When researching for conceptual ideas for The Phone Box project, I found this curious news about a phone box used as a grieving place in Japan. In a hill in Otsuchi a remote town in Japan, a white phone box was placed after the Fukushima disaster of 2011 with the purpose of becoming a place of solace for the survivors of the tragedy. The phone line does not actually work, it has a symbolical meaning. The visitors that are normally friends and family from the victims of the disaster, come to the ‘wind phone’ and use the phone to communicate with their passed loved ones, with the purpose of grieving and dealing with their loss. As our collaboration project deals directly with mental health issues and a phone box, I found this video extremely familiar to the concept of the project. Our phone box in the game is also a place designated to discuss and grieve unfortunate events that has happened, communicating you with old characters that relate to that past. In contrast with this case, our phone box has the capability of demonstrating how the trauma and problem can be worsen through the use of communication. This is as mentioned before is an attempt to de-taboo mental health problems.

Even though our game has a more extreme use than this case in real life, I found the ‘wind phone’ to be incredibly poetic and inspiring for my project. It has a massive mysticism aspect to the situation and a great connection with the past and memories. To translate this concept to our project, I thought of how could I incorporate the aspect of solace and grieving into the music. My initial ideas was to make the sound texture completely different from when the gamer is outside and inside of the phone box. This way I will give a character to the space and let know to the gamer that they are in a place of sensibility and introspection. As the game contains a great factor of memories and connection with the past, I thought of including some sort of window into the past through sound. The way I thought of achieving this was by including recordings of the radio, entering and leaving quite quickly in the soundscape, mimicking the nature of memories and thoughts.