music for Tomb Raider was composed by Nathan McCree, who at the time was an in-house composer for Core Design. The main inspiration behind the score for McCree was English Classical music. This approach was directly influenced by his conversations with Gard about Lara's character. Based on this, he kept the main theme simple and melodic. The main theme used a four-note motif, which continues to appear through the series. The piece "Where The Depths Unfold", used when Lara is swimming underwater, was a choral work. They did not have the space or budget for live music recording, which was challenging for McCree as he needed to create the whole thing using synthesisers. To make the choir sound realistic, he inserted recordings of himself breathing at the right points so it sounded like an actual choir. For each track, McCree got a basic description of where the music would be used, then was left to create it. There was no time for rewrites, so each track was included in the game as first composed. Unlike most other games of the time, there was not a musical track playing constantly throughout the game; instead, limited musical cues would play only during specially-selected moments to produce a dramatic effect. For the majority of the game, the only audio heard is action-based effects, atmospheric sounds, and Lara's own grunts and sighs, all of which were enhanced because they did not have to compete with music. According to McCree, the game was scored this way because he was allotted very little time for the job, forcing him to quickly write pieces without any thought to where they would go in the game. When the soundtrack was finally applied, the developers found that the tunes worked best when applied to specific places. The symphonic sounds were created using Roland Corporation's Orchestral Expansion board for their JV series keyboards. English voice actress Shelley Blond provided the voice of Lara. She was given the job after her agent called and had her record some audition lines onto tape. She felt under a lot of pressure at the time, as Core Design had spent three months searching for the right voice. She recalled: "I was asked to perform her voice in a very plain non-emotive manner and in a 'female Bond' type of way. I would have added more inflection, tone and emotion to my voice but they