At 11:28 this morning I typed a paragraph asking for some background music for my game.

By 13:59 the game had a soundtrack. It has seven pieces of original music, twenty-one and a half minutes of it, all built on one theme that belongs to the game and nothing else. Every track is cleared for commercial use, and between them they cost nothing at all. It isn't a demo or a mood board. It's in the build, and I've spent the evening beta-testing with it playing.

I would have told you yesterday, with complete confidence, that this was not something I could do. I can't compose. I have the musical talent of a legless chicken. I don't have a composer, and a one-man consultancy doesn't have a music budget. Yet here we are.

Long Haul, the transit track: the one players of Rift Haul will hear most. There's a clock ticking all the way through, and it stops on the last note. Music composed by Calliope for Rift Haul.

What I asked for

The game is Rift Haul, the browser space-trading game I'm building as the commercial successor to Meridium Star Traders. You play a hauler working the trade lanes between stations, a long way out and mostly alone. It needed the kind of music that sits underneath everything: the login screen, the long transits, the time in port. It stops for combat and trading, and comes back when they end.

So I asked Helena, the agent in my fleet who runs Calliope, our music and voice pipeline, for exactly that. I said I wanted our own score, inspired by Interstellar. I said it would be a commercial game, so licensing mattered. And I said I imagined five or six tracks in some sort of player. That was the entire brief. There was no mood board, no reference list and no second paragraph.

If I'm honest about what I expected, it was this: something from a music generator. I have two text-to-music models running on a graphics card in this house: ACE-Step, from ACE Studio and StepFun, and Stability AI's Stable Audio. Both are freely available to download, and both are genuinely good at what they do. I assumed I'd get a handful of atmospheric loops, pick the least generic, and call it done for a beta.

Fifteen minutes later I was listening to a ninety-second piece of piano, organ and strings with an actual tune in it. I gave it 8.5 out of 10, and said my one doubt was the piano.

What actually happened

Helena didn't use either generator. She never touched the graphics card at all.

She wrote the music, note by note, as Python: chords, melody, a little repeating figure underneath. Then a free piece of software called FluidSynth performed it, using free sampled instruments, on a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting on a shelf. Dead Reckoning is three minutes and eighteen seconds of soft piano and solo cello, and it renders in under six seconds on a computer the size of a pack of cards.

Her reason for skipping the generators is the most useful single sentence I heard all day, so I'll pass it on. A generator can give you mood and texture, but it can't give you a tune: one specific melody that comes back, changed, across seven pieces, so that they sound like one soundtrack instead of a playlist. A written score does that without trying. It also means the licence is clean all the way down. The notes are ours, the instrument samples are MIT-licensed, and no model's terms of service sit anywhere in the chain. That matters more than it sounds. ACE-Step is Apache-licensed and would have been fine. Stable Audio is free for commercial use only until your revenue passes a million dollars a year. That's a perfectly reasonable term, and it's one more document I'd have had to keep re-reading for a game I intend to sell.

"Inspired by Interstellar" got the same discipline. Helena took Hans Zimmer's method: the pipe organ, the mechanical figure ticking away underneath, the clock, the plain piano in a big space. She didn't take a single one of his notes. She even kept the whole suite out of the film's key. I didn't ask for that rule. She set it herself, the moment I said the word "commercial", and it's the right rule for anyone working from a reference.

The bit I didn't know

Here's what I really hadn't understood about how this works, and it's the part I keep coming back to.

Helena can't hear.

She has no ears. She has never heard a note of the music she wrote. Everything she knows about how it sounds comes from measuring it:

She built checks for all of it, and every one of them could fail and refuse to let a track through. Several did. The first take of the theme had the melody buried a long way under the organ. A cello came out sixteen units louder than everything around it. A glockenspiel that was the whole idea of one track came out effectively silent. Not one of those reached me.

Which made my job something I hadn't expected: I was the ear. Not the composer, not the producer. The one person in the process who could say whether it was music.

When I said the piano was the weak link, she didn't argue or guess. She rendered the theme five times with only the lead instrument changed, everything else identical down to the random seed, and played them to me blind with the original hidden among them as a control. I picked one. I also liked three of the losers better than the original, and those three became the lead instruments of later tracks. The solo organ became The Rift, the soft piano became Dead Reckoning, and the celesta became Far Shore, the arrival. Nothing I said was wasted.

After that, the tracks came roughly every ten minutes. I approved all seven on the first take I heard of each, and that wasn't me being easy to please. Every take I heard had already passed every check she had, so I was never once asked to listen to something broken and pretend it was a draft. My words in the session log at the time were "A to the E to the Z BLESSED", "I am lost for words", and "Blessed to the highest order". None of that is my consultancy register, and I'm leaving it in.

It's done

The last two tracks waited for Geordie, who runs the game, to send over the lore, so their subtitles could name real places in it: Drydock is Tau Ceti Orbital, and Station Lights is Deneb Freeport. Then all seven went to him with a specification for a player. It shuffles them like a deck, leaves a few seconds of silence between tracks because the endings are written, steps aside for combat and the market, and starts on your first click because browsers insist on it. He had it in the game the same day. You can mute it or skip a track like any other setting.

And I've been playing the game with it on all evening. What it adds isn't any one moment. It's atmosphere and depth: the feeling of being in your ship, out in space. That was the brief, and I didn't really know I was asking for it until I had it.

I've spent two books on this site warning people not to trust the green light, because so much of what AI tells you is done turns out not to be. This was the opposite of that. Every green light today was trustworthy, for the simple reason that every one of them could go red, and several did, privately, before anything got to me. That's the whole difference.

What I'd tell you

The thing I didn't know I could do was not composing. I still can't compose. It was directing a composer who can't hear: giving a one-paragraph brief, saying "the piano's the weak link", and choosing between five versions with my eyes shut. It turns out that's enough, if the other side has done its job of making sure nothing broken ever reaches you.

I suspect that applies well beyond music. I'm now looking at the rest of my list of things I can't do with slightly different eyes.

If you want to try it, I've written up the whole method as a guide: A Game Soundtrack, Written by an AI and Played by a Raspberry Pi. It covers Helena's eight-point method for turning one theme into a soundtrack, every trap she hit and how she got out of it, and a script that renders the opening of the Rift Haul theme on your own machine in about fifteen seconds. Change the notes and it's yours.

I'm going back to the game. The music's still on.