Control Resonant composer says Dylan's 'involuntary hero' arc and fractured bond with Hedron shaped the score

Asked how he approaches a project, Alanko said the scenery usually makes the strongest impression, along with how the main character relates to that scenery, whether through connection or disconnection. He said there are no fixed rules and described the work as a case of guessing how a musical choice will make a listener feel. "It's basically psychological to an extent, really. Trying to play with your brain first, and later on with the player's brain," he told TechRadar Gaming.

Alanko said "human vocals" was a term he and Remedy Entertainment identified as part of Control Resonant's core music aesthetic, which he said offered a whole dimension. The relationship between Dylan and Hedron, described in the interview as a powerful Resonant entity and the antagonist, was the other element that pushed the early writing forward.

He called the pairing between Dylan and Hedron conflicted and said it would be reasonable to call it dysfunctional, adding that this quality supplied a human layer to the setting. "Dylan, being one might call 'an involuntary hero', or 'anti-hero' even, provided a lot of writing material," Alanko said. He described Dylan's path from what he called a blank, soulless and partially mindless being to someone willing to sacrifice himself to find his sister as material for a dozen stories, and noted that the siblings' relationship has not been exactly peaceful.

To keep his own thinking straight, Alanko said he wrote descriptive terms on sticky notes at the start of development. For Dylan, those notes read "rough," "larger than life," "gut-wrenching," "human, yet inhuman" and "organic." For Hedron, he wrote "strangely familiar yet frightening," "clangorous," "structured and sequenced," and "mathematical and procedural."

Alanko said the word procedural referred to Hedron's appearance rather than to a compositional technique, explaining that it was almost as if Hedron communicated through circular shapes. The interview was published by TechRadar Gaming.

Editor's Summary

Petri Alanko, composer of Control Resonant, told TechRadar Gaming that the game's music draws on its setting, on the "human vocals" approach he developed with Remedy, and on Dylan's conflicted relationship with the entity Hedron. He characterised Dylan as an "involuntary hero" whose arc from a blank, partially mindless state toward self-sacrifice supplied much of the writing material, while Hedron was described through terms such as clangorous and mathematical. The score's direction was set using descriptive notes that contrasted Dylan's organic, gut-wrenching qualities with Hedron's structured, procedural appearance.