What makes videogame music sound videogamey?

[marurun]

I think with video game tracks, there are certain hallmarks you are looking for within classic stuff. They all revolve around the hardware limitations. First is PSG sounds. Simple waveforms with no filtering and basic envelopes. Square, saw, triangle, that sort of thing. Second is FM synthesis. Arcade boards, consoles, and PC hardware tended to use cheaper, lower quality FM synth chips, meaning you really ended up with all the personality of FM synth and none of the smooth Yamaha DX7-style quality. Third, with the Amiga and SNES, is low-quality digital samples with pitch adjustments to create music. Again, cheaper-quality hardware, low-memory environments, limited channels... All this technology existed in electronic instruments and accessories for musicians long before being incorporated into computers and game systems, but musicians demanded a certain quality, and more effort was put into offering quality components and filtering and the like.

If this sounds like an indictment, it's not. The best game composers knew their limits and so they had to make the quality of their compositions stand out in limited polyphony with limited quality, and in tight memory limits. You can spot old video game music because the compositions of the good stuff are tight. The sounds used are best-in-class for the limited options and quality available. The compromises made tend to be carefully considered. I think there was a certain mindset in those communities. Composers had their inspirations (prog and art rock in Japan, dance and techno/electronica in the EU, not sure about the US) and adapted their chosen genres to their limited tools. You can feel that attention to quality in their tracks. Look at the soundtrack to Actraiser on the SNES. Not only did Koshiro compose those tracks, but he personally oversaw sample optimization to make sure he was getting the absolute best out of the very limited memory available in the SNES for samples. Quality control from top to bottom.

[Anapan]

^Yeah, that's really important - I learned this when I was playing with LSDJ. With only 4 tracks, you have to eliminate anything extraneous. Stick with the strongest parts of the song. This has an analogue with Anime - the simplified lines, use of curves, large eyes, etc. It's all about compression and best use of the limited medium. Totally Japanese (?). It's kinda like playing Tetris, or simplifying a line drawing or photo into curves in a vector image. Smooth everything over using your artistic skills to make a perfect scalable image that can be expressed in a simple algorithm.

Arpeggios were exploited on the Commodore 64. I know they were used earlier - even on PC Speaker, but this is where it was really used to it's best. The SID chip was so limited, and the user-base was so large and collaborative in it's exploitation of the hardware. Someone found a way to toggle 2 tones really quickly (like the old touch-tone phone DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) sounds) to make use of one channel to approximate two instruments. This was expanded to 3 and more immediately. Now an arpeggio is it's own type of electronic instrument - used in EDM to invoke nostalgia and give grain to otherwise simplistic musical sequences.

The process from chip to MIDI can be reversed to an extent. There are gigabyte-sized piano virtual instruments and analogues in every main instrument that a band would use. For the most part, those are the digital instruments composers use for the main themes in soundtracks. They have been recorded in 5.1 surround in multiple environments and come with their own mastering. When using them as a virtual instrument, you can choose their position in a room and all.
The same site I linked has links to how you could interface a midi virtual instrument with a game music rip, or in some cases realtime feed the game's musical...
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oops. lost my train of thought. talk more tomorrow.,

[Erik_Twice]

I think the kind of people that composed video game music and the creative environment they were are also very important when it comes to this.

Most video game music composers had little or no experience when they started to work in the medium. They were simply either clasically trained, had their own band or were knee-deep in some kind of scene. They were not professionals and brought a very unique set of influences into their work.

This is why metal is the most common genre in classic video games and why electronic music is such a staple of Amiga games.

They also had very little artistic constrains, as long as the equally nerdy game designer thought it was fitting it would go in.

I think the arival of Hollywood-esque compositions into gaming is a mixture of the two above plus rising budgets allowing for full orchestras to be deployed.

[J T]

As I continue to go back and listen to classic OSTs from games I played in my early youth, I realize that the NES and SNES had a big hidden influence on my later tastes in music. Chip music set the foundation for me to get into many aspects of EDM. The intricate melodies of gaming soundtracks led me to feel bored with modern pop, and crave things like prog rock, jazz, and classical. The multicultural influences in games that tried to represent different aspects of the world influenced my interest in world musics. The unusual characteristics of odd soundtrack moments would influnece my later interests in experimental music and the avant garde. When I go back and listen to old soundtracks, I have a musical vocabulary for them now that I didn't have then, but I can see how my tastes evolved out of those old 8-bit and 16-bit classics.

[samsonlonghair]

Chip music set the foundation for me to get into many aspects of EDM. The intricate melodies of gaming soundtracks led me to feel bored with modern pop

Dude, modern pop is NOTHING BUT EDM. It's all EDM all darn day long.

[J T]

Yes, but EDM is an umbrella term that includes everything from Squarepusher to Katy Perry, who sound wildly different.

[Sarge]

Here's some great chiptune rock for ya. You can just hear the guitars in there.



Oh, wait, someone did update it.

[J T]

To say a bit more about EDM, I think the major innovation of electronic music is the emphasis on unique timbres. The holy trinity of music theory is usually melody, harmony, and rhythm. With the advent of synthesizers, timbre rose to an equal level of importance. With an analogue synth, you have control over a huge amount of parameters of the timbre of the synthetic instrument by being able to adjust the basic wave form (square, triangle, sine, saw) and to run these through oscillators, filters, attack envelopers, etc. When they started making acid house in the 80s, the Roland TB-303 bass machine became the instrument of choice because you could tweak your bassline timbre over the course of a track. People got really creative with timbre over time, even if the melodies remained simple. One of my favorite examples of this is a track called Wales, by DJ Merlyn where in the last 2/3rds of the track, the repeating basslines and synth leads twist, bend, and modulate their timbres continuously.

Videogame music got me interested in synthetic sounds at an early age. Music didn't have to be confined to guitars, bass, pianos, etc. You could make your own instrument timbres that have their own unique feeling. Of course, there is a lot more you can do with sound in EDM than in video game chip music, especially when you get into further details regarding sound engineering, mixing, and mastering.

I always feel like I'm going back to basics when I listen to chip music though. It feels raw to strip away all the layers of production techniques and just let the chips belt it out. There is something sweet and innocent about chip music, that has an earnestness about it like lo-fi shoegazer music. It can also be more abrasive in its raw form, like punk music (which is why I have a softspot for chip-punks like Werewolf Fucking Asso). All this is simply to say that I have a love for the basic chip sound, and this is a well-connected node in my web of musical interesets.

[J T]

KeyGlyph mentioned something on an episode of her VGM Jukebox podcast, which really resonated with me, which was that in a really good videogame loop, you don't really feel that it is repetitive, but rather that the end of each loop just gets you excited for the next cycle.

I think this is a great point, and I've noticed a few different tricks that game composers use to keep loops from getting stale. One that I already mentioned, is that there can be a bunch of staccato stabs at the end of the loop, there might be a rest, and then a quick flourish back into the loop. As an example, take Mad Forest from Castlevania 3. At the 5 and 50 second marks in this video, you will hear an example of what I am talking about, Though it's not technically the end of the loop, you still feel that sense of resolution that just kicks right back into the next cycle and you don't want it to stop. It's like the composer is building anticipation for the repetition, rather than making it feel redundant. It helps that the rest of the loop is awesome too, obviously.

Another trick for keeping the loop on a good vibe, is that they usually run through a few unique passages. There is often a funky rhythmic passage, a simple melodic passage, and a busy melodic passage with counterpoint harmonic melodies and/or arpeggios. If we stick with that same song from Castlevania 3, you'll notice the rhythmic passage starts us off, ending with the staccato send-up 5 seconds in, which sets up the main busy melodic passage, and is eased into the simplified melodic passage about 37 seconds in, before repeating the loop. Videogames need loops that you can enjoy listening to on repeat for long stretches of time, and Castlevania 3 delivers.

Another technique that I think helps with this is when game composers repeat a theme, but with alterations. If they do this a few times, you sort of lose track of where the loop started, and it then feels less repetitive as well. Some composers will even hide the main melody for awhile, then bring it back on a different instrument. All of these variations on a theme keep the the repeated melody feeling fresh, but constant, which also blurs the line of where the loop starts and ends.

I think these kind of strategies are also part of what might be used to define a videogame music genre, at least one that grew out of looping 8 and 16 bit soundtracks.