All those words - an overview of the site's terminology.

I like words, but I also appreciate that they can be a little confusing at times. So I thought I'd just clear up how we describe things here on The Sounds Stories - just so you know what's what. They're all designed to make your choices/selections easier.

• Stories - this is the term I use to describe a group of tracks. The tracks will have some kind of relationship to one another so that it feels like a collected whole - like a score or soundtrack.
• Theme - this usually refers to a track that has a distinctive melody or feeling to it that could belong to a character, place or repetitive situation. It's leitmotif for the technically minded.
• Moment - this is all about a particular point in a story. A dramatic moment, a romantic moment, a dangerous moment, etc. Stories are all about conflict - these pieces help to underline those conflicts.
• Variant/Variation - we use these two interchangeably. It just means that it uses the same musical or sound structure as either the theme or moment and plays around with it to give a different feeling or emotional context.
• Bed - this is an odd one, but it's just a technical term to describe a sustained sound that serves as an underscore or background to a scene.
• Tempo - that's the pace - is it fast, mid or slow. We also use drone to define tempo - which means it's a sustained note so the tempo is hard to determine.
• Style - that's the word we chose, but we could have chosen emotion or genre or tone or... Well you get the idea. So style just felt like a good 'catch all'.
• Key - that just refers to the general key in which the music is written. We only give you major or minor, we don't get into scales although a number of the pieces are written in a specific scale. But the key should be enough to tell you if pieces of music will sit well alongside one another.
• Instrument - I know you know what that is, but in addition to it meaning the actual instrument used it can refer to section or style of instrument. There are couple of odd ones like Hybrid Orchestral (which is an orchestral sound that's been manipulated or distorted, or melded with synthesizers) or Orchestra FX (which is where the instruments create weird and wonderful noises.)

That's about it - sorry if I'm teaching all those grandma's out there to suck eggs (WHO THE HELL SUCKS EGGS????!!!) but I thought it was a useful thing to do.