C418 Minecraft Soundtrack

Daniel Rosenfeld better known as C418, is a german musician who is focusing in the genres of ambient, IDM, experimental, and electronic.

hes mostly known as the creator for the soundtrack of the Mojang video game Minecraft is composed by The game's soundtrack is instrumental relaxing music.
in 2017 the C418 claimed that the music is far from done,

While you can play it as a survival game, the real joy of Minecraft is in finding yourself in a unique world and trying to develop your own place in it. As a result, the music in the game takes a backseat and primarily works to enhance experience, and so it never gets old.

to the music there are alot of points of view different from each other but for me the music is nostalgic, almost sad, because it gives this sense of loneliness , that even with villaggers and animals, the player still needs verbal interacion, as the music was created before multiplayer

It was his brother, Harry Rosenfeld, who introduced him to music composition through Ableton Live,Daniel got his name from  His brother was also known as C818, from which he chose the name C418, claiming that the name is "really cryptic and doesn't actually mean anything".
 he's focusing in the genres of ambient, IDM, experimental, and electronic.

 interview:

Did it take a while to figure out what the music for Minecraft should be?

Not necessarily, because even at the very beginning of the game it was a super lonely experience. I kind of like that. Back then they didn’t have the fancy shadows and the geometric shapes. It was kind of... I would call it an ugly game. When I was starting to do the music, I had just recently played another ugly game called Dwarf Fortress. One of the developers was a flamenco player, so he decided to put that in the game. So when you start the game, you have this really odd contrast between flamenco and an ugly DOS window. I wanted to do something similar with Minecraft. I think it really helped, because people have this feeling of “Maybe there’s more to this, I have to play a little bit more.”

You also had the limitations of the sound engine to deal with?

Yeah. A couple years ago if you had two song files at once, it would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine.

Did you try to take advantage of those limitations?

Yeah. One of the things that we really can’t figure out is what a player is doing. Is the player in a cave? Or is he in a house that he made himself? So I decided to basically have music that doesn’t really explain anything. It doesn’t say if it’s battle or if it’s night... Generic music, but still kind of unique and different. Then we had that music randomly playing 15 to 20 minutes in, where there’s nothing else playing. If something significant is happening, the player remembers the music associated with it. If the music is playing and nothing really is happening, they’ll just accept it. Originally I was like, “You should probably play the music as few times as possible because it’s probably going to be annoying.” And it turns out the pause in between actually helps. It has a very weird emotional effect, I think.

Can you talk a bit about the sounds of the game?

Early on, I wasn’t that knowledgeable about Foley. I think I’m sort of good at it now, but it’s a little bit late. Now, if I were to replace everything, people would hate me because the sounds are iconic now. Foley is weird because it’s all trial and error. You just make a sound and eventually you go, “Oh my God, that’s it! Get the microphone!” There’s no set way of doing anything at all.What I’ve always found so fascinating about it is how doing something completely unrelated to the sound is often a better version of that sound.

 If you walk on grass, there’s barely any sound that your feet make. It’s better to take a VHS tape and just smash your hand in it. That sounds perfectly like grass.

-Flagstaffocal73