Nothing is Sound is an unofficially-released stream-technical simfile pack by the stepartist Zaia, under the pseudonym Serenade Snow. This pack is focused primarily around the use of the footswitch technical element in use with 16th streams.
Although it was never officially released, the beta was publicly available on the r21freak forums at the time of its cancellation, thus classifying it as part of the official Zaia simfilography.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia (as Serenade Snow) |
| BPM | 135-192 |
| Songcount | 13 |
| Blocks | 11-15 |
| Type | Technical-Stream |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | April 8, 2010 |
¶ Structure
Nothing is Sound is structured identically to the format of another pack, Loaded Futurepack (2010). All four difficulty blocks share the same stepcounts and volumes of streams.
- SX charts contain both bracket (BR) and footswitch (FS) elements.
- SH charts contain only footswitch elements.
- SM charts contain only bracket elements.
- SE charts contain no technical elements.
The description field contains the stepartist name.
¶ Development
I had found some unexpected exposure as a stepartist when Tachyon Beta came out in July 2010 and I received positive critical feedback for my Superluminal SX16 chart. Endeavoring to capitalize on this, I quickly started to plan a full-scale pack, and as the recent content I'd been working on happened to be streamy footswitch-focused simfiles, which had been inspired by Mad Matt's Loaded Futurepack, I settled on this as the type of pack I believed could generate some momentum. Most of this pack was stepped between April and August 2010. There was a post on r21freak requesting assistance with sync.
As more of this pack started to come together, it became apparent that the pack suffered from intrinsic structural issues that affected the pack's integrity. Not all the songs could support all the chart types that were intended for the finished pack. Some charts had no brackets, which cut out two of the difficulties, and the varying lengths of the songs and their genres resulted in a tonal inconsistency between the simfiles that I wasn't happy with, and so I eventually decided to cancel the project and move on. During this time, I was busy with school, so I had less free time to devote to simfile projects, which was already spread thin across other unrelated charts I was working on, so the pack quickly went into dormancy.
The unofficial release date of August 8, 2010 is the date the final beta version of the pack was posted to the r21freak forums.
Spending time evaluating this pack helped motivate my interest in pursuing more consistently-themed concepts, which my next simfile project Powerglove would go on to explore.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
The pack's name was derived from the album Nothing Is Sound (2005) by the American alternative rock band Switchfoot, which was chosen as a reference to the technical element that the pack was focused on.
The success of Loaded Futurepack left me interested in exploring footswitch-oriented content further, and I gradually began working on more similar content, with a vague plan to coalesce them into a pack. I was interested in a broad range of music, and this pack allowed me to see in what other genres of music i could write streamy footswitch charts to. The result was a fairly mixed songlist with no consistent theme other than the footswitch patterning they all shared, which included genres such as KPop, video game music, metal, speedcore, ITG officials and IIDX music.
¶ Graphics
The graphics were based on the pack's Switchfoot inflluence, and the banner includes the Nothing Is Sound's album cover art, edited to fit into the 418x164 size requirement for ITG banner artwork. This was achieved by cutting the bottom half of the album art image, inverting it, and overlaying it on the top half, and using the magic wand tool to select parts of the top layer and erase it. Editing was done in Adobe Photoshop CS2, or as the readme.txt file for the pack seems to say, "PS C2".
The background art is taken directly from an image I found on DeviantArt by user JaapvdV and cropped to fit the 4:3 resolution requirement for ITG background artwork. No other alterations were made to the image, and results in a banner and a background that bear little resemblance to each other.
¶ Songlist
Nothing is Sound contains 13 songs.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Gunsot to the Head of Trepidation | Trivium | 145 | |
| Energizer | ZiGZaG | 152 | |
| Euphorium | DM Ashura | 158 | |
| Grave Consequence | TSUKASA | 180 | |
| Guillaume Tell | MC F 40 (Rossini) | 180 | |
| I Go Crazy Because Of You | T-ARA | 135 | |
| Loaded Futurefile | Anc | 269 | |
| Red Lucifer Rising (Ver-0) | S.S.H. | 87-192 | BPM is incorrectly displayed as 130 |
| Return of Salieri | Warmen | 143 | |
| Snow Storm | Dj Taka | 145 | Artist is incorrectly stylized. Correct is “dj TAKA” |
| Toccata & Fugue | Beautiful Day | 140 | |
| VANESSA | Suzaku | 92-185 | |
| Vortex Infinitum | Shin Hae Chul & N.EX.T | 86-172 |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
This pack was never formally released, and it was only exposed to the public on r21freak during its development, so no community feedback was made.
SerenadeSnow: Snȱw - Return of Salieri* 94.48 FOOTSWITCH
¶ Trivia
- Although this pack contained resteps of its own from S21 Works, a number of the songs in this pack would go on to be restepped in future projects themselves:
- A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation (Dropbear Awareness Pack, 2011)
- Vortex Infinitum (Dropbear Awareness Pack, 2011)
- Euphorium (Cirque du Zeppelin, 2014)
- Guillaume Tell (Cirque du Jackhummer, 2018)
- This pack contains the first simfile i made to feature sideswitches (I Go Crazy Because Of You).
- No mine markings were used to mark the footswitches in this pack, as the convention to mark had not yet become widespread. I'm not sure when exactly the concept of mine-marking came into existence, but since it wasn't in Loaded Futurepack, it wouldn't be in my pack either.
- I received little to no engagement on my r21freak post for the pack. I couldn't tell you if anyone even downloaded it. I'll be pleasantly surprised if anyone had.
- The Snow name from Serenade Snow, which I was using at the time this pack was being developed (but was not in use when Tachyon Beta came out), was given to me by a girl I liked, because she was describing the very blonde hair I had at the time.