The sound of a building that is awake

Every room in the game is built from a reference shoot. The stairwell was the last one we recorded, mostly because nobody wanted to stand in it after midnight.

The hum is real. It sits just under the noise floor of the recorder, around 52Hz, and it changes when you move between floors. We could not find a source for it in the building.

So it became the spine of the audio design. When the player is calm, the hum is there but quiet. When the story tightens, we do not add music, we add harmonics of that same hum until the room feels wrong.

The upshot is a soundtrack with almost no melody in it. If you notice the music, we have failed.