We fixed the bass. The soundtrack still didn't have a tune.
A bass-heavy drone earned four replacement songs and a vote. Two days after the winner shipped, the owner still wasn't happy — and measuring it properly found the bass had barely been the issue at all.
The original background music was four detuned low tones under a slowly opening filter — no tempo, no melody, no chords. The owner's verdict was blunt: it "sucks and sounds like noise only." Measuring it rather than guessing: three pitch classes for an entire game, a filter that crept open over minutes, and most of its energy sitting down in the bass.
Four songs, one vote
Four full replacements were composed and rendered — an ambient drift, a retro chiptune drive, a synthwave pulse, a minimal generative piece — each put to the owner as a 75-second clip. The owner picked the chiptune, Pixel Drive, over the recommendation. It shipped two days before this post.
Still not right
The verdict came back fast: "not quite satisfied." Measuring the shipped song bar by bar found exactly why — it had swapped a drone for something that sounded like music but still didn't have a tune.
Underneath the melody, the fast arpeggio sat in almost the same register — 95% of its notes within an octave of whatever the melody was playing — and the rhythm section played one identical pattern every single bar. The whole thing was a single 33-second loop, repeating unchanged for as long as a game lasted.
The bass turned out not to be the story
The original diagnosis had pointed at the bass — most of that old drone's raw energy sat below 400 Hz. But a raw energy number isn't what a person actually hears. Measured again, properly this time, through how an ear actually weights frequencies and how a small speaker's own low-cut already discounts the bottom end, the loss turned out nowhere near as dramatic.
The game's own master compressor was checked too, on suspicion that it was flattening the mix — it adds about 3 dB of loudness and narrows the dynamic range by under a decibel. Left alone; it wasn't the cause of anything.
Composed, not generated
The replacement, shipped today, is three actual written songs — Low Orbit, Aurora Line, Event Horizon — one for the early game, one for the middle, one for the hardest stretch, changing as the player's level does. Each has a real form: a verse that returns, a higher middle section, a reprise with its own counter-melody, and a bridge that thins out before a final rise. The mix was set by measuring each voice alone, not by ear — the melody sits loudest, with the drums, bass, arpeggio and pad each a measured step quieter, instead of nearly buried like before.
The owner listened on the day this shipped and approved all three — Event Horizon is the favourite. What still hasn't been judged by anyone: how any of it sounds through a phone's own speaker or a pair of headphones, whether it starts cleanly on an iPhone's first tap, or whether a full, long game makes even a good tune wear thin.