The Space Between Dancefloor and Game Audio

Spending nights behind the decks in Stockholm’s club scene and days crafting soundscapes for video games, Isidor Breitholtz, creator of the Time & Space expansion pack for Tomofon, lives in two creative worlds that can feel miles apart. One pulsing with rhythm and energy, the other rich in atmosphere and narrative. Time & Space became the project where those two sides finally collided. Possibly while wearing a black Y2K cyber sunglasses and arguing over realism vs. stylization.

I wasn’t interested in making a pack that fits strictly the dance floor scene or just ambient scoring. Working with sound design all the time, I wanted to make what was lacking in my own library of a million sounds. I needed to find something new, and see what happens when club music meets the storytelling textures of game sound.

Isidor Breitholtz

The result is a library where rhythmic synths pulse alongside strange, cinematic ambiences, a sound pack that’s just as comfortable in a warehouse as it is inside a cutscene.

Mod Wheels and Motorbikes

One of the unique pleasures of working in Tomofon, Isidor explains, is how effortlessly melody and rhythm can blend into one another. Many of the sounds in Time & Space carry both cadences at once - they loop and drift, groove and glide. Load up the two Digi Horizon presets and just play freely, and you’ll find arhythmic, playful swells that weave through your mix with their own kind of logic.

My favorite sound to create was definitely Start the mod wheel ride away. It’s meant to emulate the feeling of a vehicle revving up, like a motorbike sequence. If you hold a key and start playing with the mod wheel, it feels like it’s accelerating off into the distance, or even circling back. It’s a small example, but it shows just how much motion and variation you can achieve using nothing but the synth’s internal matrix.

Working within Tomofon’s audio model system, however, didn’t come easily at first. Isidor describes it as learning a new language, one full of restrictions, quirks, and strange workarounds. Compared to the structured world of a traditional DAW, Tomofon offered far less rhythmic control. But that limitation turned out to be a hidden gift.

At first, I struggled with how little rhythmic control I had. But eventually, those limitations became the most inspiring part. I found myself tweaking tiny envelope curves and discovering movement I didn’t plan. What started as rigid experiments often morphed into lively, human rhythms. The rhythms are not perfect, and that’s exactly what gives them life.

Isidor in the studio

Never play it safe

The unexpected, messy and unplanned moments became essential to the packs identity, Isidor explains. Sometimes inspiration is a walk in the park, literally.

I was in a park on a break and heard someone playing a jaw harp,” Isidor recalls. “I was totally stuck that day, uninspired, but as soon as I heard that twangy, bouncing rhythm I thought, I gotta make that in Tomofon.

So he stepped into the vocal booth, and, as one does, tried his best to throat-sing like a robot cowboy. “It was weird,” he admits, “but when I dropped it into tomofon engine I loved how it resemble like a robot’s interpretation of a jaw harp. It sparked a flood of new ideas for a bunch of patches. Tomofon is great at that - you throw something in and get something unexpected back.”

That silly, spontaneous experiment ended up becoming one of the most creatively productive moments in the project. “It was another reminder,” Isidor says, “that chasing down odd, funny, even slightly stupid ideas can unlock something way more original than playing it safe.”