Divinlog no. 2: a theme for every card
This is part of my series of devlogs about my upcoming tarot music game Divinuet. Read them all here!
I hit a huge milestone last week: I finished composing the final piece of tarot card theme music for Divinuet. Composing a piece of music for each of the 78 cards ended up taking me 6 years! Of course, Divinuet isn't my full-time job, so that factors into how long it took. But still, 6 years! This was probably the biggest chunk of work needed for the game, so being done with that feels incredible.
Each playthrough of Divinuet is divided into two parts. In the first section, you receive your reading, and as you read the definition of each card you drew, its theme music plays. The second section of the game creates a piece of music for you by combining musical building blocks depending on the order and combination of your cards. The card themes described in this post show up during the first half of the game.
I didn't give myself many limitations with these, except that I wanted them to be somewhere in the ballpark of 45 to 55 seconds in length and in keys that would work with the interlude music that plays between them. Part of the reason I had initially wanted to write music for all the tarot cards was to explore the huge variety of ideas and moods represented in the deck, so I wanted to give myself a lot of freedom to experiment and play.
In order to further explain the thought process behind composing the card themes, I now need to explain a bit about how tarot works. If you already know about suits and pips and court cards and all that jazz, you can skip to the picture of my cat.
As I mentioned above, most tarot decks, including the one I use for Divinuet, contain 78 cards. The cards are divided into major arcana and minor arcana. In readings, the major arcana tend to represent momentous events and spiritual shifts, whereas the minor arcana usually represent smaller day-to-day things. There are 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, and the minor arcana are divided into 4 suits. If you hear of a card that doesn't have a suit in its name, like The Tower, The Fool, Judgement, etc, that's a major arcana. If it does have a suit in its name, like the Queen of Cups or the 2 of swords, that's a minor arcana.
While each card has its own individual meaning, certain themes tend to emerge in the minor arcana suits, which are wands (energy, passion, fire), cups (emotions, love, water), pentacles (material things, practicality, earth), and swords (intellect, logic, air). There are 14 cards in each suit: the pip (numbered) cards, ranging from ace to 10, and the court cards: page, knight, queen, and king.
That's all you need to know to understand this post, but if you're interested in learning more about tarot (which I highly recommend, tarot is very cool!) I'd recommend checking out learntarot.com, which is a hilariously outdated site but contains tons of good info. It's how I got started learning.
Ramona and the LOTR tarot
Despite giving myself very few rules for composing the themes, some patterns naturally emerged. Let's take the pentacles, for example. The low number pips, which are mostly about things like laying foundations and putting in work, use a lot of folk instrumentation, while the higher numbers and some of the court cards, which are more about wealth and luxury, lean more into fancy Baroque vibes. In fact, the kings and queens of all the suits are pretty regal sounding, while the pages are more cutesy and playful.
The wands have a lot of energetic synth arps and brass, while the cups have a lot of dreamy synth pads, gentle piano, and soft strings. The swords, containing more "negative" cards than any other suit, have the most dissonance. The major arcana have more big orchestral pieces than the minor arcana. I wasn't consciously trying to group any of these things together, but overall you can definitely hear some of the patterns present in tarot emerging in the music.
Given the number of themes I needed to compose, creative blocks were inevitable. At one point a year or two ago, I hit a big one. While I felt like I was doing a good job writing music for the cards I personally like, I was having a lot of trouble coming up with music for the cards I didn't feel as connected to. I felt like I wasn't doing them justice. The thing that pulled me out of that rut was realizing I should take the whole thing less seriously. That it would be fine, and arguably would even make the gameplay experience more interesting, if some of the themes were a little corny or silly.
The Knight of Cups is a purposely sappy and slightly ridiculous violin and harp duet. The Hierophant sounds exactly like the pretty but bland organ music I grew up hearing in church every Sunday. The 3 of Wands could easily be used as background music for a cheesy ad for a travel agency. Tarot can be serious, beautiful, and insightful, but it can also be really fun and a little goofy, and I hope the music of Divinuet reflects that.
Overall, writing a piece of theme music for every tarot card was a huge undertaking, but it was also so, so much fun. I got to explore so many different ways of making music, including using tons of combinations of instruments I never would have thought to try. It was really creatively rewarding, and I can't wait for everyone to experience the card themes in their full glory when the game is released.
If you're a real nerd were hoping I'd get more into the weeds on how I composed and implemented the themes, you're in luck! I did that in a blog post I wrote for Audiokinetic in 2019 (god, I've been working on this game for eons). It's very old, and I only had composed 10 themes at the time, but the music system has stayed the same. The article also features some very old art and UI stuff that I'm no longer using, so that's kind of fun to look back on!