Music • Images
interactive
For the educational iPad app Explore Vincent, I composed the complete soundtrack, which I later renamed
'The Van Gogh Suite".
The app told the story of Vincent van Gogh through animations, a chronological timeline, and an extensive selection of his paintings.
The music was inspired by the French musical tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting the period in which Van Gogh lived and worked. It also contains a few subtle, tongue-in-cheek musical quotations, including Richard Wagner's 'Treulich geführt (track 7) from Lohengrin and a bandoneon melody faintly reminiscent of the music performed at the wedding of King Willem-Alexander.
I composed the soundtrack for De Griezelbus, a CD-ROM adventure game based on the popular children's books by Paul van Loon.
The game combined an interactive story with a series of puzzles. My challenge was to make the music genuinely frightening for children, but not so frightening that it would keep them awake at night ;-)...
The score balances suspense, mystery, and a touch of playful horror throughout.
A personal footnote: Mike Menijn (R.I.P.), founder of Warehouse, the multimedia agency behind De Griezelbus, invited me in 2011 to join the Multimedia Design programme at HAN University of Applied Sciences as a lecturer.