When you think of space, your mind probably goes to something John Williams composed – maybe the theme from E.T. or one of Star Wars’ big pieces. Films and TV have filled the soundless void with specific styles that shaped the genre, from sweeping orchestral arrangements for epic tales and synth-fueled punk in harder sci-fi stories. Starfield composer Inon Zur wanted something different for Bethesda’s space game, however, and he tasked himself with creating a new kind of soundscape representative of a future that’s not so out of reach. The journey took him on a space odyssey of his own that lasted the better part of a decade and produced one of the more ambitious soundtracks of 2023, and Zur spoke with GLHF about the process of bringing it all to life.
Zur tells GLHF that Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard approached him in 2016 during Starfield’s earliest stages and had just a single idea in mind: He wanted to make a space game that tried answering some of life’s big questions, or failing that, to at least explore them in some meaningful way. That was all Howard had for Zur at the time, but it was enough.
“It was really infatuating,” Zur says. “I was so excited that I went back home, and the next day, I just started writing music. I didn’t know for what yet. He just gave me very general details, and of course, there was no game, so no pictures, no videos – just the idea. I composed about 20 minutes of music, and that actually ended up in the game.”
Starfield’s promise of a more thoughtful take on the genre appealed to Zur, but so did the idea of returning to space in general. Howard’s offer came nearly 20 years after Zur’s last extraterrestrial composition – 2000’s Star Trek: Starfleet Command – and while he composed for blockbuster hits including Dragon Age: Origins, Crysis, and Prince of Persia and received several awards for his work, he says working with space opened exciting new avenues for creation.
“The unknown, the vastness, the mystery, all the emotions space stirs up – it offers such a great opportunity for a composer to treat it in a very cinematic way,” Zur says. “In shooters or even in fantasy RPGs, we’re grounded and walking on Earth, and here, we’re thrown into space and flying out there. It just allows such an amazing opportunity to create new harmonies and soundscapes.”
“Cinematic” gets thrown around a lot as a general descriptor, but Zur said that to him, making something cinematic means imbuing it with emotions that make it “bigger than life.”After the initial rush that produced tracks such as Planetrise and Peaks and Valleys, he started thinking about what it might be like to live in the time and universe Howard described and eventually settled on three overarching emotions for Starfield.
“The first one is the awe, this reality that’s so unbelievable that you cannot really grasp it,” he says. “The second emotion is fear and anxiety, that worry of what’s out there and how you’re going to survive. The fear of the unknown is huge. Along with it comes excitement, though, the opportunity to discover a new world, to see a bright future, and to create a new future for you and for the human race.”
Zur could have drawn on plenty of existing material from films and even novels for inspiration, but he says he wanted to create Starfield’s sound without consciously mirroring any inspiration or aiming for a specific, known style. Bethesda had a few guidelines and collaborated with Zur to refine and tweak what he came up with over the seven years they worked on the soundtrack. However, Zur tells me that Howard gave him the freedom to head in any direction he thought might work.
“I believe that, throughout the years, we hear so much music, and it’s instilled in a composer’s brain,” Zur says. “The difference between a composer and somebody that doesn’t compose music is we know how to take this data that is there, meld it together, and create something out of it. I think that if I had done a lot of research before Starfield, it would limit my creativity a little bit, because then I’d try and get close to this sound or mimic that style.”
“That is, by the way, one of the problems sometimes with films,” he adds. “They are being tagged by the editor, and then the composer feels that they must follow only this.”
Zur says he and the sound team focused on a few central, sometimes conflicting themes to guide these emotions along. The first is traditional orchestrated scores, inspired in part by the so-called space composers – John Williams and A Space Odyssey composer Richard Strauss, for example – but Zur tells me he also looked to synthetic sounds to create different textures. These helped give Starfield a different identity and gave him the tools to tackle what he called one of Starfield’s biggest challenges: making it feel believable.
Most sci-fi stories put you outside the familiar, whether it’s Star Wars and its magic sword wizards and outlandish creatures from distant planets or even E.T., which puts the otherwordly firmly in the center with its star character. Starfield tries something different. It aims to blend the futuristic with the everyday in a bid to make players feel like humans reaching space is a natural next step for the species, and not something out of, well, a sci-fi story. Zur says that since he wanted players to feel grounded in reality, he opted for steady beats and familiar rhythms and thought outside the box for instrumentation.
“Starfield has plenty of combinations when you mash the synthetic elements with the orchestra that creates a very different soundscape, but you hear a third element, a kind of unknown, harsh element that I integrated into the score,” Zur says. “My aim was to create something alien and primitive, so I used a lot of organic instruments for this, rather than synthetic, and processed them in a way that made the sound seem unfamiliar.”
One example Zur gave was recording a traditional bar of cello music, then breaking it down by feeding it into a synthesizer and rebuilding it with another synthesizer that emulated the cello’s sound. He wove these sounds into your routine tasks in Starfield – landing and taking off in your ship, for example, or even just the music that plays as time passes on planets like Jemison – and tells me he thinks these combinations are what give Starfield a unique identity.
Creating these soundscapes was far from the only challenge Zur encountered over his seven-year journey with Starfield. Another core part of the game’s personality is the freedom to do whatever you want with whomever you want. You can be a space pirate and, simultaneously, join the Marines tasked with eradicating those same hives of villainy. There’s no judgment and no blocked path, which meant Zur had to approach the score for each faction in a careful manner that supported your particular fantasy.
“There are no bad guys or good guys in Starfield,” he says. “Each faction thinks in a different way, and sometimes these philosophies collide and create tension. Obviously, if you play one role, then you will have to eventually fight your opposite, but it’s not making them bad or you good. It’s just different, and the music is trying to tell you that story.”
Balance is what Zur says he’s most proud of with Starfield, and not just with the factions.
“Starfield has a good balance between accessibility for the listener, so the listener could hear the music and feel drawn into it right away, and originality in the harmonies and soundscapes. Overall, I think that we – Mark Lampert, the legendary head of audio at Bethesda, and Todd Howard – really achieved the best balance, and I think this is what makes the score for Starfield special. Somebody could like it, somebody maybe wouldn’t care for it so much, but inside the game, it drives you to the right place. It just works.”
You can purchase the Starfield soundtrack on Steam and the Apple Music Store. Inon Zur will also be giving a talk about bringing Starfield’s sounds to life during L.A. Comic Con on Dec. 2, 2023.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF