After listening to the MoP soundtrack for the 500th time, I think it’s time to listen to something new. Does anybody know what type of music this is? Is it Chinese? Japanese? A certain style of music? I’m curious. I’d love to listen to more
It’s a really long video, but if you skip to 55:08 they talk about the inspiration for the soundtrack. Pretty interesting, because I absolutely loved the music from Mists also.
The kazoo is the best bit of MoP. I wish it would play everywhere in the entire game. I want it in the launcher, I want it on the log-in screen, I want it in loading screens. First time I heard it, I thought it was some weird virus or something, but it’s perfect.
I would suggest it is “asian inspired” but no specific region. IIRC, Lorewalker Cho’s song is no earthly language, but it bears some phonentic resemblance to several eastern languages. Said from the perspective of someone who is not Asian, but watches so much japanese/chinese/thai/korean tv that Netflix is confused as to my main language.
(I love the soundtrack to bits, and it results in my alts getting xp-locked at 90 so’s I can linger in Pandaria some more.)
I wouldn’t know what to call it, either, but I’ve been listening to this compilation a lot and I really like it. It’s got some WoW Pandaria soundtracks alternated with other music that seems to have things in common with it, such as the instruments they use.
Q: What instrumentation did you use for the MoP soundtrack? It sounds very different from what we’ve heard in other World of Warcraft expansions.
A: We supplemented the usual palette of sounds rather than replace it. That stemmed from a conversation I had with Chris Metzen early on; we were looking at all the gorgeous artwork and art direction of Pandaria, and he said, “the artwork is telling us we’re in a different world, a place of wonder, but one that will potentially get conquered by the Alliance and Horde.” He felt that we needed an Asian overlay, but that the soundtrack was also an opportunity to remind us that we’re still in Azeroth. We shouldn’t go so far afield that it doesn’t feel like Warcraft.
So, we kept our usual palette of epic orchestral sounds, but we added some specific Chinese instruments. One is the erhu , which is basically a Chinese fiddle; it’s got 2 strings, and an almost vocal vibrato singing quality. We also added the guzheng , which is like a harp, but it’s long and laid out flat. It’s both strummed and plucked. The third instrument was called the dizi —you know how if you pluck a blade of grass and blow on it, you get that reedy sound? Well, the Dizi has a hole in it with a membrane that vibrates, and so it sounds like a flute, but it has this very buzzy overtone. We also included one more—the pipa , which is more or less the Chinese version of the banjo. Those four instruments, along with Chinese drums, gave us the overlay we needed to have a bit of Asian feel. We also changed the orchestra’s playing style—even when we were using familiar instrumentation, we had a bit more sliding between notes at certain times. In some ways, it’s what Hollywood has told us Asian music sounds like, but some of it’s authentic. Those Chinese instruments were all played by masters.