Music composed by Grzegorz Bednorz (01,02,04-06,08-12,14-24) and Matthew VanDevander (02,03,06,07,09,10,16,23)
Mixing and Mastering by Grzegorz Bednorz
Album artwork by Wes Enns

Track 13 Arranged by Grzegorz Bednorz (featuring music composed by Grzegorz Bednorz and Matthew VanDevander)
Track 17 Composed by Grzegorz Bednorz (featuring music from Shrine composed by Matthew VanDevander)
Track 20 Composed by Grzegorz Bednorz (featuring music from Mine composed by Matthew VanDevander)

Taiji features an infinite and immersive ambient soundscape which endlessly evolves as the player explores. In this soundtrack album, I re-arranged the dynamic music of the game into a series of tracks which are finally finite for the first time. With this album in your possession, you will now be able to listen to the music of Taiji and be finished before the inevitable heat death of the universe! You can't put a price on that, but we did.

Purchase includes 7 bonus tracks, bonus artwork, liner notes, and a pdf with detailed info about each track.

DETAILED INFO - INTRODUCTION TO THE ALBUM:

HOW DID I GET THE JOB?

Before I got this job, I didn't think of myself as a music composer. But since I was working alone on my own puzzle game and I couldn't afford to contract someone else to compose music, I decided to learn how to do it myself. I started learning guitar in January 2021, and soon after I started to compose simple guitar pieces. Approximately a year later, I began to more seriously learn music composition and production and started to compose and implement the music for my game. At some point, I found Taiji's devlogs on Matthew's YouTube channel. Taiji has certain similarities to my game, so I was very interested in it. In November 2021, I became a play-tester for Taiji and I loved the game so much that I asked Matthew if I could design an additional puzzle for the game. In total, I ended up designing 8 puzzles which made it into the final game. After designing these puzzles, I asked Matthew what he still had to do before releasing the game. One of the things on his to-do list was composing the music for the white ending. I asked if I could do that for him and he agreed, but he wanted to pay me to do it.* So I got my first composer gig only 4 months after I started to seriously learn music composition! After Matthew listened to the first draft of the piece, he said that it was much better than the rest of the music in the game. Half-joking, he said that in that case, maybe I should just re-compose the music for the whole game. I knew it was a joke, but I started getting a lot of ideas for how the rest of the music could be improved. When I discussed those ideas with Matthew, he was very interested and agreed that the music was the weakest part of the game and perhaps should be improved. We decided that I would compose new music for Orchard and Mill as a test and then he'd decide if we were actually going to replace all the music. Matthew liked this new music as well, and the reaction of testers and the devlog viewers was also positive so he decided that it was worth postponing the release of the game. In the beginning, Matthew also composed new music alongside me, but to be able to continue paying my contract, he had to take a job partway through, leaving me to finish up the music mostly by myself. It took four and a half months to compose the release version of the soundtrack. After the launch of the game I worked for another three months on remixing the music for the album, and replacing the "White" and the "Order" pieces. I'm aware that I was very lucky to get this job and I'm immensely grateful that I had the opportunity to work on such a good game.
* Matthew: He had done so many good puzzles, I commissioned him to do the White piece mostly on a lark because I thought of it as back-pay for contributing so much to the game for free.

"CHAOTIC" AND "ORDERLY" MUSIC

Dualism is the main philosophical motif in Taiji, and I wanted to reflect this in the music. The approach that I came up with is for each major area of the game to have two main instruments: One is more "orderly" and the other is more "chaotic", as a reference to the chaos and order of the yin and yang in Taiji philosophy. The "orderly" instruments in each area play slow, traditional melodies which perhaps represent a player's ordered thoughts and knowledge about the puzzle mechanics. The "chaotic" instruments play fast out-of-the-blue melodies with a lot of frequency leaps, often sounding like random notes rather than an organized melody. Their unexpected nature reminds me of how new ideas suddenly appear in one's consciousness (for example, for how to solve a puzzle or interpret a new puzzle symbol). The "chaotic" instruments sometimes also play repeated notes and trills which, although orderly from a frequency standpoint, have more chaotic rhythms. The "chaotic" melodies were inspired by those from Jami Sieber's piece "Maenam". Although emphasizing these conceptual ideas was very important, this had to be balanced with the initial impression to a first-time listener. So in some areas, in order to make the music more interesting or to enhance the mood, we added a third melodic instrument.

THE HARMONY

We chose to compose most of the music using only the notes of the D minor pentatonic scale*. We did this because we wanted to be able to dynamically mix together tracks from different areas, and we wanted the music to be relaxing and peaceful. A nice side effect of using the same scale for all the music is that the music feels very consistent. A final reason is that Taiji, apart from being a video game, is an ancient Chinese philosophy, and because most traditional Chinese music uses a pentatonic scale (although not in equal temperament), I hoped that the pentatonic scale might give the music a slight Chinese feel.
The pads of each major area play different chords in an attempt to make the harmony differ between different areas at least a bit. The melodies played by the "orderly" instruments also treat the root note of that chord as their root. So we could say that different areas use different modes of the D minor pentatonic scale.

Notes of the chords played by pads:
• Shrine: C, D, F, G
• Mill: F, G, A
• Gardens: A, C, D, F
• Mine: F, C, D
• Ruins: G, A, C, D
• Plateaus: A, C, F, G
• Orchard: C, D, F, A
• Gallery: D, F, G, A
• Graveyard: G, D

* The exceptions to the D minor pentatonic tonality are the endgame area music, the "Black" and "Chaos" pieces, (which all use the full D minor scale), the "White" piece (which starts in the D minor key and later transitions into D major key), and the "Order" piece (which continues the D major tonality from "White").

VIRTUAL AND REAL INSTRUMENTS

Due to budget and time constraints, the vast majority of instruments we used in Taiji's music were virtual instruments (VST plugins). We recorded only the following live instruments:
Grzegorz Bednorz – Classical guitar, Snare brushes
Matthew VanDevander – Electric guitar, Acoustic guitar, (Voice samples for "Taiji" and Endgame area)
Jamie Ramirez – Snaps, Snare brushes, (Voice samples for "Taiji", Endgame area and "Chaos")

SNAPS AND BRUSHES

In the game we always play a track with snaps and brushes close to the snake puzzles (a.k.a. floor puzzles, a.k.a dance floor puzzles). Snaps were recorded by J. Ramirez. Most of the snare brushes were performed by G. Bednorz, although some of them were performed by J. Ramirez. The track was arranged by G. Bednorz.

DYNAMIC MUSIC SYSTEM AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IN-GAME MUSIC AND THE ALBUM

Matthew programmed a dynamic music system for Taiji which could be configured in real-time by editing text files. These text files were later baked down into static data for the final game.
The game is divided into many "music zones". Using the text files we could choose which audio files (called "layers" in the text file) are going to be played in a given "music zone". For each audio file in a given "music zone" we could set the minimum and maximum volume, the duration for it to blend its state between "music zones", the duration for a track to duck out completely, "chaos influence" and some other things. There is an oscillator which oscillates the volume of each layer between its minimum and maximum volume over time. The frequency of the oscillator is also changed at a set interval (usually 10 seconds) to a new random frequency. The "chaos influence" of each layer specifies to what degree the layer's volume is dependent on the oscillator versus a separate random number generator. I'm not going to elaborate too much more on the music system, as it would be better to explain it in a dedicated YouTube video. But anyhow, there is some randomness in the mix of the music and we mute or change the volume of different instruments in certain "music zones" within each area of the game.

For the album, I took the source audio files from the game and remixed them in my DAW. Most of the album tracks from the game's major areas are composed to resemble an accelerated version of the player's journey through that area. To that end, I tried to recreate the mix of certain of the game's "music zones" on the album. In many of the following track descriptions, you will find a Sections sub-heading. Under this sub-heading, you can see a breakdown of which "music zones" are referenced in which sections of that album track. If you'd like even more info about the mix of the music in the game, you can actually watch the music system working in real time by using the music debug info in the game. To turn the music debug info on or off you just have to press Shift + ] twice.