I don’t know anything about this game, nor racing games in general, except for one of the Forza Horizon installments I played a while back. I also don’t know anything about house music, which is the overall genre this song belongs to. What is going on with that weird clicky-winding sound? Club music is weird, man.
Anyways, despite the high-volume, frantic rhythm, this song is surprisingly relaxing.
Listen below or load the mp3 of “Liquid Soul” in a new tab/window.
2 Comments
I’m not sure what you meant by “clicky-winding sound” but I note that at some points in the song, the digital drums are pushed through a filter that varies the quality of the output, making it sound progressively analog instead of digital. It mimics reducing the size and fidelity of the speaker output, until it sounds like a cheap AM hand-held radio from the 1960s. I’m not sure what the actual terminology is, but the whole production is synthesized, including the faux vocal samples.
The cranking noise starts at around 1:33. I almost sounds like a guiro but with the stick dragged a little slower.
https://infogalactic.com/info/G%C3%BCiro
The general term is probably “lo-fi,” though this isn’t a lo-fi song…they just used lo-fi filter settings to make it sound like a poor signal, like you said, from an old radio.
It is probably all synthesized. Maybe some of it is naturally recorded but likely it was all digitized at some point. This game came out in 2003, so maybe there was some non-digital stuff going on. The voice was likely a real voice but, as you said, processed to get the right sound. I recorded with someone a while back who told me the history of voice correction in recordings. Autotune in some form has been used in nearly every decent studio since the nineties. Usually you don’t notice it, but it’s there. Most singers aren’t good enough to hit the exact notes without it. Granted, it’s rare to find someone with perfect pitch. Interesting stuff.