Trek To Yomi Music Interview: “Imagine Everything You Know... Now Forget About 70 Percent Of All Of It”

thegamer.com:

“How do we convey anger, tension, sadness, anxiety, love, duty, mystery, et cetera with a fixed set of instruments?” Trek to Yomi’s co-composer Cody Matthew Johnson asks contemplatively. “A challenging exercise that pushed the limits of my neural plasticity for sure – how rewarding!”

Trek to Yomi’s imitation of particular shots, grain effect, and unique sense of movement might be the first things that might catch your eyes about the game. Hiroki’s samurai journey is basically a playable black and white homage to the film director Akira Kurosawa — you know, the only name that everyone seems to relate to when it comes to movies about honor, tradition, and other themes of the old Japanese warriors.

Related: Trek To Yomi Preview - Yomi Yo-My

However, there’s another aspect in Trek to Yomi as important as (if not even more than) its visual identity: the music. Recorded and composed only with instruments used during the Edo period in Japan, when the game is set, composers Cody Matthew Johnson and Yoko Honda faced different challenges while creating Yomi’s sounds and tunes.

“I'm not an instruments expert, and due to Japanese instruments being very specific about their usage - occasion, region, played by what ‘class’ of people, et cetera, I had to conduct a thorough research of all the instruments we primarily used to score this game, including the ones I thought I already had enough knowledge of,” explains Honda, who was born and raised in Japan. Even if she had knowledge about Japan’s music and culture, Honda had to work out how to share said knowledge and her skills with the rest of the team.

“I couldn’t just give simple feedback like ‘that doesn't sound authentically Japanese, but pan-Asian’ or ‘please avoid this specific