Pixelated Soundwaves

Pixelated Soundwaves is a digital-only, freely accessible music album produced by A Pixelated Point of View containing 12 custom tracks that have been derived from existing audio samples across various genres. The total runtime of the album is approximately 45 minutes.

The samples used to compose all of the tracks have been derived from the game Habbo Hotel: an online browser game originally released by Sulake Oy in early 2000. As the developers introduced a feature called ‘Trax’ in early 2007, it allowed players to create their own songs inside of the game with precomposed samples that were stored on so-called ‘sample cartridges’. Players were allowed to use four cartridges (36 different samples) of choice per project and were able to make music by dragging the samples onto the timeline inside of the UI. Unfortunately, the 2009 move from Shockwave to Flash broke the Trax feature irreversibly; turning it into a remnant of the past. Pixelated Soundwaves is a project that aims to relive the good old days of trax by offering a total of twelve songs across various genres, from piano, to hip-hop and from trance to dance.

All of the samples were rerecorded and properly timed for use in DAW software. All of the songs have been composed in Ableton Live 11 as it allowed for more creative freedom and BPM control instead if I were to do it inside of the original Trax UI. Mastering and Mixing was idem dito done inside of Ableton Live. I consider Pixelated Soundwaves a final respect towards a highly popular feature that is unfortunately no more. It is my final take on the Trax genre of music in the form of a freely available album for everyone to enjoy; no matter if you still play the game in some form of if it serves as a memory of the past.