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Techniques and Styles of Video Game Music
MarkN writes "Video game music has come to represent much more than just the beeps and boops of early video games that often got muted out of annoyance. It's a genre that stands on its own, stylistically and musically. It necessarily differs from typical soundtrack fare in a few important ways — it's written to accompany an activity rather than meant to be listened to passively, it is often required to loop and extend indefinitely, and it has the potential to be adaptive and respond to player feedback. In this article, I talk about some of the techniques used to make game music effective within its constraints and with all of its potential, and discuss how different styles and musical techniques can relate to the gameplay."
It's the same as any other music, meant to accompany entertainment. Orchestral, techno, ambient, there is no difference. Get over it.
Aerith's Theme from FFVII. To think that something so simple on a grand scale can lodge itself so deeply in the soul.
Pinball games with Bsmt2000 sound and the mid 80's / 90's games had good midi based music where real good.
Chris Granner and Brian Schmidt did real good work with the sound on the games they did the sound work for.
For instance, Final Fantasy and Myst both feature orchestral soundtracks but the composing techniques used do vary, leading to different effects being created. The tendency seems to be that Japanese games feature melodic tunes for every scene/stage/level whereas Western games tend to use more ambient compositions.
Would someone with more knowledge in the area care to elaborate?
Aly.
I'm surprised nothing from Tetsuya Mizuguchi is mentioned in the article. He produced/concepted Rez, Lumines and Every Extend Extra among others. These games heavily intertwine gameplay into sound and music. Often times the player not only affects the music being played, but 'creates' some of it. When you lock-on to targets in Rez, sometimes it syncs up with the beat, which creates majestic results.
Many games just wouldn't be the same without their soundtracks; the works of Hideki Naganuma and Frank Klepacki would be excellent examples.
Tin Drum studios i think? I cant believe I remember that, haven't played that game in years. It was a techno soundtrack but very ambient-like in most cases, was the classic didnt notice it much until you started humming out the beats later on.
*DrugCheese rants*
For anyone who is at least a fan of video game music, I highly suggest attending a Video Games Live concert. I'm going to one in January and it should be awesome. I'm not the biggest fan of video game music, but mostly I'm going for the experience that the VGL guys create with the videos in the background and such.
The original Unreal: Various level songs but during combat the song would start to get more intense, even based on how many opponents you were up against. They added anything from instruments to completely different shifts of melody. It helps it used the tracker xm file format for the tunes I think.
The music that plays in the menu when you first start the game up is important for setting the tone of the game. The music for the game Mafia was absolutely masterful at this.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Whether you like shit, crap or simply awful music there's something for everyone in the world of computer music. Seriously, i don't know anyone who doesn't turn the music off immediately and just have the sound effects.
I think that Aliens Vs. Predator for PC, despite having static tracks that cycled at random (at least specific tracks depending on what race you were playing as) had some of the most fitting game music ever. it was very true to style the movies and made you feel like you were really taking part in a movie of your own. Halflife did it a different way, instead of music throughout, certain shorter tracks would trigger at certain parts throughout the game, also giving it a more cinematic experience. Serious Sam, despite being fun in a silly way would switch from normal background music to faster paced metal parts when an enemy rush or boss fight would trigger. Deus Ex and System Shock 2 were the first games i can remember that had dynamic soundtracks that flowed elegantly between combat, stealth, and just wandering around.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
They have a whole section about dynamic music in TFA, but fail to mention full dynamic systems like LucasArt's iMUSE.
Yes, OK it's nice that Mario Kart Wii's music gets muted when you're underground.
But at the same time, LucasArt's adventure games have been able to assemble musical score on-the-fly based on the combination of a several pre-written pieces and a set of conditions based on current status.
These doesn't use as much a "musical score" or a pre-written "music" as they mix freely a large quantity of smaller "themes" combined to form a continuous score.
It provides a much better musical environment to the game, but also introduce some difficulties and drawbacks :
- It's much more complicated to compose. You can't just out-source the music to some artist whom you ask to write a score. The music design has to be an important part of the rest of the game design.
- There won't be any actual song created for the game. You won't be able to sell a CD with tracks from the game. You'll have to hire an additionnal DJ to make a nice mix of the themes (basically replicating what the game engine does in-play).
- As there aren't actual song, you can't just license known tunes from known artists. You can put song from Prodigy or Offspring on Wipe Out or on Crazy Taxi. You can put Bob Marley as-is on Monkey Island 2.
The last two points explain why most mega-corp aren't interested in this.
The first point explains why indie game developper won't easily be able to do this.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The video game music from the 16-bit era and before was the most interesting to me because the constraints the composers had to work with created a unique musical style. Like the composers on the NES were working with at most a triangle wave and square wave generator, and maybe a noise generator as well (but probably not all three at once). They weren't only limited in the kinds of sounds they could use, but it also required most of the songs to be monophonic. And then there were memory restrictions, so that the tracks often had to repeated every minute or so without being ridiculously annoying.
Now that these limitations are non-existent in newer games, I think the most interesting aspect of game music is the idea of dynamic music that mixes multiple tracks or generates new music in response to the game. I can't think of any really amazing examples of this though. But it's been around forever, like the bongo drums that start playing when you get Yoshi in Super Mario World totally change the feeling of the music, or in the X-Wing games where the evil imperial MIDI plays whenever a star destroyer warps in.
Now it seems like now a lot of developers use typical movie score type of music (not surprising since high budget games have basically become interactive movies) or just license popular music tracks and throw them into the game. This is rather disappointing given the potential for really awesome interactive music.
Both Anarchy Online and EvE Online had such evocative music that I found myself listening to it offline, even after I no longer subscribed. The music actually got me to resubscribe to Anarchy Online for a while just because I loved the atmosphere it evoked.
I've heard some good game music before but only these two made me think I needed to add their soundtracks to my library.
The author is stating the obvious and making superfluous categorisations. All the 9 pages could well be fit in one or two paragraphs - in one slashdot post if you wish.
Though his style is admittedly admirable. What he lacks contentwise he makes up with literary style.
Oh, so true, so true, my friend!
Take the marvellous music of Tetris - it is impossible to express it in other terms than it's Russian-ness!
It has this particular ... uhm... aire of a Diaghileff dance with tints of Mussorgsky expressed authenticly by the unexplicable broad Russian soul of a Solzhenytsin. It sparks the image of Vrubel's Seated Demon in my mind. I wonder if I'm the only one.
Art academics is the cancer that is eating culture. imho. I wish they left games alone but they're befuddling them with Wagners and national characters and whatnot.
It's just a question of time untill those professors of game design will develop their own arcane vocabulary. How else would we know their work is serious business worth the salary?
Now, how about an arpeggiated dynamic piano anticipatory presentation factor for your next unit of gameplay? Would you like it Japanese? I can't really bring up the player-system-enthusiasm for even a sub-boss without a proper dynamic anticipatory musical accompaniment, especially if it's not Japanese. What I'm wondering at now is how this new wave of Japanese neo-post-existentionalism in game design will affect the french maitres.
I'm a composer, myself, and a game soundtrack enthusiast, and one thing I've noticed time and time again is the drastic differences in philosophy between Japanese and western game soundtracks.
Japanese composers tend to approach scoring from a more stylized approach, more akin to opera or broadway musicals. The technique of giving each character and element its own unique theme was first pioneered by Wagner back in the 1860s, but it has become a staple of dramatic scoring and often used for "epic" film soundtracks as well (John Williams is one of the masters of this).
It's a very effective approach to scoring... but it does stylize the action to a certain extent. In the eyes of many western game developers, it over-stylizes the action. Western game developers appear to be quite phobic of stylization and mellodrama, and are far more concerned with upholding the perception of "realism" than being emotionally dynamic (dramatic). For this reason, western game soundtracks use much less of the techniques found in dramatic genres. Each piece is scored independantly, and the soundtrack generally lacks any over-arching themes or conceptualization. Western game soundtracks tend to be generally very loose, many times with different composers writing music for different sections of the game.
On one hand, it does assure that the game doesn't feel stylized, which is one of the major goals of western game soundtracks, but the caveat is that it impede on the "continuous flow" which seems to be another primary goal of western game developers.
Personally, as a fan of the dramatic, epic, and heavily conceptualized... I greatly prefer Japanese soundtracks to western ones. As a composer, I like the fact that the music plays a more dominant roll, and is used to really help style each game uniquely. I strongly dislike the realistic school of a videogame design... I like every title to have its own unique character through its music, graphic design, and writing. I think that western games become a bit monotonous because their ideal is one of characterlessness. Of course, I'm generalizing. I'm currently playing Fallout 3 now and enjoying the hell out of it... but then again, it's heavily stylized in many areas; it has the 50s kitch and futurism stylization to really weave the setting together. It's similar to how the brash art-deco stylization made Bioshock shine.
However, when I think of the greatest original soundtracks that really hit home, I'm always going to go back to Final Fantasy VIII, Metroid Prime 1, Mario Galaxy, or Chrono Trigger. They weren't afraid of the music taking on its own unique character in the context of the game, interweaving themes in interesting ways, and being highly influential in giving each game its own unique feel.
As an aspiring composer myself, I'm not sure I fit in with the current western aesthetic in game music. I simply feel that western composers and directors are too hung up on destroying any semblance of stylization, the very thing that I think really makes the genre so damn appealing in the first place. We just need to get over our fear of the dramatic. There's nothing wrong with open-ended realism, but I'm starting to feel like there's a major stigma against any games that aren't. Is stylization concidered to be a sign of weakness or caused by some kind of latent homophobia or sense of "wussiness"? Get over it, it makes life entertaining.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Sonic games often had some great music to play to. Especially in later games such as Sonic Adventure, it often sets the tone for final bosses.