In an important battle in the role-playing game Phantom Blade Zero, the entire screen is awash with an oppressive blood-red hue. Players hold their breath, grip their controllers, and brace for a traditional wuxia duel.
But what they hear is not a classical Chinese melody. Instead, an erhu — capable of sounding "tender as water" — is fed through a guitar amp, distorted into a piercing "horse neigh" that crashes into a heavy metal rhythm.
The man behind the score is Bo Caisheng, music director of Phantom Blade Zero. The game was released on Oct 29.
For this battle, Bo combined traditional Chinese instruments with Western musical techniques to create a sound that deliberately defies familiar categories — "something mysterious and powerful that players have never heard before", as he put it.
"Chinese music in the past often made you feel as if you were in an ancient Chinese village," Bo said. "But with Phantom Blade Zero, I wanted to imagine a different direction for Chinese music — something more like Shanghai, a thriving metropolis of neon lights and skyscrapers, yet still unmistakably Chinese."
In this "cyber Shanghai", Chinese elements remain dominant, but intertwine with modern pop music.
"R&B, hip-hop, trap, electronic music — they all work surprisingly well with Chinese musical elements," Bo said.
But that doesn't simply mean layering traditional instruments over contemporary beats. Bo wants to push the instruments themselves into unfamiliar territory through what he describes as their "bipolarity": the capacity of a single instrument to embody radically different sounds and emotions.
For example, the xun, an ancient Chinese wind instrument, takes on two strikingly different roles in the game: at one extreme, its sound evokes the "crying" of a wuxia tragedy; at the other, it conveys a source of immense power.
With the pipa, a Chinese lute known for its fierce, martial character as heard in works such as Ambush from Ten Sides, Bo goes in the opposite direction, playing only harmonics to give it a calm, ethereal quality associated with Discordance, an otherworldly realm where time stands still and space is distorted.
The Mongolian traditional art of khoomei, or throat singing, undergoes a similar transformation. While retaining its traditional wildness, Bo also uses it to evoke megalophobia — a fear of immense objects or spaces.
"I want to explore what other possibilities there are for Chinese instruments and musical elements," Bo said.
That search has even taken him beyond instruments commonly played today. He found an artist specializing in instrument restoration and consulted historical texts from the Tang Dynasty as well as Yueshu (Treatise on Music), compiled by Song Dynasty scholar Chen Yang, to reconstruct rarely seen instruments such as the yazheng (an ancient bowed zither), zhu (an ancient struck string instrument), and se (an ancient 25-string zither).
Then he wrote music for them. "If you bring an instrument back to life but give it no music to play, then it's just an ornament," Bo said.
But for Bo, reinventing the sound of traditional instruments is only part of the project. Rather than treating those sounds as background music or scattered fragments, he wants to make them part of a larger narrative design.
"I try to find every possible way for the music itself to tell the story," he said.
One way he does that is through musical foreshadowing and recurring connections throughout the game.
For example, players will hear many "motifs" — short musical phrases that may appear in cutscenes or be woven into intense boss battles. When they hear a certain phrase, they might wonder, "Have I heard this somewhere before?" The same element or familiar melody can recur in altered forms as the story advances. By the finale, all these musical threads can converge and be fully realized.
Unlike a film score, however, this kind of musical storytelling cannot simply be locked to a predetermined sequence of visuals. It has to respond to the player's actions.
"Film is more fixed. You can write the music around the rise and fall of the images," Bo said. "But in a game, there's no way to predict what a player will do in a scene or how long they'll stay there. Players have much more freedom, so the music must adapt accordingly."
One solution is the loop — music designed to cycle while sustaining the emotional state of a scene even when different players remain there for different lengths of time.
"Music is alive in games because the player is alive," Bo said. "Good game music constantly responds to what the player does. I think that points to one possible future for music composition."
In an era when AI music generation is becoming increasingly common, Bo believes technology is neither the answer nor the enemy.
Although he still insists on "handcrafting" every note, he also uses AI tools for post-production tasks, such as removing unwanted noise from recordings.
"People tend to treat craftsmanship or purely handmade work as sacred. But to me, the most sacred part of music is expression," he said.
For Bo, technology, historical instruments and musical genres are tools for that expression. What matters is what he can make them say in a contemporary musical language.
"I want to bring traditional Chinese instruments to life through a modern aesthetic and find a new place for them in today's world — to discover what else they can become," he said.
Contact the writers at xuwanyang@i21st.cn
