One of the most interesting compositional challenges I’ve faced was finding where the music for a dark fantasy project should truly come from. Not which instruments. Not which tempo. Where the theme should originate, structurally and emotionally.
The answer was hiding in plain sight: the game’s title itself.
A method based on modular arithmetic
Every letter of the alphabet has a fixed numerical position: A=1, B=2, C=3, and so on. A diatonic scale, however, only contains 7 degrees. To bridge that gap, I applied the modulo operation dividing each letter’s value by 7 and keeping the remainder.
The formula is simple: note = letter value mod 7. The result is always a number between 0 and 6, which maps directly onto the seven degrees of a major scale.
Applying this to a nine-letter title produced a complete melodic sequence nine notes derived entirely from the word itself, with no arbitrary decisions involved.
When repetition becomes a decision
During the process, one note appeared twice in immediate succession. Rather than treating this as a flaw, I treated it as a compositional gift. Two repeated quarter notes became a single half note, giving the phrase a natural point of rest. The math had produced a repetition. The music turned it into breathing space.
A second method: direct alphabetical mapping
I also developed a more intuitive approach, assigning each letter directly to a note following the musical alphabet’s seven-note cycle (A through G, repeating). This produced a second, distinct melody from the same title and revealed something unexpected: an accidental chromatic shift, a sharped note immediately followed by its natural counterpart.
In music theory terms, this is a momentary modal shift — a note borrowed from outside the established scale. I didn’t correct it. I embraced it. That semitone became the musical symbol of corruption at the heart of the game’s world.
From cipher to theme
Played alone, the resulting melody felt incomplete almost meaningless. That was intentional. The theme needed harmonic context to come alive. I built that context around the Dies Irae, the centuries-old liturgical motif tied to judgment, death and fate, which has appeared in Western music for hundreds of years whenever something is about to end badly.
When a player eventually hears the full theme, they’re not just hearing background music. They’re hearing a message encoded in the name of the game itself before a single note was written from imagination.
This is the difference between composing music for a game and composing music from it.