Interview w/ Pedro Silva

Upon asking the OMORI music team permission to transcribe the soundtrack back in May of 2021, Pedro Silva, the primary composer, said I could ask them whatever questions I could think of and to show them what I was working on. I ended up asking a lot of questions and they gave me permission to post them here in an interview sort of format for all to enjoy. I think there's a lot of very interesting information to learn about the music and the game that hasn't been brought up before!

Since Pedro has transcribed the most music, I was able to send a lot (maybe too many) questions their way, but there are still a lot of things I would love to ask Jami Lynne and OMOCAT about the other songs and certain aspects of the game, respectively. If I end up having that opportunity, I will be sure to post it here!

Disclaimers: I will be slightly adjusting things to make it all easier to comprehend (I have only slightly touched any punctuation, formatting, anything like that). I first started asking Pedro questions throughout and after my first run of OMORI, and I highly recommend not reading the interview until you beat the game yourself. Links go either to YouTube, Bandcamp, or other safe locations.

Pedro: I'm not sure, you'd have to ask her!

That piano I used though is a stock reason piano, that 3 or so notes were sampled from, then down-sampled, then made into a simple sampled instrument with a bit of reverb. A vast majority of sounds on the soundtrack are done that way, trying to replicate the same way it would have been done with SNES/n64/PS1 soundtracks.

For Remina, its both hands sort of overlapping eachother on the upper registers of the piano, intentionally pretty chaotic and without structure.

And that's totally ok! All that sounds great. Thank you for asking

Pedro: Mm yeah!

Those areas are technically connected, both emotionally and in the world so it made sense to me to do so. I tended to not want to gravitate towards heavy usage of leitmotifs in this game as a few lovely notable and similar games have already done that and I feel like its strong parts of their identity but, being able to connect bits and pieces here and there while we were developing was always a joy to do. On that note, instead of melody I hope people were able to feel all the connections and cohesiveness with the instrument and texture choices intentionally made in the game.

For 100 Sunny, it started off mostly just as a play on Thousand Sunny, which is the 2nd ship in One Piece. Which... is because that's a pirate ship and I was inspired to write this song based off another theme from another game that has a pirate ship that features the song I was inspired by and.... also the name 100 Sunny sounds cute and fits. Oddly enough, this song was named this way before we decided on Sunny as the default name.

Good For Health, Bad For Imagination, White Surf Style 6, August/Water are all also references/jokes related to other media/songs/things for similarly obscure and convoluted reasons in terms of the development of these songs from a musical standpoint/just how my brain works, and also because the things they're referencing have thematic or mirrored vibes that I wanted to evoke for the game.

I find that how something makes you feel is much more important than the specifics of exactly what's happening, and that's especially true with black space. By the time we started work on the black space area of the game, we were well acquainted with and entrenched in our characters and world, so impressionism, abstract feelings, indulging in less-accessible forms of music, textures and art and just following our feelings were important for designing blackspace overall.

Most of these others are primarily stylization choices

And thank you! It was great being able to explore so many sides of what I enjoy

Pedro: This is definitely also extreme hamburger music but no, I also haven't ever played Runescape though!

And yeah feel free to post any of that anywhere!

Pedro: Mm! So for Treehouse, technically the Otherworld town theme was written first which was the only song me and Jami collaborated on (save for me creating the non-chiptune arrangements of WHITE SPACE, which she wrote), and was written very early back in 2014 when the game world was quite different. From Otherworld, Lost At A Sleepover was also made adapting its melody due to the connection it had at the time, and then as things shifted, around 2019 I adapted that melody for the Treehouse since the Treehouse is the real world analogue to neighbors room.

Convenience store was written sometime in 2017, and it definitely shares a very very similar instrument that is doing a similar rhythmic pattern. But that's mostly just a coincidence / a product of how I tend to play keyboard parts depending on the sounds they're producing. That sound for example tends to lend itself towards really staccato somewhat bouncy chords.

Everyone is Asleep and Clean Slate definitely also share that same sort of instrument with the nice delay/echo on them, again, sort of just, my sound palettes and taste in writing revealing itself.

Sinister Swing and KK Cruising definitely both have that silly Casio CA-100 Organ, but no its not a rip from it, but I would imagine they both come from the same source. I'm somewhat afraid of using soundfonts for legal reasons so most of OMORI is stuff I've painstakingly tried to find sources for or recreate, or experiments with sound using similar processes to how instruments were made for the SNES/n64/PS1 era.

I didn't write WHITE SPACE or I Prefer My Pizza 90% Grease either, but I'm really glad you listened to the guildlings OST! I hope more people get to play that game some day.

Pedro: We composed things on our own though, very much separately.

Identity is definitely something I've had a rollercoaster of a time with in my personal life during the 6 or so years we worked on this. In terms of gender, sexuality and professional identity and I wish I had some... clearer answers, insight or anything helpful to say. But no, I feel perhaps too much attachment.

On a very personal level, I'm very glad to have been able to release a final album as slime girls and have OMORI release so I can put that era of my life to sleep and move on. But everything in the past will always be a part of who I am now.

Pedro: Oddly enough, the music I made as Slime Girls and the music I made for OMORI has very very very little overlap, sonically and emotionally. The sole exception being the 2nd half of PURPLE/GLOW which features some sections written for OMORI and scrapped and turned into something else. The reason for this distinction is that video game music generally has to serve a Function and deeper feeling attached to the game. Whereas personal music.... is just that.

Thank you! Bonfires is one of my favorite songs I've ever written.

A Trace Of uses the similar really harsh frequency noise instrument that I love.

I'm honestly... quite glad to have gotten away with using a lot of harshness on the OMORI soundtrack, doesn't feel very common in video game soundtracks.

Pedro: So writing music for me can take a ton of different forms. Most commonly though yeah, I will sit down in front of the piano which is hooked up to the laptop and just play stuff, record the MIDI data, edit, play other instruments etc. The piano in Duet is a recording of me playing .... in the sense that its several takes spliced together and then the MIDI edited and refined. But 90% of stuff, including drum parts, I come up with by playing and then adding more.

And totally, it's impossible to name everyone but I am like a sponge and on the page of viewing writing music (especially for video games) as essentially a process of problem solving, I consistently and constantly with no control in my head think of how other songs do it and use those references extensively.

Whether it's Yasunori Mitsuda, ZUN or Yoko Shimomura, from a Britney Spears song, obscure anime BGM or song I've written prior. Everything pops up forever in my head.

Pedro: And yeah! I've contributed a cover/arrange of Dearly Beloved from kingdom hearts to SilvaGunner, I'd love to do more as I have too many evil ideas in my head for OMORI songs.

And totally! Feel free to transcribe whatever you'd like to.