“Technically, you shouldn’t be able to hear him because he’s right over there and there’s a wall between you. “So imagine there’s a creeper in that house way over there,” says Rosenfeld.
Each Minecraft world is created using graphical elements known as voxels, which are great for generating landscapes quickly, but make it difficult to signpost the properties of objects within the space. So if you make a cow farm or a sheep farm, you can’t have all the animals making noises at the same time. And the engine only has 20 sound channels. Let’s say it’s a rain sound effect and now you’re on a beach so you have wave sounds, too – but if you do that, if you play two looping sound files simultaneously, the engine crashes. “Imagine a looping sound file that plays for two seconds and then just starts over. “Minecraft has a terrible sound engine,” exclaims Rosenfeld, who grew up in east Germany, learning audio composition on cheap computer packages like Schism Tracker and Ableton Live. It turns out the minimalism was kind of unavoidable. Where did this perfect accompaniment come from? The sound effects are weirdly evocative too – the staccato farm animal noises and groans of enemy mobs all contributing to the game’s unique atmosphere. The wilting, minimalist tracks, slow-paced and slightly melancholy, recall the ambient works of Satie and Eno they drift in the background as you build, sometimes just a few piano notes sounding as night draws in on your blocky world. The music is such an important part of this crazy gaming phenomenon. Yet the roomful of Minecraft fanatics hangs on his every word. His sound files won’t load, then his computer crashes his notes are on his mobile phone which seems to continually switch off. At the GameCity festival in Nottingham, he is supposed to be telling an audience about how he wrote the music and sound effects to the multimillion-selling building game Minecraft, but he keeps getting distracted. D aniel Rosenfeld is an endearingly chaotic public speaker.