Art by Matthew Fleming.
This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.
Since its official release in 2011, Minecraft has grown from a small, experimental indie game into the best-selling video game of all time. Today, the game's haunting music and quirky sound effects are just as iconic as its blocky visuals. In this episode, composer and sound designer Daniel Rosenfeld (also known as C418) unpacks how he created the original music and sounds for the game.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Blip Master by Jerry Lacey
Key by C418
Haggstrom by C418
Danny by C418
Wet Hands by C418
Équinoxe by C418
Haunt Muskie by C418
Chris by C418
Minecraft by C418
Subwoofer Lullaby by C418
Mice on Venus by C418
Thirteen by C418
Mellohi by C418
Living Mice by C418
Blind Spots by C418
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View Transcript ▶︎
[music in]
Dallas: Can you hear me?
Dallas’s Daughter: Yep.
Dallas: What game are you playing right now?
Dallas’s Daughter: Minecraft.
This is my seven year old daughter.
Dallas: What does Minecraft look like?
Dallas’s Daughter: It looks like a world of squares… It is a world of squares totally.
She LOVES Minecraft.
Dallas: Why do kids like it so much?
Dallas’s Daughter: Just because you can build so many things, create, even decorate a house if you’d like.
Dallas: How often do you play it? Dallas’s Daughter: Really often. A lot often.
Dallas: Is there anything about Minecraft that you think everybody should know about?
Dallas’s Daughter: I think they should know about that it’s really fun. If you’re creative you can create so much and it won’t make any messes.
Do you think I should do a whole podcast episode on Minecraft?
Dallas’s Daughter: Yeah!
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... I'm Dallas Taylor.
[music out]
[music in]
The story of Minecraft goes back to 2009, when an indie game designer named Markus Persson posted a short video of his new project on Youtube. The video was called “Cave game tech test.” It showed computerized blocks of green grass and grey rocks, with a blue sky up above. Soon after, Markus changed the name from “Cave Game” to “Minecraft,” and started posting test versions of the game online.
A few years later, in 2011, the full version of Minecraft was released, and the game exploded in popularity. Just 3 years after this release, Microsoft bought Minecraft for two and a half BILLION dollars. It’s now the best selling video game of all time.
The reason Minecraft is SO successful is because you can CHOOSE how you want to play. It’s an open world “sandbox game,” which means you can build and shape the world around you with no rules, and no goals—almost like virtual Legos.
Dallas’s Daughter: Really, I like to play it just doing my own thing.
In Survival Mode, you collect materials like wood and stone to make buildings, all the while fighting off monsters, and finding food to eat. In Creative Mode, you’re invincible, and you have unlimited resources to build whatever you can think of. And this is how my daughter likes to play.
Dallas: Do you play in Survival mode or in Creative mode?
Dallas’s Daughter: Creative.
Dallas: Why creative?
Dallas’s Daughter: Because you can build stuff and take a long time to do it.
Dallas: What kind of stuff do you like building?
Dallas’s Daughter: Houses and villages. Oh, and one time I built Disneyland, but I'm still building it. It's really cool.
[music out]
Minecraft players have made all kinds of incredible things. They’ve recreated King’s Landing from Game of Thrones, they’ve built The Shire and the Starship Enterprise... At one point, electrical circuits were added to the game, and players started building functional calculators, and even simple computers. The best part is, if these creators have made their worlds public, anyone can explore them.
Dallas’s Daughter: I love exploring.
Dallas’s Daughter: It's my favorite thing.
[music in]
Over the years, the sound of Minecraft has become instantly recognizable. And amazingly, almost ALL of the original music AND sound effects were made by one person.
Daniel: My name is Daniel Rosenfeld. I go under the moniker C418 as the music artist, and I write music, and I do sound design as well.
All the music in this episode is Daniel’s Minecraft score.
Daniel: I guess as a teenager, I realized that that is what I enjoyed doing, even though I wasn't good at it, but I kept doing it over and over again.
In the early 2000s, lots of indie game designers used an online forum called The Independent Games Source.
Daniel: It's not as big anymore today, but back then it was the breeding ground of the first generation big indies. And I hung out on that community and Markus also frequented there, and we talked there a lot.
Markus told Daniel he was working on a new sandbox game.
Daniel: And the thing he was making, obviously, was Minecraft.
Markus had heard some of Daniel’s music, and wanted him to score his upcoming game.
Daniel: He liked the music I was making, so we started collaborating.
[music out]
From the beginning, Markus gave Daniel a lot of freedom.
Daniel: I guess Markus gave me complete free reign. He either didn't know how to limit me, or was completely fine with what I was doing.
*Before he could start composing, Daniel had to figure out what STYLE this new game needed.**
Daniel: At the time video games, especially in our branch, the indie games, we were kinda stuck in Chiptune.
Chiptune is music that sounds like it came from an old school video game.
[music in]
Back in the early days of video games, the music wasn’t made with pre recorded instruments. Instead, both the music and sound effects were produced in real time by the sound chip inside the system. The console itself was almost like a player piano, reading instructions from the game, and playing the sounds from its sound chip. That’s what makes this music sound so distinct.
Even today, chiptune-style music is used in indie games that are going for a retro vibe. But Daniel felt like Minecraft needed something different.
[music abruptly bitcrushes out]
Daniel: My biggest inspiration was a game at the time called Dwarf Fortress… it was honestly quite a hideous game.
Visually, Dwarf Fortress is about as simple as it gets. The screen is a basic, overhead map, made of text characters on a black background.
[Music clip: Dwarf Fortress music fade in]
Daniel: But The main developer, he plays flamenco, so he put flamenco music in it.
Daniel: So you see this hideous DOS window and flamenco music at the same time, and the contrast was so jarring to me, that I was like maybe there's more to it and I want to stick around.
[music out]
Using Dwarf Fortress as inspiration, Daniel began composing the music of Minecraft.
[music in]
Daniel: I wanted to have something that at first sight doesn't make sense to the visuals. Like that kind of makes people stop in their track and go, "Why is this music the way it is? Why is it so sad? What is going on here?"
Among the square blocky landscapes, or in the depths of a monster-filled cave, the music that plays is… really beautiful.
Dallas’s Daughter: The music’s really pretty. Like when the sun is going down, it’s just so pretty. Mommy thinks it’s pretty, too.
Daniel: I wanted to make something that is pretty, in contrast to it. So like I wanted to do something organic and orchestral, I guess... a lot of piano.
This music was totally different from what he was used to writing.
Daniel: I, at the time, wrote very eclectic electronic music. I did not consider myself a person that can write calm ambient music.
Daniel: People always tell me the music sounds like Erik Satie [sfx] or Brian Eno [sfx]. And at the time, I never listened to any of that.
Instead, he let the game guide the music.
[music out]
[music in]
Daniel: it was literally just you and this big, empty, desolate environment that had nothing except blocks. And it felt very melancholic to me. Like it felt lonely.
[music out]
[music in]
As the game grew and evolved, so did the sound.
Daniel: It was ironic that immediately after I finished the music, and we put it in the game, we put in multiplayer.
As my daughter can tell you, playing in multiplayer can get really hectic.
Dallas’s Daughter: I like it by myself the most because I don't want other people destroying my world. You mean people like your little sister?
Dallas’s Daughter: Yeah.
Dallas’s Daughter: She is four and a half. Almost five.
Dallas’s Younger Daughter: I don’t know how to build.
This is her little sister.
Dallas’s Younger Daughter: I like playing it. But I just don’t know how to build and stuff.
Daniel: Suddenly the game became this messy, loud, everyone throwing colorful blocks everywhere, universe, which is why eventually I also made what I called the Creative music.
Daniel: I made the music a little bit less melancholic, a little bit more optimistic... Actually, it's the only music that is quite percussive, even.
[music out]
There were some challenges that came from the game’s technical limitations. For instance, because of the way it was coded, the original game couldn’t include music that was triggered by a player’s location. So Daniel couldn’t make a specific song for the caves, and another one for the mountains.
Daniel: I have this whole bunch of music, but we have no way of knowing what a player is doing. If he's underground, overground. We have no idea.
Daniel: We had weird issues where you couldn't have two pieces of music running at the same time, because the sound engine would just crash.
Daniel: It felt really limiting, and like I had to come up with lots of ways to still make the game sound interesting enough.
In the end, Daniel turned these limitations into an asset.
Daniel: I just decided, “Well, if it is the way it is, let's just make it weird, and embrace the weirdness.”
[music in]
Embracing the weirdness, Daniel made a radical decision.
Daniel: So I decided how about we just let the music play randomly and see what happens?
At sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight, the game will start a random track. To make it even less predictable, that track can sometimes be silence.
Daniel: I specifically requested lots of silence.
[music out]
Daniel: The original idea was like people are just going to get tired if it plays over and over again.
Daniel: The silence even itself is randomized. So there's a random amount of time before a new song could play.
Daniel: It was a free for all for music, and it's shocking that it worked.
But this unusual approach didn’t just work, it became a defining characteristic of the game.
Daniel: When the music comes in, for some reason it seems like a big moment to the player. I hear so many stories of like somebody saying like, "Oh, I was just digging dirt [sfx: Minecraft digging], and then the music came in, and I was feeling so emotional."
[music in]
Dallas: How does the music make you feel?
Dallas’s Daughter: Sometimes sad, sometimes happy. It's really cool music.
Of course, music is only one side of the sound of Minecraft. To immerse players in this strange, blocky world, Daniel had to make convincing sound effects. But making sounds for all of the actions and creatures turned out to be even harder than making the music. That’s coming up, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in]
In just ten years, Minecraft grew from a small, experimental indie game into the best selling videogame of all time. In the game, players dig, build, fight and explore in a blocky, colorful landscape. As they do, gentle music fades in and out, seemingly at random.
The person who made all of that music is Daniel Rosenfeld, whose musical name is C418. But on top of the music, Daniel also made the game’s original sound effects. [sfx: old Minecraft sounds] from here + here]
[music out]
When Daniel started working on these sounds, he had virtually no experience as a sound designer.
Daniel: I was a complete amateur in sound design, obviously.
Daniel: I felt so insecure about my abilities of being a good sound designer, because I was not.
Daniel also didn't have the tools that professionals do.
Daniel: I know that professional sound designers, they don't do all their sounds on their own. They get libraries, and they use the sound libraries in tandem with making their own sound effects to layer stuff, and it makes it sound great.
[music in]
At the time, Daniel couldn’t afford a sound effects library. So, he downloaded sounds from a website called freesound dot org.
Daniel: We used freesound.org. And then like as time went on, I replaced more and more of the sound effects with my own creations.
Just like he had done with music, Daniel figured things out as he went along.
Daniel: So you can imagine me, in my hometown, where snow is still a thing, jumping into like big wads of snow [sfx] and just like holding a microphone as I'm doing that, to get snow sound effects.
It turns out, there’s a much easier way to get a good snow sound, using a bag of corn starch...
Daniel: You just scrunch it [sfx], and that sounds much more like snow than actual real snow.
[music out]
Some of these sounds took a lot of refining.
Daniel: Originally, we had footstep sounds from Freesound. And they were awful footstep sounds [sfx: poorly recorded footsteps]. Walking on grass sounded like eating cheerios [sfx]. It was terrible.
But Daniel and lead developer Markus Persson found a better way to use this sound.
Daniel: What Markus did to signify the “You're digging now” effect is that whenever you dig something, he made the footstep sound play fast and like in repetition, like crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. [sfx: Minecraft digging] And that was satisfying, that was really satisfying.
Daniel: And the footsteps I replaced with something that was more footsteppy [sfx].
[music in]
Of course, the game’s creatures also needed sounds. [sfx: Game creature SFX]
Dallas: What is your favorite animal in Minecraft?
Dallas’s Daughter: Well, mostly chickens are my favorite animal.
Dallas: Why?
Dallas’s Daughter: Because you can just leash them, and you can fly with them.
Dallas: Oh, there's a chicken. Right there.
Dallas’s Daughter: Yeah, but how bout I find a leash then I'll leash it up.
Dallas: So you're putting a leash on a chicken?
Dallas’s Daughter: Yeah, that's what you're able to do in Minecraft.
Dallas: Wow.
Aside from chickens, there are also pigs... [sfx: Minecraft pig ] horses… [sfx: Minecraft horse]...
Dallas’s Daughter: Cows [sfx: Minecraft cows], llamas. See, he's a llama. [sfx: Minecraft llama]
[music out]
Most of these sounds are just recordings of the actual animals, pulled from a free sound library. But for some of them, real life was just a little too real.
Daniel: Cows are very screechy creatures that go ehhh [sfx] And finding just a generic moo is almost impossible. So I had to do a lot of pitching and like making it nice and fiddling it, so that it sounds like a generic cow that you think a cow sounds like. [sfx: Minecraft cows]
Some animals were more abstract.
Daniel: I remember the spider sound effects [sfx: Minecraft spider]. I originally was like what do spiders sound like? They don't sound like anything, do they? But as it turns out there are screeching spiders.
Camel spiders—which are not actually spiders—are native to the MIddle East. When they’re threatened they make this scratchy, rattling noise. [sfx: Camel spider screech] Daniel wanted to use this sound in Minecraft, but had no way of recording an actual camel spider.
Daniel: In middle of nowhere Germany, I don't think you can find screeching spiders.
So, Daniel made his own sound.
[sfx: Minecraft spider] Daniel: That’s a water hose. I took a water hose and I just put it in a synthesizer and pitched it around. [sfx: Minecraft spider]
In Survival mode, spiders and other enemies can make the game pretty tense.
Dallas’s Daughter: Really scary. Really, really scary. Some monsters come out and get you.
Dallas: Do they sound scary?
Dallas’s Daughter: Really scary. And a Creeper could blow up to get you and you would D-I-E.
Creepers are one of the most feared enemies in the game. If you’re not careful, one of these green monsters might [sfx: Minecraft creeper] sneak up on you and blow itself up, taking both you and your buildings with it. [sfx: creeper explosion]
Daniel: So I didn't have explosion sounds, but the thing that you can get very easily on the internet is gunshot sounds [sfx: Gunshot]. So it's just pitched down gunshots. [sfx: Minecraft creeper explosion]
The game also includes monsters that are more familiar, like zombies.
Daniel: I remember doing the zombie sound. I had a horrible flu. My throat was shot, and I was like, “This is the perfect occasion to make zombie sounds.” So I just gurgled into a microphone [sfx: Minecraft zombie].
Daniel also used his voice for the villagers who inhabit the strange, isolated towns.
Dallas’s Daughter: All they go is “Hmm hmm hmm.”
Daniel: I think some sound effects got lost with the villagers, because I originally did the "eh" sounds [sfx: Minecraft villager], but then I also made very contrasting sound effects for the children villagers. They were like, "Hahahaha." Like screechy little kids. And I'm kind of bummed that that never got into the game, because like what they put in the game ultimately was just the “eh” but pitched up, [sfx: Minecraft villager child] which was really bizarre for little children. Like “eeeh.”
To add some ambiance to the game, he put in a few other sonic details.
Daniel: So the way the game works is that if there's a block that has the brightness of zero, which means complete darkness, monsters could spawn from that block. So I created a little bit of a warning sound, which is like little spooky effects that I did with my synthesizer. [sfx: Minecraft Spooky ambience] And they would just randomly play if there's a block with zero brightness nearby. For years and years, people don't know why those creepy sounds were playing.
Daniel: It added like a sense of spookiness to this very innocent game.
Daniel also worked out a way for players to choose their own music, though they had to work for it.
[music in]
Daniel: I came up with the idea of being able to collect music.
Daniel: When we started expanding on the caves and whatnot, I wanted the player like hearing creepy sounds, and if they get closer to the creepy sounds, they realize it's actually a record player, just playing a vinyl, and they can just turn it off. [music hard out] That was the original idea.
That idea ended up being too hard to program, but players can still find music to play in jukeboxes. Every disc you find plays a strange tune.
[music in]
Daniel: I was very particular in the writing of those discs. I wanted them to sound scrappy and kind of stupid. Like a bit amateurish in a way.
Daniel: I used an instrument called the Mellotron, which is the original sampler, which is this really weird piano, where you hit a key and a tape would run, and it's a looping tape, so it loops one instrument.
Daniel: I used that instrument extensively to have this weird, wobbly feeling to it
Daniel: That's what I wanted to have, this weird, fun, scrappy. This is the music that people in the Minecraft universe would listen to.
[music out]
Today, the world of Minecraft is still growing. These days, a team under Microsoft creates the sounds and music for the game. Of course, compared to Daniel, Microsoft has almost endless resources and experience. Fortunately, they’ve stayed true to the original sound. Most of Daniel’s music and sound design is still there. The new sounds, like the pandas [sfx], dolphins [sfx], and Piglins [sfx], all fit right in, as if Daniel made them himself.
[music in]
As the game has grown over the years, Daniel’s impact has grown, too.
Daniel: I get emails daily now, maybe like five emails, 10 emails per day. People that tell me these stories of how emotional the music makes them, and like how it reminds them of school, or a deceased friend. A lot of really emotional stories, and this has been happening for the past 10 years now.
For him, Minecraft’s popularity is still a bit of a shock.
Daniel: Sometimes I have these pangs of like “Wait, but this game is scrappy. Nobody would actually buy this, right?” But no, everyone bought it.
Daniel: I like to say that trying to imagine the impact of Minecraft is like trying to visualize the distance between the earth and the moon, and like trying to figure out what that looks like. I just blank out. I just have no emotions, because it's too much. I can't handle it.
Despite his success, Daniel is still critical of his work.
Daniel: I seem to be never happy about whatever I do. But I never got any criticism.
Daniel: This is a problem that I'm somehow facing all of my life. Like talking to other composers, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I worked on project X and they just always shut down my music, and I had to do it over and over again." And I never encountered that myself, so now I'm freaked out. “Am I doing something too right? Why is nobody complaining about what I'm doing?”
But even though he tends to overanalyze, when Daniel’s making music, it all melts away.
Daniel: Making music it's my private Zen garden.
Daniel: When I write music, everything is okay. Nothing else has ever given me the feeling of… “I'm okay, I'm charge of this, my life is okay.”
Daniel: I tried a lot of things in my life, and nothing ever clicked in the way writing music has, to, I guess, shut my noisy brain down for a short while.
Today, millions of us can enjoy what Daniel’s noisy brain came up with.
Dallas’s Daughter: I leashed up the chicken now.
Or, put a leash on a chicken...
Dallas’s Daughter: When they go up, they will start flying with me.
Dallas’s Daughter: And when I let go, the chicken will safely come down. Bye.
[music out]
[music in]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound amazing. Hear more by following Defacto Sound on Instagram.
This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was story edited by Casey Emmerling, it was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Jai Berger.
Thanks to our guest Daniel Rosenfeld. ALL of the score music in this episode was written for Minecraft by him, as C418. You can stream Daniel’s music on Spotify, or even better; go buy one of his wonderful albums on Bandcamp. It’s really great music to study or work to.
Finally, what’s the next iconic video game or video game sound that you think we should cover? You can tell us on Facebook, Twitter, on our subreddit, or by writing hi@20k.org.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
