# Original soundtrack and effects

The soundtrack was composed specifically for Small Worlds, Long Journeys. Tools/compose_score.py contains the authored pitches, phrase times, instrumentation and synthesis. No samples, recordings, stock loops or earlier game's music are reused.

“Home Among the Leaves” is the 120-second camp/title theme. Eight unhurried phrases develop a D6 / Bm7 / Gmaj9 / Asus4 family, with soft felt-like additive tones, warm sustained harmonics and restrained stereo echoes. Three 160-second habitat arrangements share a matching foundation: Mossfold uses gentle wooden/felt notes, Prism Wetlands brighter seed-like plucks, and Warmstone Heights a lower spacious motif. Notes and echo tails wrap across loop boundaries during rendering.

The app ships 29 actual WAV files: five music files (camp plus a common foundation and three habitat stems), eighteen distinct tuned creature calls and six effects (step, discovery, arrival, upgrade, mastery and season). All are 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo. Habitat stems start together on AVAudioPlayer's sample clock; the foundation and one region are audible, with two-second fades on region/camp changes. Effects are limited to three simultaneous voices. Befriending input has a 0.45-second guard and no repeated notification loop.

Music and effects settings persist independently. Ambient audio respects the silent switch and other audio. Backgrounding pauses music/effects. Interruption-began stops playback; resumption requires the system's shouldResume indication. Removing an audio device pauses playback until an explicit preference change or foreground return. All game information is readable without sound.

Release/Audio contains four usable AAC listening arrangements, encoded with Apple's encoder from the actual uncompressed masters. The WAV masters live in SmallWorlds/Resources/Audio. AUDIO_MANIFEST.json records durations, hashes, RMS, peaks and loop-edge differences. The three full regional mixes peak below 0.105 linear full scale and have no clipping. Their measured sample-boundary differences are below 0.0015. These are rendered checks, not a claim of subjective mastering approval on physical iPhone speakers. App-host tests decode every WAV and test synchronized positions, backgrounding, mute and interruption handling. A final physical speaker/headphone listening pass remains an owner/device gate.