Portal 2: Songs to Test By by Mike Morasky

Review written by BlueMoonMusic

The Portal games, developed by Valve and released in 2007 and 2011 respectively, are one of the pillars of my childhood. Many hours of summer vacation were spent watching my sister play the games until I too played them for myself and fell in love. Inseparable from the games is the lengthy soundtrack, which can be found in a four and a half hour long album titled Portal 2: Songs to Test By. This mega album includes the soundtrack to Portal 1, Portal 2, and Portal 2’s co-op mode. Though the artist of the album is officially dubbed “Aperture Science Psychoacoustic Laboratories,” the actual genius behind Portal’s music is Mike Morasky, who is no stranger to creating iconic game scores. As a composer for Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead among others, Morasky is an expert in not just creating music that is perfectly attuned to the game it’s made for, but also dynamic and interactive.

Before getting into this mind blowing soundtrack, it’s important to have the context of the games. I’ll largely be talking about Portal 2’s music, but it’s important to understand it in context. Portal 1 is a puzzle game about Chell, a test subject forced to complete physics based tests involving a portal-making gun, overseen by a rude and sarcastic robot named Glados. Portal 2 runs under a similar premise but delves into the lore of the characters as well as the company that runs these tests: Aperture Science Laboratories. The story of the portal games is witty, playful, and sad, while also being part of a puzzle game that is genuinely challenging and fun to complete. But when it comes to the games’ soundtrack, especially the second one, the process of completing tests isn’t just mentally satisfying, but musically.

The biggest shame of Portal 2: Songs to Test By, is that the album doesn’t give the listener an accurate idea of how the music actually sounds in game, because that would be impossible. A massive portion of Portal’s music is procedurally generated, building musical themes off of each other as you complete elements of the test in real time. Steps within the test, or even individual objects and testing elements, have musical themes associated with them, adding onto each other the further you get and pushing the player to finish the composition. The player isn’t just listening to the music as they play, but composing it in real time. This means that within the game, no composition is ever the same as it is on the album. Putting these tracks on an album loses this interactivity element, compiling a near infinite amount of music into individual songs. One of the best examples is “Triple Laser Phaser.” This song is built up of only three elements: a bass synth, a higher pitched synth, and an off beat harmony synth. Listening to the song on its own, it just sounds like these three elements playing together for four minutes, but it’s completely different in game. In the test chamber that this song is for, there are three lasers that players have to activate to open the door and move on, and each laser is tied to one of the three musical themes in the piece. The test is completely silent when you start, but as you activate each of the lasers, you add a musical theme one by one until you have the full song as you finish the test, getting the version you hear on the album. But it goes even deeper than this. The way the sound is mixed in the game, the music is dynamic based on how close you are to the source of the sound. “Hard Sunshine” is a track that serves as the musical theme for hard light bridges, bridges made of pure sunlight players can walk on. But this track only plays when close to the light bridges. Walk up to the bridge, it gets louder. Crouch down while standing on a bridge, it gets louder still. One of my favorite tracks in the whole game is “The Friendly Faith Plate,” the motif for a launch pad that flings players in the air called aerial faith plates. Just like the light bridges, this song only plays when actually jumping on a faith plate in game. It is as if the in-game objects are emanating the music, giving a diegetic feel to the tracks. I used to spend so many unnecessary hours in tests while playing this game, messing around with the test elements so I could hear the music associated with them. Each track is perfectly composed to reflect what it represents; whether it’s a laser or a slime that makes you bounce, the sounds perfectly match.

So how was Mike Morasky able to create these pieces? The music in the portal games have a particular sound that goes beyond just synth, and it turns out, Morasky intentionally went through some extra steps to achieve this. When creating the soundtracks of Portal 1 and 2, he did it with the express purpose of making it sound like a computer had written the music. He used chiptunes, incorporated odd rhythms, and resampled any real voices to make them sound robotic. Described as saying he wanted it to feel like an “old future through a new lens,” the computerized sounds of the music lends itself perfectly to the setting of the game, feeling both futuristic and lonely at the same time. Throughout the games, the player character is the only human physically present, accompanied only by robots and disembodied voices. Each test chamber, while individual, is still within the same complex and share design motifs. There is very little opportunity for character themes or location-based tracks, making the composing process seem like an uphill battle for Morasky. This is why he turned to unconventional methods: giving objects and testing tools the musical motifs, creating a soundtrack that was unique while making the game even more interactive.

Amidst all this talk about the mechanical sounds in the Portal soundtrack, it’s important to pay attention to the human vocals that are still present. The most notable is that of Ellen McLain, the voice of Glados. Providing cheeky, in-character songs that play during the credits of both games (“Still Alive” and “Want You Gone”), Mike Morasky takes full advantage of the fact that McLain used to be an opera singer. One of the most iconic songs of the game is “Cara Mia Addio,” an original Italian opera song sung by Glados at the end of the second game (which sounds like it would be tonal whiplash but never fails to bring a tear to my eye). This song also serves as another leitmotif for a puzzle element called the companion cube, as seen in the track “Love as a Construct.” Despite how jarring robot opera may seem however, this isn’t even the most notable use of real human voice in the game, in my opinion. That title goes to the song “Exile Vilify,” written and performed by the band The National (please note, this song is not featured on the album itself, but would be impossible not to talk about). This song plays on a radio hidden in one of the many test chambers. Now, hidden radios are an ongoing theme throughout the Portal games, but they always played the same song. This radio is the only one to play something different, and it’s rattling to hear it be a sorrowful ballad. Ever since I discovered this easter egg, whenever I play the game I always sit and listen through the entire song, all four and half minutes of it.

I could talk about the soundtrack of the Portal games for ten more pages and still not cover how much I adore it and how much it’s impacted me. Every time I hear one of those songs I’m transported back to being a kid again. But at the same time, I love getting to re-experience it as an adult to properly appreciate all the thought and care that went into it. Video game soundtracks are hard to create; how can you create music for an experience that is individual for every person who listens to it? But Mike Morasky went above and beyond when he created Portal 2: Songs to Test by. It set a new standard for how music can be incorporated into the media, how the interactive element can be used to an advantage, not a hindrance. I don’t want to sound like I’m selling the games to you, but I truly mean it when I say that the brilliance of this album can only be appreciated fully when you experience it in game rather than just listening to it.

For a better idea on how some of these tracks work in game (including the examples I laid out), watch this video!