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The Rise And Fall Of Game Audio
Thanks to Armchair Arcade for its article discussing why new game composers should look to classic game audio for pointers and inspiration. The author argues that classic Commodore 64 composer Rob Hubbard's work "is innovative precisely because he isn't trying to mimic 'real' music or make his computer sound like something besides a computer", before arguing of newer game audio: "How did game audio composers respond to this sudden technological boon? They began to imitate. Rather than innovate, they only did what had been done so many times before." The author concludes: "What concerns me is when they ignore the abilities unique to the electronic medium. It makes no more sense for a game audio programmer to mimic a string quartet as it does for a flutist to make his instrument sound like a kazoo."
Of course that's kind of a load of crap. It does make sense to imitate a string quartet because it's proven to be pleasing to people's ears, unlike, say, a kazoo. We're making games, not trying to create new forms of music.
I think people want more and more "realism" in their games to the point where they look and sound like a movie (maybe even play like one cough).
Today I find music from Sonic 2 and other SNES/Megadrive (Genesis) era games to be much much better then from the 3D era. They now seem too "unclub like" (no other way to put it).
When I listen to music ingame I want it to blend in, to make me tap my foot and to be enjoyable in the background. Todays games tend to make music "just there" or a huge part of the game (Doom 3 comes to mind), but none of it is really enjoyable. Rather then make music to be enjoyed they make it to fit a game and you can't just sit there and enjoy it, rather you must hear it as it was originally ment to be or nothing at all.
Places like http://www.ocremix.org/ do a good job at keeping the old game music alive in a new format and show how much we love the classic songs.
Developers don't understand that we can still remember all the old school music to levels in a game we loved and replayed many times far far better then music we hear for a level in a game we never pick up again.
I like muppets.
I like playing those old games, but I always mute the audio. Those simplistic noises are painful for even a short period of time.
Very few games are about music. Most are about something else. All of them are visual artworks. In any visual artwork, the music is secondary. It may be as important as the visuals, or even more important... but it is not the focus of the work. It is supplemental to it. It is enhancing to it. This is the same in Movies, Games, TV, etc. The music is meant to enhance the emotion in a certain way... be it sadness, or a pounding beat to get your heart pumping when you are blasting aliens.
I guess my point is that games are just about the LAST place you should expect to see new forms of music, because they aren't made to create new forms of music. They are made to create fun games.
As far as immitation - it's easier to get the reaction you want from sounds that are already associated with an emotion than from something completely new.
If you want new forms of music in games, create new forms of music that have emotional resonance. Eventually they will be used in games. But don't expect the game designers to do it. That's not their goal.
Today, the only the electronic music most of us hear is the repetitive, simplistic beat of dance or industrial music piped into clubs and dubbed over with offensive lyrics and banter.
I think someone needs to check out ishkur's guide to electronic music. There is a pretty wide variation between the intricate beats of Drum 'n Base and the repetitive, simplistic beat of House. Of course, if you want more experimental electronica, look for IDM, Aka intelligent (unintelligible) dance music. None of these would be possible without using computers carefully as instruments, and none of them fit into mainstream musical categorization.
I must also argue with the idea that game artists haven't evolved the craft. Most games now feature dynamically adjusting music based at bare minimum on character states. They adjust for boss encounters without interrupting musical lines, and can dynamically increase or decrease instrumentation based upon on-screen action. While most game audio creators do focus on sounding like traditional recordings, this is probably because most are traditional recording artists these days.
Some of the best game soundtracks are traditional recordings. Final Fantasy, Xenogears, and Wipeout all spring to mind as great soundtracks involving "dumped-in" music. Even Street Sk8er, with it's off-kilter collection of grungy tunes, was a great listen.
That's not to say that the article doesn't have it's points. But to say that videogame composers should be at the forefront of experimentation just because they used to need to be is erroneous. Of course, if everyone were as original and good as The Fat Man (no lie, he's one of the greats) game audio would be far better off. But that combination of original sound and skill is rare in any medium... and The Fat Man's genius is not so easily replicated.
Game audio should be convincing, engaging without being detracting, and should heighten enjoyment the first time heard without getting annoying the 10th. It should dynamically change based upon the character's situation, and should contain an original artistic spark. Game audio shouldn't be the tunes you hear in your car... Nor should they be the buzzes and blips of yesteryear. While certain composers pioneer original genres (Tommy Tallerico springs to mind), this shouldn't be the defining feature.
All artists should be creative, game or no.
The ______ Agenda
that audio in games is 'bad' or 'boring' today.
For example, everyone is ranting on about the atmosphere in Doom III, and a huge part of that seems to be a direct result of the awesome, surround sound audio experience.
A lot of other games recently have had incredible audio. Some examples that spring to mind include Deus Ex (atmospheric, surround sound, with great music), KOTOR (hard to make bad audio when you have the Star Wars themes and light sabre fight noises), Grand Prix 4 (motor racing in surround sound), and Vietcong (not a great game but it had cool music and sound). Less recently Red Alert 2 had great music, and I still think there's nothing quite like the sound of a fully fledged melee in Quake III, with rockets rumbling, railguns pinging, and shotguns banging away.
We're all nostalgic for old games. Some of my favourites sound-wise include UFO/XCOM, Sam and Max, Speedball 2, and pretty much anything on Amiga. But this doesn't mean that modern games, with surround sound and near-cinematic quality are somehow bad or boring. Maybe the difference is just simplicity - when you have very limited ability to use samples and only one or two channels, you have to come up with something catchy and simple.
Read Pynchon.
Oops.
The ______ Agenda
Interesting thoughts. However...
The gentleman writing this article seems to hold as his primary goal pushing forward the field, advancing the arena, conducting experimentation, and then complains that game producers are too "cowardly" to produce such music. The problem is that this is *not* a game producer's goal. His goal is to impact the emotions of the player as much as possible to increase the effect of the game.
Perhaps if I want an epic scene, I would choose choir singing, and perhaps with an action scene metal. That's because people *have* formed associations in their head between music and the meanings associated with that music. To ignore those associations is on par with ignoring other learned languages, like English, and simply making random sounds because they are "experimental."
I tend to dislike most synth sounds. I think that people dislike identical stimuli very much -- our brains seek to avoid it, be it from boredom or whatnot, it is clearly not something that we have evolved to consider good. Try listening to a medium-volume sine or square wave for ten minutes or so. It's maddening and unpleasant. Much synth music suffers from the same effect, because it is similarly repetitive -- identical, even.
My guess is that the reason we like traditional analog instruments (aside from the longer evolutionary period than the handful of years that synth has been around) is that each sound is very different. The volume, pitch, hold, and tiny variations crop up. That's important to making music appealing -- it constantly exposes us to unknown stimuli.
I'm also guessing that we tend to like identifying patterns, and classical music is full of apparent patterns for our brains to discover.
I simply find the sound of an analog guitar more appealing than a synth guitar, or of a simple sine wave.
That being said, I do agree with the general argument that video game audio has moved too close to traditional audio, and is not really taking advantage of modern technology.
First, I was very disappointed when Creative beat out Aureal in the short sound card wars a few years back -- we were looking at a GPU-like era of new ideas and rapid improvement. Creative pushed EAX, basically a reverb model. Aureal pushed A3D, modelling 3d environments and actually bouncing sound around. If a wall is close to your right year, sounds are different than if there is simply empty space there. We are very capable of picking up on spatial hints from sound, and there are currently no such hints provided in game audio.
It will increasingly become possible to do this sort of thing in software -- we now enjoy software-generated Doppler effects, and I look forward to 3d modelling.
Second, we are only now seeing anything other than a linear track of audio that plays. Game audio is intended to accompany a changing environment. Events and the game environment change at different times. Unless you're playing Dragon Warrior, that probably means that a suitable soundtrack is not the same each time!
We implemented a simple version of this early on, when music tempo increased to indicate a warning in many video games. Later, games like Total Annihilation had two tracks that they could switch between depending upon how "dangerous" the environment is. Since then, we've taken the step of slightly more intelligent transitions (transitioning from the first track to the second on beats and the like). In general, though, our composition techniques and tools are poorly suited to anything but a single, static sequence of music.
A proper modern game audio engine should include a set of, say, states. Once I change states (from, say, STATE_NORMAL to STATE_FIGHTING), the audio engine waits until the first transition point in the audio and then kicks into the STATE_FIGHTING audio). There should be the ability to add a transition sequence of music associated with the transition between those two states at this point in music. So I'd store a bunch o
May we never see th
"What concerns me is when they ignore the abilities unique to the electronic medium. It makes no more sense for a game audio programmer to mimic a string quartet as it does for a flutist to make his instrument sound like a kazoo."
What concerns me is when recording artists ignore the abilities unique to the compact disc format. It makes no more sense for a recording artist to use acoustic instruments than it does for a flutist to make his instrument sound like a kazoo.
Please. As a musician, this is ridiculous.
Why do you think there are so many synthesizers that aim to emulate the sounds of acoustic instruments as closely as possible? They make a nice sound. The violin has had centuries to be perfected. Some people make music out of square and sine waves. Some people use acoustic instruments. Some people sample. The thing that really matters is what sound it makes. If a situation demands a sound that is made by an acoustic instrument, then why in the fuck should you limit yourself to only sounds that "take advantage of the abilities unique to the electronic medium."
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Both the article and the comments so far seem to suggest that electronic style music works best for computer games. As an fan of Uematsu Nobou, I tend to disagree - Uematsu does the score for Final Fantasy (every game in the main series, except the upcoming 12). For the most part, Uematsu's often brilliant composition seems stunted, especially if you listen to any of the Final Fantasy orchestra CDs (which replay the FF music with real instruments - either piano, full orchestra, or in the case of FFV an electronic album, or Song Book or IV Celtic Moon, in celtic style).
However, even Uematsu presents a challenge: I didn't like FF8, but Laguna's theme is electronic music. Of all the major themes in recent final fantasy games to be translated into orchestra, The Man With the Machine Gun is almost always the poorest - it was best as a thumping electronic theme, with a lot of looping.
While electronic music may seem obvious in a game, it often isn't. Take a medieval game - Fire Emblem or even Lord of the Rings. Thumping techno beats don't sound right with those titles. Orchestra work has to be gameified. Star Wars did this well in X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Alliance - it dynamically loaded themes during missions according to what was going on - if new Imperial ships came in, the Imperial theme would cue. Another theme would come in when your reinforcements did.
The really interesting thing after playing both were my reactions to the music - after X-Wing I would cringe when I heard the Imperial theme, as it always meant more enemy ships. But after TIE Fighter, the Imperial theme began to sound noble.
As some games get closer to movies, they will get more orchestral soundtracks (Final Fantasy). Some games will continue to have loopy techno music, like puzzle games. Games like TIE Fighter will creatively straddle the power of orchestra and looping nature of gaming.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
I can't speak for electronic music in general, but at least concerning video game music, I think the article is a bit backwards. It claims that by catering to realistic sound, modern game music is detracting from artistic innovation.
I have to disagree. Certainly, I would say my favorite video game music spans from the NES days (Mega Man 2's soundtrack, being my favorite), but I see nothing lacking in the quality or enchantment of modern game music.
Chrono Cross has a wonderful soundtrack, with a celtic flare and realistic sound. Any recent Zelda game has a beautiful arrangement of sounds and music. How about Nobuo Uematsu, taking the music of Final Fantasy and performing it with more traditional, rock instruments in his recent album, The Black Mages?
These are all examples of modern video game music composers "imitating" classic sounds and stylings, yet I would still consider them innovative and artistic.
It's not necessarily antithetical to art to embrace technology, yet still utilize the familiar sounds of preceding works of music. Sometimes, there is a convergence of new technology with older music. What about when the Beatles started experimenting with using orchestras in their work? I think that was pretty innovative.
I think that perhaps the most bizarre argument in the article is that by imitating realistic sounds, modern video game music composers are limiting themselves. Yet, by reverting to an earlier technology, they would be free to innovate. If they're utilizing the technology given them to create the music they have visioned in their heads, it's not being limited. Explain to me how utilizing the full range and capability of modern electronic music is more limiting than sticking to an earlier era of electronic music technology.
I would say that the art of a video game music composition comes not from an adherence to sounding realistic or synthetic; it comes from the individual composer's vision. If Yasunori Mitsuda had the vision of a celtic theme for Chrono Cross, and decided to make the music sound like real instruments rather than *BLOOPS* and *BLEEPS*, then he achieved his vision, and his work is art.
This is a shortsighted and ultimately fallacious argument. If you said the same thing about graphics, everyone would immediately recognize it as specious ("graphics programmers should focus on computer-generated-looking stuff and games should never visually strive for realism"). What is wrong with a string quartet as a soundtrack for a game? That ability is open to us, and you are saying we shouldn't do it because it is not "computery" enough for you? Instead of making a comment on innovation, you are instead trying to dictate style based on your personal tastes, and attempting to cast it as criticism. Not going to fly, in my book.
It makes no more sense for a game audio programmer to mimic a string quartet as it does for a flutist to make his instrument sound like a kazoo.
If a string quartet makes the game more entertaining than it makes perfect sense. Computer games are immersive environments, and the goal has been to make them more and more realistic with the (I assume) eventuality that at some point "players" will be unable to distinguish between simulated and actual reality.
I see no reason why game developers should strive to make their games obviously illusory. In fact, most of the gaming community has quite obviously voted with their pocketbooks for realism .
Now, this doesn't mean that I don't think there is room for innovation in game audio, but it's absurd to think we should throw out techniques that have been successful in other media just because it's a computer game.
Having a symphony orchestra kick in as you're avatar is walking along is more cinematic than realistic but again, the point is to entertain. Why shouldn't a game be as compelling and immersive as a film?
Oh, and what's so bad about kazoos anyway? P.D.Q. Bach has done some pretty entertaining work with kazoos. This is often, in fact, the only original aspect of his work. P.D.Q. like the game devlopers, was heavily criticized for his "excessive borrowing".
Copied or not it's entertaining which, after all, is the goal.
To me, I love the simplicity of digially created music. No orcistra or anything. It's simple, yet manages to not get boring. It rewards the listener who listens to it by increasing the tension, then letting it all go in a cresendo of beats and sounds.
t orrent t orrent
If you love video game music, and it's remixes be sure to download these torrents.
http://bt.ocremix.org/files/OCR00001_to_OCR00500.
and
http://bt.ocremix.org/files/OCR00501_to_OCR01000.
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Support Indy Music. Buy
the entire game industry. Early video games /did/ create a new form of music. If I wanted to hear a movie score, I'd go see a movie. I want more interesting synthetic sounds with my games.
http://www.sidstation.com/
I've got a sample CD made with this synth, and it can make some very complex and interesting tones. Game systems used to have character and personality based on what sounds their hardware could produce. Now they just seem to be used as a CD player and a straightforward sampler.
But I can whistle the Duke Nukem Forever tune...
The comparison of a guitar to a sine wave is absurd. Besides, the MIDI specification allows for 127 levels of volume (key velocity) in addition to the ability to manipulate and filter the audio after synthesis.
And it is VERY easy to dynamically adjust tempo of synthesized music. If it's being synthesized in real-time, simply change the rate at which the note-on and note-off messages are sent. It's as easy as dynamically adjusting say the speed of a car in a driving game. In addition to that, modern digital signal processing techniques allow you to alter the speed of the audio while retaining the original pitch.
It's another way of digitally representing an analog audio signal. In fact, it's of significantly less resolution and quality than vinyl.
Ok, good job. You're almost there. Now take it the rest of the way...
... ....
There's nothing
unique
about VIDEO GAME MUSIC either!
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
It's not like there's a button you push that says "make music" and out it comes. Everything from the technology of the instruments used to composition and performance are equally if not more complex than with tradidional instruments. The more you understand about how the music is created, the better you're able to understand and appreciate its complexities.
You don't hear techno coming out of an opera singer's mouth, and you don't hear pipe organs in African drum circles. Certain genres are often associated with the venue of performance, and video game music once stood apart as its own art form. Recently it seems video games just play music from other genres, and there's nothing wrong with that, I just think that game-specific music seems to have been placed on the back burner.
Check out the High Voltage SID collection, includes all legendary game music from Hubbard, Galway, Daglish, and others who followed.
http://www.hvsc.c64.org/
Players / Winamp plugins can be found with Google...
Some chiptune fan the author is...
He doesn't know the difference between Koji Kondo and Shigeru Miyamoto, and even if he did, he wouldn't spell their romanized names correctly.
As a big chiptune fan, I have to say that this guy's SID bias is appalling and that his writing is even more frustrating. He needs an editor.
I'm not a big fan of "electronic" sounding music. I find far more lasting appeal in more classical sounding background. Take for example, the great work by Jeremy Soule, one of my favorite composers. His theme for "Total Annihilation" is one of my favorite bits of ANY music. It reminds me of a story I heard about Star Wars: A New Hope. Apparently it was originally going to have a nice electronic/"space" backtrack. Just think how it would have changed the movie to have some synthesized theme instead of William's awesome work? There's no reason to cheapen game music just because we can.
Yes, there are quite a few artists who do homage to the
beloved SID. Ignoring people who remake SID tunes on other
instruments such as Mahoney mahoney.c64.org or the
Press Play on Tape pressplayontape.com
(go to both websites now, if you want to hear GOOD music, also get
the PPOT Boy Band Music Video), there are also arists that are
signed with big labels that create their music with SID.
One of the more recent artists is Bastian who uses SID for the
base, often lead, and sound effects. Not the frindge of the music
spectrum when comparing to Aphex Twin, but still, quite fresh and
unique (highly recommended song 'you got my love')
arist website: bastianmusic.nl)
There are rumors wether many of the euro techno bands dont use
SID chips to enhance their music. Orbital is one of the most
known of bands that I heard about.
Afterall, SID chip has been voted into top 20 chips produced for
computers, alongside such marvels as z80, sparc, and intel cpus.
(link www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art9.htm)
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/apz, SID chip was developed in 1981 and is still produced
Featuring two-bit mono PC internal speaker sound.
I just have to say that as much as I loved my commodore 64, I still loved my amiga 500 more! ahh the games, the demo's! was amazing stuff. This article was great as it helped me remember some of my favourite games tunes.
My all time favourite is from the game "Lotus Turbo Challenge 2" and is the 'loader' music.
I just downloaded it from HERE
This is 'mod' / protracker format music as used by the amiga, so maybe not quite so groundbreaking as the c64 and its SID chip were, but it was still brilliant.
So what is your favourite music from the good ol days. ?
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
Actually Star Wars was originally going to be set to a riff on Holst's 'The Planets', until John Williams convinced Lucas to let him do something cool.
no thanks
By the mid-20th century, photography had advanced to the point that the old ideal of photorealistic painting as perfection had lost its value.
/. about how simple waveforms relate to traditional instruments, and what happened was this:
Similarly, we are at the point where we can reproduce all musical instruments with identical synthesized or sampled equivalents - always in tune, always on time.
This devalues good sonic artists in a similar way, though a slightly different one; it would perhaps be better to compare what is happening with music to what occured in the case of plays and ballets as film largely took over and left behind a smaller market for the "live performance." It's already happened once with the rise of recorded music, yet it seems that it can happen again with the rise of entirely non-performed music, too.
On that note, I must admit that I've gotten into chiptunes myself, playing around with a few simple samples in the Impulse Tracker format, which lets me reshape them to my delight. I went through a lot of the thoughts expressed here on
When I started setting up my samples in Modplug Tracker and putting on volume envelopes and filtering I discovered that I was getting fairly close approximations of the traditional instruments almost 90% of the time. The sounds were pleasant and when setting them in short simple chord patterns I was able to happily listen on repeat for hours on end. That implies to me that traditional instruments are in fact *emulating* the simple waveforms. The reason chips often sound bleepy and irritating is more a matter of sound reproduction and filtering than of the basic patterns involved.
Now, how this all relates to game music; I think that early game music is a very ahead-of-its-time phenomenon. The limited technology encouraged the people making these songs to explore their boundaries and go beyond having "the best square-wave imitation piano on the block." They had just a few years in which the technology was at that point, they were under time and budget pressures to put these things into a game context, and yet there's still some great stuff there. If traditional instruments lose their value this form, renewed with the underlying developments of previous years, might revive en-masse once again. But eras and trends come and go, so it's unlikely any one form will ever dominate entirely.
This is just another case of "the old games were better". Not true! Again!
Game music is there to create an atmosphere, and thus has to be in the domain we are familiar with to be able to illict a human response.
Something as arbitrary as Rob Hubbard whose Sanxion and Delta music was admitedly memorable does not promote the genre as a whole to be 'better'. He simply was good at creating atmosphere, and that's all he had to work with.
Take Doom III and Quake I for instance. It's the best in-game music ever! Why? Because it got it's desired effect like few other games ever has.
-shrug-
Now stop flogging a dead horse!
"A proper modern game audio engine should include a set of, say, states. Once I change states (from, say, STATE_NORMAL to STATE_FIGHTING), the audio engine waits until the first transition point in the audio and then kicks into the STATE_FIGHTING audio). There should be the ability to add a transition sequence of music associated with the transition between those two states at this point in music. So I'd store a bunch of regular tracks like STATE_FIGHTING, and STATE_NORMAL, a bunch of short transition tracks (STATE_FIGHTING 1:03.5 to STATE_NORMAL 1:07.3, for instance)."
This sounds a lot like ActiveMusic in DirectX. Go play "Munch's Oddysee" on Xbox for a good example. As you get more involved, the music changes.
What I ultimately hated about it was how repeititve it all ways. Every transition became predictable, boring. It wore out the life of the music, because it was always the same base theme, and all the other transforms were the same, too.
MegaMan is good. I wish more games were like it. It melded cool music with cool action, and it kept them linked themeatically instead of using tricks of technology.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...kinda, anyway. I have no idea how actually practical this would be, but it might be neat to have some game music actually synthesized in realtime. A lot of game music now is dynamic, but it's basically (as far as I know) just mixing between different prerecorded songs. Keep in mind before reading further that this is purely speculative and probably not very practical.
It would be neat to have things synthesized on the fly and the parameters could be adjusted in various ways depending on what's going on in the game. Old video game music was obviously synthesized in realtime, but not dynamic as far as I know.
As a simple and retarded example off the top of my head, a main bass line or whatever could become more distorted and harsh the more damaged the player gets. The drum part could change and become faster or something. The only kind of game I can think of where this might be vaguely useful would be in a horror game or other game where atmosphere is very important. I could see--er, hear--a Silent Hill type game using a technique like this to possibly cool effect.
Of course, this would be a lot more processor-intensive than just playing MP3 files or whatever. Modern softsynths can use up lots of CPU power. But there could be options for quality of sound, like there is now.
So it probably wouldn't really be practical at all, but it's a neat idea, I think. I like dynamic music in games, as it can greatly facilitate a mood and a movielike feel, but most I've heard is just fading from one background music to another depending on whether you're in combat or exploring or whatnot. It begins to sound kind of silly if you get close to a monster, then move away, then back close, so forth. "Doo de doooo.... DUM DA DUM DA...doo de...DUM DA DUM...doo..." What I was thinking about would allow for much more gradual and subtle changes in the music.
For the record, I'm an electronic musician that uses all kinds of software and hardware, so I know what this would entail on the music end.
As for whether or not realistic or electronic sounds are better for games, it depends entirely on the game. Some need one kind, some the other, some both. The technique I'm thinking about could be used with either.
wtf to the mods too, very much ontopic, maybe even redundant...well it would be were it not the fact its a FP
... are somewhat exaggerated.
There have been some games in recent times that have done innovative things with music. Of the games I've played, first and foremost is Rez (and I'm actually quite surprised that neither the AA article nor any comments have mentioned it). If you've never played it, the shots you fire add beats timed to the music, the music transitions very naturally when you jump ahead to the next section of the level, parts of the stage bounce in time to the music, and the timing of the beats gives you cues for when enemies are about to appear or change strategies. It's really a tour de force on unifying music with gameplay.
Another game that brings something to the debate is Metroid Prime. Despite having a Nintendo-proclaimed "cinematic soundtrack" and relying heavily on traditional styles, it's a surprisingly innovative and memorable soundtrack that blends orchestral accompaniment with traditional Metroid musical themes and experimental synthesized instruments. It's something of a counterexample to the AA article's main point that orchestras equal imitation.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
But in the late 80s, electronic music wasn't going away, it was changing places. Synthesizers became cheap, electronic music was the new punk rock. Hardly the stuff for the likes of Vangelis and Jarre.
See, if he actually had any interest in electronic music, he would at least have checked out labels like WARP, formed, by the way, in 1989. You could just as well turn his point around: Today, the only guitar music most of us hear is repetitions of the simple formula The Beatles used, dubbed over with trivial lyrics. Oh, and calling drums and guitars "obsolete" is just offensive to anyone with any interest in music.
He also doesn't quite get that most music is created through performance, considering live music to be "silly spectacle". It's just that computers can't emulate "real" instruments convincingly, you can't make the same music you would make on a guitar or with a string trio with a computer.
So we have a fool who knows nothing about the history of electronic music, has no understanding of traditional music, trying to teach us something about game music. I'm not going to read the whole article.
For some reason after tie-fighter they switced to CD music and gone was this advantage.
Sure mp3 or CD music has the advantage that it plays on crappy soundcards but there is really no way to have a neat switch between themes.
In X-wing I loved the music but in more recent games I switch it off. I wished they had continued to develop the tech to have the music match the action and switch seamlessly between themes but sadly the cheap bastards with their onboard soundcards ruined this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
FP?
The reason I was so damn impressed with the SID wasn't just the expertise of a handful of composers but the way its unnatural, alternately gritty and spooky sound went together with the melancholic, psychedelic or just plain strange quality of some of the music. I'm thinking of darker themes like those of Warhawk, Zoids or Lightforce here, not the happier fare of Thing on a Spring or Giana Sisters.
There was something truly unique about SID music that got lost when "everyone" got Amigas and games started to use sample-based "tracker" music. And now everything's just playback or at best a form of "DJing", or so it seems (must admit I haven't examined too many modern games). Many games do have great, atmospheric music -- more listenable in the long run than even my favourite SID music. But still... I was so in awe of this puny brown breadbox sweating out such strange and wonderful sounds live and on its own, so to speak. Even the electric mayhem sounds of Atari 2600 Missile Command had ...something -- the way this was truly computer-generated, not prefabbed elsewhere like the soundtrack on a video cassette.
Nowadays every computer can reproduce every kind of recordable sound -- that's great, and I wouldn't ever want that development to not have happened, but somehow it's just not very unique or impressive -- using the computer as a tape recorder doesn't have much to do with the medium computer; listening to music in mp3 format doesn't make it this particular computer's "voice". I often say the same about graphics -- merely imitating reality isn't really the most artistic or interesting application of improved technology. It isn't real; why not use that to your advantage?
I think I agree with the article there, though maybe the author should listen to some Autechre or cEvin Key or what have you instead of complaining about the repetitive, simplistic beat of dance or industrial music piped into clubs and dubbed over with offensive lyrics and banter. Most clubs aren't exactly places where I'd expect to hear intelligent electronic music. (Besides, when was The Cure a synth pop band?)
There're software synthesizers, of course, but does this approach play a role in game audio? I found Trash242's (?I think) suggestion, posted a little further down (or up, depending), very interesting. Would be great to see it happen.
Homeworld had music so good it gets released as a stand-alone CD with the Homeworld: Game of the Year Edition. They had the band YES do the credit music. A good sign that it is good music is if you remember it, and if you ever hear the music you start to long to play the game. I have Halo and Homeworld in my head now.
George Lucas needs more people to tell him he's wrong about some things and he needs to listen to at least some of them. Needs more collaboration.
The current batch of Star Wars movies are great examples of the movie just being his own vision.
If he had things his way, one of the more famous scenes in Star Wars would have been this:
Leia to Solo: "I love you".
Solo:"I love you too"
That's BORING!!! That's very like the newer Star Wars stuff.
But instead of that - Harrison Ford said: "I know"
Fortunately for all of us, Lucas kept that line after the director's insistence.
SID chip was developed in 1981 and is still produced
...
Are you sure the Sid chip is still produced?
Reason i ask is that these people Sidstation claim to have access to the only remaining stocks of the sidchip which they are using to build their Sidstation "Groove Box" . So... If you know where I can buy a bucketload of sid chips id sure like to know...
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I think a really good example is the music from Deus Ex (the original). It's not synthesized or kazoo-sounding; rather, it has a large variety of samples including classical instruments, with interspersed techno beats.
There's a few songs on that soundtrack that I really like to load up in an ImpulseTracker player and listen to just for fun. They're not all exactly toe-tapping, but they are kind of neat and they remind me of playing that part of the game.
The important fact, however, is that if you took this music out of context, it would be TERRIBLE. If you just sat there and listened to those songs and tried to compare them to normal, everyday music, which you would listen to in the car, they're atrocious. They're hokey and corny-sounding and are reminiscent of some kind of failed French orchestral-techno fusion.
HOWEVER . . . it's the perfect sound for that game. It gets you into the mood, it creates atmosphere, and it carries the game along perfectly. When I listen to those songs on my media player, they're perfectly good because I'm not expecting "real" music, just listening to a soundtrack from a game I like. And that's how it should be. There should be no need to imitate a real, orchestral soundtrack if they don't want to, especially when something else, such as the psuedo-techno beats of Deus Ex's music, would suit the game better.
In my opinion, Deus Ex is the perfect example of how a game should do music. If they want 100% synthesized, NES-like beats, they should do that. If it's a Star Wars game, for instance, then they should do a 100% orchestral soundtrack. But they shouldn't feel FORCED to do a 100% orchestral soundtrack. They should just make what will carry along the game best and put you in the mood best, which could be anywhere in between.
Yeah, maybe it'll be useful in my day to day life for me to hear background music.
;).
:).
e.g. ominous sounding music when something bad could be about to happen. Mugger in ally close by.
Romantic music to help tell Mr Clueless Me that the girl is indeed interested
Maybe there should be a super hero/heroine with this ability
I was under assumption that SIDStation was making own
chips, but you are right, my bad:
\ The possible production of SidStation synthesizers is limited.
\ Production of SID-chips has stopped since long, and we have
\ searched all over the world for remaining stock. We will stop
\ the production of SidStation as the stock we've managed to
\ secure is at an end. The price of the SidStation will also be
\ increased as the stock dries out. If you want to be in
\ possession of a SidStation - don't wait.
from : sidstation.com/sidstory_sidwhat.php
--
/apz, SID is much better sounding than Roland TB-303 !!!
How is Halo realistic? How is Zelda WW realistic? How is F-Zero GX realistic? No game is realistic. And I really think thats not the prime goal of most game designers, they want their games too 1) Look good 2) be fun and immersive 3) sell lots (not necessarilly in that order).
No gamer wants purely 'realistic' games. Take FF tactics or advance wars on the GBA (all 'cartoony' btw). Prime examples are GTA and FF, I mean come on look at the summons in FF series they are the furthers thing from realism, in fact look at the dichotomous design in FF8 'real' character models vs. 'cartoony' enemies and you can't say that the enemies and summons were striving for realism, they were striving to look good and for a consistent artistic style. No one really wants things to "look real" they want things to look good and mimic the real world with some artistic liscense. Take "doom3" it looks nowhere near 'real' or photorealistic it looks like really great art but I wouldn't call it real. (how real are zombies/monsters anyway?). IMHO they are striving for 'exagerrated realism' where artistic liscense plays a huge role. Not pure realism.
i think that the guy that wrote the article has no idea of what he's talking about.,
.,
., something which may not be true for him but sure is for most games consumers.,
., much more effective.,
.,
.,
.,.,
:)
one of the things he mentions is that it's cheaper to hire an orchestra than to use synthesizers.,
he promptly forgets that a lot of games include synthetic sounds/music. this kind of music obviously cannot be made with a real orchestra.,
yes, IF you want to emulate an orchestra then it's cheaper to get a real one.,
but most music i hear in games today is synth based
so i dont see his point.,
furthermore, there are lots of tools available today ( they are called SAMPLERS, not synthesizers ) that will alow you to create an instant orchestra., definitely cheaper than to rig up a real one.,
another thing is that by using a medium like DVD you can deliver incredibly complex music which would otherwise be impossible to generate in real time (especially while a game is struggeling for resources to execute simulation code).,
i'm not sure if the writer ever attempted to write a synthesizer but it munches cpu cycles away like the coockiemonster., well, you get the idea.,
he also forgets that the audience is expecting studio quality music
i think the article is bogus and the guy should download a sid emulator or something
games in general are getting more mass market.,
you cannot put too much 'new' stuff in there., that's why some of the companies opt for the orchestral sound., nothing to do with not using the potential of the hardware.,., it's all about cash., most people like orchestras.,
also, he propably doesnt understand that if one would like to generate a score in real time with the use of the hundreds of channels of audio on offer the results would sound like sh?t
mixing algorithms, effects quality, resampling quality, available cpu cycles,etc, etc, all affect the final sound., and unless your style is industrial/glitch music then you shouldnt try.,
furthermore, you've got no controll over the kind of system the music will be heared on and it's capabilityies
so the safest bet is to pre-produce everything and just play the final 2 or 6 channel audio.,
this way you get a consistent quality
something we all want..,
so there are, at least at this time, enough reasons to do stuff the way it's being done.,
enuf for now.,
greets.,
aka.,
Theoretically, vinyl CAN have greater resolution than CD, but once you have played it enough, the wear on the vinyl destroys this. CDs may scratch and rot, but they don't wear.
In practice, you will obtain much better results on CDs, if it isn't the digitally compressed mess of today, unless you are say, SPECIFICALLY trying to record a 23 kHz sine wave onto a medium. Yes, it is possible to do this on vinyl, and not possible on a CD, but that is beside the point.
As for "quality", that is all opinion, but you state it as "In fact...". It is not a FACT at all that vinyl is higher quality than CD, or vice versa. Quality is all up to your perception. If you hear vinyl better, go for it dude. More correctly though, what you COULD have said is that, "In fact, my opinion is that CD is of significantly less quality than vinyl", but you didn't.
Sources: Source 1 Source 2
I'd almost forgotten. The first thing I do in any game is turn off all noises but sound effects. Music in games is fun for the first time or two you play it, then it gets repetitive and tiring real quickly. Its not that the music is boring, or bland- its that while gaming you hear it over and over and over again. It'd be like playing 1 cd constantly, it gets on your nerves. I'd personally like to see either mmusic dropped from games, or at least a turn of option on all console games.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I was referring to raw resolution of the audio signal. Obviously if either a record or CD are damaged, they'll produce less than optimum results. Without having the audio rounded off to the nearest bit, vinyl has if nothing else much better stereo imaging than CD. I've got records that I've played hundreds of times over the last, say, 5 years... having spun them in the forest, in the desert, at clubs, and they still sound better than their CD counterpart. If you take care of your vinyl, calibrate your tonearm, and don't use damaged styli, vinyl really isn't as fragile as people make it out to be.
as it does for a flutist to make his instrument sound like a kazoo
Actually, according to the 8-year old (just started learning) living next door to me, her flute already sounds like a kazoo...
As Audio Director for Flashbang Studios, I have been happy to grab some fame and recognition by taking precisely the approach so opposed in this article. In Beesly's Buzzwords, we managed to receive a nomination to Finalist in the Audio Innovation for Web/Downloadable at the Independent Games Festival at Game Developer's Conference 2004.
While one can never truly get in the minds of the judges, I believe we made it to Finalist precisely because we made our music sound MORE like a symphony orchestra and less like $20 Casio-tone keyboard. The web/downloadable category in large part represents the emerging "casual games" market. The audio budgets, both in cash and file size, can often be quite tiny. As such, synthy, repetitive pseudo-techno is often the norm. A similar game, Pop Cap's Bookworm, has a single in-game loop that's maybe two minutes long. It's synthy and happy and kind of nice, but after playing, I mean "researching" the game for an hour, I wanted to scrub my mind clean of that song.
Keeping that in mind, we gave Beesly four distinct songs, taking a cue from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Winter and Spring are light and airy piano songs on sampled grand piano, and Summer and Fall are full (sampled) orchestrations that sound a bit like Copland if I want to be generous. Which I do, since it's my own project. At the time, my friends Paul and Jon and myself were working on a shoe-string budget. We couldn't afford an orchestra (if we could I would have gone for it), but we could afford a few hundred dollars of sampled Akai CDs. The majority of people who commented on the music for Buzzwords said that they find the it "soothing" and "nice". Some have even gone as far as to say it's the first casual game they haven't simply turned off the music in a few minutes.
There's a reason many people like the sound of the symphony instruments more then synth-phony instruments. (Zing!) That reason is that the mainstays of the symphony orchestra, the brass (Trumpet, french horn), the woodwinds (clarinet oboe bassoon), the strings (violin viola cella bass) are all time-tested in a brutal darwinian competition for survival. For centuries composers have competed for funding and commissions, and in that competitive environment, only the sounds with waveforms and harmonics most naturally suited to some kind of average human ear have survived. Different cultures might find different timbers more appealing, but the surviving instruments have had centuries to settle upon overall pleasing sounds. (I am drawing heavily on a book called Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy here by Robert Jourdain. Slashdot is having trouble with the Amazon.com link.)
Synth instruments are relatively new, having mere decades of darwinian refinement by comparison. Let's take food and wine as an example. Not everyone knows how to cook, but everyone knows what they like. Chefs have had thousands of years to study what human neurology will like in the way of food. Now let's add in the metaphor for synthetics. Tang is vaguely like orange juice, but few people would say it is somehow as tasty or as rich as the real organic thing. Grape Kool-Aid can be tasty in its own right, but wouldn't most people with refined tastes would prefer a fine wine or at least real fruit juice?
Someday artificial foods may somehow surpass real foods, but they'll have to do really well to fool our highly evolved tastes. Take the Replicators on Star Trek- they could in theory replicate any food anyone could want or imagine. Thousands of tastes all at once that leave your taste buds reeling. So what do people usually replicate? Simple and familiar things. Steak and potatoes, coffee, or their old favorites from whatever planet they're from. And we'll use our cheap, flexibile digital hardware to try and make the best symphony sound we can for our next games. With luck,
This thing just read as another "things were better when" piece. Music is music and how it's created is secondary to the results. I don't see all the constraints that he is talking about and I have worked in game audio for 6 years. Games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights were made better with orchestral sounding tracks. Synth sounding tracks would have made the experience less in my opinion.
He cites the example of "Citizen Kane" like a lot of people do when they want to invoke the idea that older is often better. Now, I may get flamed for this, but I didn't think "Citizen Kane" was the best movie of all time. I can see in the context of when it was made how ground breaking it was and how so many films have stood on it's shoulders since then. On the other hand people have gone beyond Kane in writing, acting and cinematography. Just as we have gone beyond the limitations of the SID chip and it's ilk. If I want an electronic sounding track I have that option. If I want a lush orchestral score I have that option. It's about choice and saying that trying to imitate an orchestra with a computer is a bad thing is narrow minded. Just because you can make weird sounds on a SID chip doesn't mean that it's more "innovative". The music from that era used standard structures and harmonies just as game music does today. It's just that sometimes it was hard to tell because the sounds were so primitive.
How many people could listen to the score for Hordes of the Underdark and say it was all synths? No many because the music stands on it's own. It's like saying that we shouldn't bother trying to create realistic lighting in games because it will never be like reality. When he says, "It's cheaper to use live orchestra than synthesizers." he betrayed his ignorance. I've worked with both Jeremy Soule and Jack Wall that he quotes in the piece and I can assure you they would both dispute that statement heartily. It's based on one composers ability and that's far from a good sampling.
Lastly, he is talking to people that for the most part made music when the entire codebase for a game could be in a persons head. These days it's extemely difficult to find people that are both good composers AND good programmers. Those that are rarely have to look for work in games, it usually comes to them. Systems are far more complex now and to be a master in two worlds is a rare talent. Chip tunes are cool in a retro kind of way, but even when they were the latest and greatest I felt they were inadequate. They always felt to me like the composers were doing the best they could with a toy piano.
P.S. - I know it's nit picking, but he also flings terms around like channels and voice without actually knowing what they mean. He might have done a bit more research first.
When I am thinking of games of old, I can find you examples of both electronical music and orchestral music used to greatly enliven the atmosphere. That is, even then there were two approaches (Im speaking about the pc games of the beginning of 90s).
:>
Anyone remembers Betrayal at Krondor? The cd version with awesome music? Thats one of the best examples of 'old school' archestral pieces that is far above a lot of I ever heard in a game (the floppy version has music that is not as good, but on other hand it does not have a full cd for music).
On other hand, I have to do the obligatory StarControl plug (and not to forget Ur-Quan Masters, remake with cool remixed music). Thats one of the better examples of the really good electro music.
Still, there are very good pieces in both old arcade, nes, genesis games and such like. Get the NSF Winamp plugins, and you can listen to the really cool sound of old nes games. Do a google search on NSF files, and there are quite a few places where you can get them. My very personal favorite is music Dragon Fighter.
Hmm, too bad that I have to get back to work. There's still a lot of ground to be covered. It is so unfortunate, that Soviet Russia started with Speccy and did not have anything before it. So many great games that we (russians) did not get to play.
Beepy electronic music may turn some people on, but it is not the best thing for the job often. The background audio on Baldur's Gate II was among the best I have ever heard -- the music was nothing that could not be reproduced by an orchestra, but it did its job admirably and sounded good to boot. The rest of the background was people muttering in English -- crowd chatter, salesmen and stuff. Yes, they COULD have pulled a Tolkien and invented some languages for the background chatter, and they could have hired Chip Davis to do the background music, but they didn't and it was still good -- excellent, even
J. C. Bach a 'memorable' composer? Probably 1 person in 1000 has heard his music.
And Franz Liszt? You're about a century off, buddy.
The article gets worse... it names Shigeru Miyamoto as the composer of the Mario Bros. tunes, implies the Mac was released in 1995... it goes on and on...
I agree the original article missed the point, but in a completely different way. As the audio capabilities of the early PCs and consoles matured, their limitations channeled and forged the creativity of artists in directions where the lack of 'real' instruments was less important.
This generated some very innovative, melodically-driven compositions, but in this I agree with you: it's no use mourning for them.
As for your assertions, maybe I just haven't noticed, but there used to be a term used to describe software like games: Multimedia. Many people are biased towards the sense of vision, but to assert that vision is 'THE focus of the work' (emphasis mine) is incorrect.
There may be more people working on the graphics and textures and animation, but if the audio is rotten, it will be noticed. A good game pays attention to audio and video. It is a synergy. You wouldn't watch the video without the audio, and you wouldn't listen to the audio without the video.
As for the assertion that computer games are the LAST place to expect innovation in audio, computer games are an exceptional environment.
Unlike the other forms of entertainment you blithely equate them with, games are interactive. In TV shows, prerecorded and new compositions are mixed, or transitioned in and out, and in movies, it's not uncommon to have an orchestra and director watching the movie as they record the score! But both of these forms result, eventually, in a static, linear soundtrack.
In games, music transitions are often handled in complex ways. See this article on Adaptive Musical Architectures. I can't seem to find any links, but if I remember, LucasArts made some of the first forays into this area.
Battlefield 1942 has been my favorite audio game lately. Listening to the music as you parachute in over Market Garden, and hearing it drowned out by roar of a B17 flying in low behind you should remove any remaining doubts you may have about the importance of game audio.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA