Video game music
[2] At the time video games had emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the late 1970s, music was stored on physical media in analog waveforms such as cassette tapes and phonograph records.
As advances were made in silicon technology and costs fell, a definitively new generation of arcade machines and home consoles allowed for great changes in accompanying music.
The home computer Commodore 64 released in 1982 was capable of early forms of filtering effects, different types of waveforms and eventually the undocumented ability to play 4-bit samples on a pseudo fourth sound channel.
Composers who made a name for themselves with their software include Koichi Sugiyama (Dragon Quest),[11] Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy), Rob Hubbard (Monty On the Run, International Karate), Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda), Miki Higashino (Gradius, Yie-Ar Kung Fu, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Hiroshi Kawaguchi (Space Harrier, Hang-On, Out Run), Hirokazu Tanaka (Metroid, Kid Icarus, EarthBound), Martin Galway (Daley Thompson's Decathlon, Stryker's Run, Times of Lore), David Wise (Donkey Kong Country), Yuzo Koshiro (Dragon Slayer, Ys, Shinobi, ActRaiser, Streets of Rage), Mieko Ishikawa (Dragon Slayer, Ys), and Ryu Umemoto (visual novels, shoot 'em ups).
Developers could use this platform to take samples of a music performance, sometimes just a single note long, and play it back through the computer's sound chip from memory.
[citation needed] Arcade systems pushed game music forward in 1984 with the introduction of FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis, providing more organic sounds than previous PSGs.
Despite the additional tone channels, writing music still posed a challenge to traditional composers and it forced much more imaginative use of the FM synthesizer to create an enjoyable listening experience.
"[18] The soundtrack for Streets of Rage 2 (1992) in particular is considered "revolutionary" and "ahead of its time" for its blend of house music with "dirty" electro basslines and "trancey electronic textures" that "would feel as comfortable in a nightclub as a video game.
[citation needed] The release of a freely-distributed Amiga program named Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987 started the era of MOD-format which made it easy for anyone to produce music based on digitized samples.
This divergence would be lessened as the fifth generation of home consoles launched globally, and as Commodore began to take a back seat to general-purpose PCs and Macs for developing and gaming.
In 1996, the Nintendo 64, still using a solid-state cartridge, actually supported an integrated and scalable sound system that was potentially capable of 100 channels of PCM, and an improved sample rate of 48 kHz.
While sampled sound could be achieved on the PC speaker using pulse width modulation, doing so required a significant proportion of the available processor power, rendering its use in games rare.
Both companies offered 'daughterboards' with sample-based synthesizers that could be later added to a less expensive soundcard (which only had a DAC and a MIDI controller) to give it the features of a fully integrated card.
Some tied into the Yamaha FM chip to simulate instruments, some daughterboards of samples had very different sound qualities; meaning that no single sequence performance would be accurate to every other General MIDI device.
Looping, the most common form of game music, was also a problem as when the laser reached the end of a track, it had to move itself back to the beginning to start reading again causing an audible gap in playback.
Games ported from arcade machines, which continued to use FM synthesis, often saw superior pre-recorded music streams on their home console counterparts (Street Fighter Alpha 2).
One of the earliest games, Ridge Racer, was loaded entirely into RAM, letting the player insert a music CD to provide a soundtrack throughout the entirety of the gameplay.
PCs continue to rely on third-party devices for in-game sound reproduction, and SoundBlaster is largely the only major player in the entertainment audio expansion card business.
Additionally, with the large growth of the video game market in the 2000s, song licensing became a lucrative route for music rights holders to gain part of that revenue.
[39] Alpha Protocol by Obsidian Entertainment was also pulled from sale in 2019 due to expiring music license rights, though there are no known plans if publisher Sega will seek to renew these.
The genre's compositional elements largely developed due to technological restraints, while also being influenced by electronic music bands, particularly Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), who were popular during the late 1970s to 1980s.
[43] Features of the video game music genre include: Although the tones featured in NES music can be thought of as emulating a traditional four-piece rock band (triangle wave used as a bass, two pulse waves analogous to two guitars, and a white noise channel used for drums), composers would often go out of their way to compose complex and rapid sequences of notes, in part due to the restrictions mentioned above.
In an unrelated but parallel course in the European and North American developer scene, similar limitations were driving the musical style of home computer games.
As technological limitations gradually lifted, composers were given more freedom and, with the advent of CD-ROM, pre-recorded soundtracks came to dominate, resulting in a noticeable shift in composition and voicing style.
This has been somewhat less of an issue more recently as domestic publishers of anime and video games have been producing western equivalent versions of the OSTs for sale in UK and US, though these are often for more popular titles.
[75] In 1991, American alternative rock band Pixies released a cover version of the main theme from the arcade game Narc as a B-side to the single "Planet of Sound".
[76] More recently, "video game beats" have appeared in popular songs such as Kesha's "Tik Tok",[64] the best-selling single of 2010,[77] as well as "U Should Know Better" by Robyn featuring Snoop Dogg,[64] and "Hellbound" by Eminem.
She had edited the 2nd issue of the online journal ACT – Zeitschrift für Musik und Performance,[105] published in July 2011, which included ludomusicological contributions written by Tim Summers, Steven B. Reale and Jason Brame.
[107] The SSSMG has the aim of bringing together both practitioners and researchers from across the globe in order to develop the field's understanding of sound and video game music and audio.
[5] The Japanese dōjin music scene is notable for producing albums of arranged videogame music which derived from popular retro franchises such as Mega Man, Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy,[137] from dōjin games, such as Touhou Project, studio Key visual novels and When They Cry series, from popular franchises on Comiket, such as Type-Moon's Fate series or Kantai Collection.
