Cyan logo music played on the piano

If you haven’t already heard, Cyan are running a Kickstarter campaign for Myst’s 25th anniversary! For $99USD you can get a copy of all the games (including the elusive 3 & 4), updated for modern Windows & Mac computers, plus it comes in a box that looks like a Myst linking book. Or for $169USD you can get a book that has a small LCD screen as the linking panel that plays videos, just like a real linking book. Fancy!

It’s no surprise where part of the idea for a Myst book with a screen inside it likely came from. To quote Rand Miller (Cyan’s CEO and Atrus actor) from the Kickstarter Live AMA, “we’re doing a book with a real linking panel because we’ve wanted one ever since RIUM+ did his”. There’s nothing much I can add to that quote, really. 😛 I plan to do a full teardown & comparison of Cyan’s one once mine arrives (UPDATE: teardown & comparison blog post here!. For what it’s worth though, based what specs I’ve seen so far their implementation carries my personal tick of approval – it looks like it will do a fantastic job and make a beautiful product for a reasonable price.

But that’s not what this post is about. This one’s about music. It’s been over a decade since I last played the piano so I’m a little bit rusty, but I’ve dusted off the old skills for a very special purpose.

In honour of the Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter, I decided to transcribe & play a piano rendition of Cyan’s logo music!

(YouTube link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

It just so happens that 10 Instrumental covers is one of the #Myst25 Community Goals. And I have word straight from one of the people managing the Kickstarter’s community goals that the Cyan intro theme music counts. As such, here’s the files so you can play it too!

Cyan Logo theme PDF
Cyan Logo theme MusicXML
Cyan Logo theme MIDI
24-bit 96KHz FLAC of my piano rendition

A couple notes on these (pun intended) – both the chord complexity and their representations are sitting in the middle between being perfect representations and being easy to play. By this I mean that I’m skipping a few notes from the chords as I wanted it to be reasonably easily playable on an actual piano, and the timing in the sheet music isn’t 100% spot-on because doing that was far more complicated to describe & decipher than I thought was worth it. Feel free to adapt this to a different instrument, add or remove notes for your own personal style, or fiddle with the timing in the midi file if you’re only intending digital playback.

Play on! 🙂