Music/Tchaikovsky’s Swan lake

[Martli]

#9395

So for those who haven’t played yet, the music in this game is fantastic. Strangely, although the game is named after a weaving machine it’s actually all about playing music to solve puzzles, and not much about weaving at all (other than you, the protagonist Bobbin Threadbare, are a weaver.

The sound track is basically all excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Here it is on YouTube (the real thing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2d_vv2w–8

It’s an appropriate source as the game has all these random references to Swans. I’m sure they have some sort of deeper meaning that Carl Jung would understand, but that stuff goes right over my head. It’s quite an out there story if you ask me, and I really like it.

For this month I’m really keen to dive into how the story behind LOOM came about, why the chose swans and sawn lake in particular for the soundtrack.

[Pix]

#9397

Many years back I got into hacking scummVM so I could get the MT-32 soundtracks to work on my PSP which I was enamoured with at the time. It played mp3/ogg recordings of the soundtracks instead of trying to emulate the MT-32 which was way beyond the PSP. This included the EGA version of Loom which got me wondering if I could use orchestral recordings of the music instead so I got a an Andre Previn CD and found the appropriate pieces of music and they fit perfectly from what I recall.

That project is long dead but is still sat at https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/scummvm with a decade old build of scummVM if anyone wants to try it with a real orchestra. The Windows build should still work fine on modern machines I would imagine. It had to be the patched MT-32 EGA version of Loom to work correctly and would probably break the others.

[Evil Taco]

#9399

That’s super cool, Pix!

[firefyte]

#9400

The FM Towns (Sacrilege!) version of Loom uses CD-audio, so if you really wanted to, you can replace the audio tracks just there directly in scummvm.

The bad part is the VGA graphics, and missing the overture vs. MT-32.

[Martli]

#9401

I will definitely have to check that out Pix!