Long ago, a team of explorers founded Discovery Cove, caring for the local environment and living harmoniously with nature, even inviting other explorers and researchers to their settlement. In the decades following, the town developed into a bustling seaport, servicing countless vessels from the sea and sky. Residents, enamored with the coastal beauty, and began ecotours allowing for excursions through the vast ocean.
However, as explorers delved deeper into the depths, they recovered artifacts from a long lost civilization, a civilization that celebrated strange, fantastical creatures and worshipped a "god of light", depicted as a star. Fueled by greed, many fortune-seekers looking to make a name for themselves opened base camps in what was once "no man's land", and began their search for the fabled "Star of the Sea". The greed driving this search for the Star has created tensions and factions in this once peaceful seaport, and the actions of these explorers have reawakened the slumbering fantastical creatures previously only described in legend. A growing threat looms over those who chase for the "Star of the Sea", a danger simply deciphered as - the Leviathan.
Discovery Cove is split into two distinct areas. On the western side is a more traditional seaside town, a remnant of a peaceful era long past, while on the eastern side is a bustling steampunk city filled with life and activity. This physically embodies the conflict between the greed of the newer explorers and the harmonic living of the older settlers.
Music plays an integral role in the atmosphere and feeling of the land, and careful thought was put into delivering a sound that matched the thematic depth of every other aspect of the area. In that vein, the instrumentation of the land’s area music provides a unique, symbolic palette within which its melodies are built.
At the base of all of the land’s music is the Hydraulophone. This unique instrument produces sound not with a solid, like a percussion or string instrument, nor with a gas, as with brass and woodwinds, but instead with fluid. Water courses through the instrument, and, as the player blocks individual holes, is redirected to produce sound. The hauntingly beautiful, imperfect tone of the Hydraulophone provides a harmonic base upon which the other instruments dance, echoing how the humans in the land are little more than passing breaths over the timeless surface of the waters.
In addition to the Hydraulophone, several woodwinds and brass instruments are used in both the village and steampunk areas. Though both families are played using the element of human breath, as expressed above, the brass instruments in particular have a unique connection to the land’s theme. In the course of playing the trumpet or French horn, condensation from the player’s breath collects inside its tubing, producing water that must then be released.
The final instrument heard in the land’s music is the Calliope, an organ that produces sound using steam whistles. The Calliope makes its appearance only in the steampunk city area, a perfect fit to accompany the frantic kinetic energy there.
