tressed Silk, recorded on a Eurorack modular. Both links are to my Web log entries; audio, sheet music, etc. are linked from there.

1roomstudio · Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2019 9:34 pm Post subject:

Wow! That’s an impressive collection of a wide variety of sounds, textures, styles, concepts (I listened to several shorter ones) it’s an impressive body of work.

The links didn’t go to the pieces, just the Home page... no worries, I found my way.

That’s also an impressive web site... very detailed and organized. Do you post your music on that site exclusively?

mskala · Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 7:04 am Post subject:

I'm glad you liked it. The links in my posting are supposed to go to Web log entries, with the audio for the specific pieces in question embedded near the bottom (scroll down). I wonder if maybe you just clicked "Audio" at the top of the page - which does indeed go to the home page of my audio server. I basically only post my musical works there now - used to have a Soundcloud account which probably still technically exists, but I was put off when they started heavily pushing their paid streaming service a few years ago.

Since posting this thread here I've also found out about "Songs of Zavazsil," someone else's attempt at recreating the music of Dwarf Fortress: https://soundcloud.com/musicmastermsh/sets/songs-of-zavazsil Those tracks sound a bit more human than the ones I did, so I think they're more in the line of "inspired by" the game descriptions than trying to follow the descriptions exactly.

1roomstudio · Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2019 11:59 am Post subject:

>>>>>>>>>
The links in my posting are supposed to go to Web log entries, with the audio for the specific pieces in question embedded near the bottom (scroll down). I wonder if maybe you just clicked "Audio" at the top of the page - which does indeed go to the home page of my audio server.
>>>>>>>>>

Didn’t see the embed at the bottom... yes I clicked on “Audio”

Does your Blog share the descriptions of how the music is composed? I would find it interesting to attempt following such an example to see how it compares with what you came up with...

Could be a Black Rabbit Hole ... or it could be interesting!

Thanks again for sharing this. 😎