Just when you thought you understood it all.

http://youtu.be/keEJUfuDDQE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVv19TCBifQ

The Games Radar video article.

Seems that they're the same lyrics, different vocalists.

It's the same song.

That's actually really fucking creepy. And incredible.

Kind of crazy actually, wonder how that came across in development and what they felt it added to the game. Something you are just barely aware of when playing the game but not enough to actually have meaning as a song, just ambiance.

I wouldn't read too much into it. Most likely they just found that the sound of singing slowed way down was particularly unsettling in the right ways for what they were going for. Sound designers go in for all sorts of crazy stuff like that. Sometimes you just don't realize what you need is the sound of a jar of nails falling on a hacksaw suspended between two guitars until you try it.

So here's what I'm hearing (the 'xxxx' means something is there but I'm not sure what);

"xxxx time's starting to catch up with us."

"too late time's finally starting to catch up to us."

"today time's falling to xxxx to us."

Or some combination of those lines. That's fucking neat. I don't know if it was intentional or not. But it is really neat.

Yep. It may have meaning or it could just be a sound guy wanting an ominous sound and used some slowed down music to achieve it.

Isn't this just the same sort of thing they did in Inception? Slow the music waaay the hell down to get a weird effect in the background? Hardly seems all that mind blowing.

@endaround said:

Pretty much. I actually use a capellas slowed down far beyond being intelligible (Enya's a pretty good example) and then chopped up into the most effective bits as ambience a lot of the time. Frequently by the end it's so mangled that even sped up it doesn't sound like a cohesive song any more, but this just strikes me as a sound designer using that trick (which isn't a particularly new one) and just being happy with how it sounded without even having to chop it up.

There's definitely something fitting about it in a game so obsessed with time shifting and such, though.

It sounds backwards to me. Has anyone tried reversing it?