Matthew Chastney is a British composer and producer, releasing music as ‘The Dreamless Sleep’ and creating soundtracks for film, games, trailers and other media projects. Matthew is a graduate from The Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, United Kingdom.

The visuals of Tin Hearts have a hand crafted and organic style, and I wanted the music to convey that as well by using the detail that comes with small ensembles and soloists. E.g string quartet, solo woodwinds, solo piano etc. Like the toys in Tin Hearts, small things can create a big result

The narrative covers an array of emotions and spans many years, the score needed to also have this sense of development and progression. The instrumentation and harmonic language builds and morphs as the player progresses through the four acts of the game.

Act 1 takes place in the attic where Albert works on his creations. The environment has a lot of wooden elements, and the music in this act leans heavily towards string quartet and piano.

Act 3 takes place in the basement and the focus shifts to electrical and steam powered machines, the strings and piano are no longer to be found and instead clarinets, vibraphones and metallic percussion becomes featured. As the player descends further and further into the basement levels the music becomes more and more electronic, as the organic instrumentation gradually fades away.

Creating music for the gameplay was a unique challenge in that the player is in control of the pace of gameplay by using rewinding, fast forwarding or pausing time controls. If someone played at a slow pace with a lot of consideration towards planning how to complete a puzzle, the music shouldn't feel like it's pressuring them to proceed in any way, but at the same time the music still needed to feel engaging. Also there are certain moments in the game where the music would need to step up and add tension.

The score features musicians from all over the world, and all of their parts were recorded remotely at their home studios.

Most of the game has a chamber music sized instrumentation, or even just a string quartet, then it shifts to the bigger orchestral style sound towards the final act.