Ka-ching! The story of how we came up with the sound for an NFT linked to Goddess Lakshmi
Client
Totality Corp
Project duration
1 month
Project requirement
5 tracks for each tier of the NFT + Music for the Lakshmi NFT website

The guys at Totality Corp came to us with a unique ask – The Gurgaon based company wanted to create playable NFTs carrying the imagery and symbolism of Lakshmi – The Indian goddess of wealth as a part of their mega project – The Zionverse, an Indian mythology inspired Multiverse. The team wanted us to create 5 tracks – each representing a different avatar of Lakshmi (Ashtalakshmi) – each track linked to a different tier of the NFT.
If this sounds complicated, that’s cause it is! NFTs are like jokes – some people get them, some don’t. But if you are someone who is into crypto, NFTs and blockchain tech, you can check out the whole project here.
The key take away here though, was that this seemed to be super interesting project and that sound would play a key role in creating a customer experience that is both entrenched in tradition and at the same time is representative of a hopeful and prosperous future.

From a sonic branding and analysis point of view, there were 3 things to take care of here:
1. Express musically, the idea of wealth and prosperity, tying back to the idea of goddess Lakshmi. The scope of composition here was actually quite defined – a number of ragas in Indian classical music relate directly not only to the ideas of wealth but also to goddess Lakshmi herself – most commonly, raga Shree and raga Lalitha. However, both these ragas consist of several dark semitones (Komal notes), due to which the compositions were rendered more serious sounding than we intended them to be.
After reviewing some more ideas in this space, we settled on the idea of the Ashtalakshmi strotra – an ancient hymn dedicated to goddess Lakshmi and her 8 forms. Hymns, in any form, are simplistic in nature since they need to be musical ideas that can easily be remembered and chanted by large groups of people. Luckily for us, memorability is a key feature of a good sonic brand.