A midnight-to-one rant about game music!

See, I think game music is a genre that shouldn’t exist, in games, anyway. Game Music, as in Reggae, Pop, Communist Lawful Evil and all those other genres. For those willing to retain a shred of sanity on not interested in pointless rants, maybe skip ahead?

At first the music for games was mainly just bleeps. Simple melodies or classical songs, something that doesn’t strain the hearing. Or there was no real music. Pac-man, Space Invaders, Pong even, the “music” there is created by collision or movement. They had enough job, days, in creating the actual games and the current happy marriage between programmers and musicians didn’t exist back then.

Not even later on, always, talking about Commodore 64 times here. There were de facto musicians like Jeroem Tel or Martin Galway but still, most of the time game music was made by the programmer (witness the sweet sounds of Paradroid) or by enthusiastic musically minded friends (witness the games we forget to mention when blathering about chiptune greatness). The thing separating the somewhat abrasive bleeps and tweets of square-wave based earlier devices and C-64 was of course the fact that it had an actual synthesizer inside it, a desirable one designed by the same guy who did the Ensoniq synthesizers, none the less. We didn’t quite catch it then, but the reason Commodore games sounded vastly superior to those on Spectrum, Aquarius or what have you was that the so-called computer musicians finally got to experiment on proper synthetic sounds and textures and that might have actually turned the compositions from being music approximation to the real thing.

Of course they soon had to give it up. Just like with actual synthesizers that were transforming from knob-laden, sexually attractive growling beasts to a 2001 semi-glossy black surface and a couple of puny buttons overnight, the computer game sound was also going steady downhill from the wonderfully raw synth innards of the Commodore, sonically speaking. Instead of synthesis, they were, after a few years of chaos and tries at creating standard synthetic sounds sets (yeah, always a bright idea, standardization), to find the wonder of samples.

A wonder only starts being a wonder when it’s fully grown, I suppose. Nowadays that we can include full soundtracks in games the new technology has finally started being a blessing again. Initially, with games being stored on floppies, you can calculate quite fast that including one ten-second sample in CD quality, as if anything could’ve played that back, would’ve taken more than what was allocated for the sounds of a whole game. Instead, after clearing the minefield of Ad-lib, Roland’s earliest, crappiest sample-based sound cards and all kinds of FM bleepers, people had the choice of using TRACKERS in their music making! Fancy!

Trackers. The wikipedia entry was useless, so, basically, for the uninitiated, they are programs that allow the user to arrange samples, pitched individually, in a vertical grid representing time. Music making software, the first real universal one there was, for almost every computer or console that could play back sampled sound . It was a massive step forward, meaning that anyone could make music – and they did. Sometimes it was pure genius, like the Bitmap Brothers Speedball 2 theme, more often it was some kind of a precursor of Coder Trance, music that thrived in the unnatural pitching and quantization and lack of any kind of effects, limitations that the ancient tracker technology imposed. It suited some games, most of all games designed by coders, really well. Actually, when you listen to the tracker music of nowadays, it seems like there’s still an abundance of Coder Trance, maybe it’s become like a sign language to all demoscene guys after all these years, perhaps they can speak of the unnameable function only through it? Before I get publicly crucified for hating on the trackers, yes, i’m sure the 1% rule applies. Just as somewhere there doubtlessly is one good Christian Emo song (perhaps called “Cut a X for Jsus”, who knows), there is a lot of really brilliant tracker music out there. Some of my best friends are track. I’m, you know, down with shit? Track is the Bomb. It’s sick and ill. Anyhow,

It seems that for people more seriously interested in music making as opposed to being oldskool, trackers have become some kind of an analogy to analog step sequencers, with a modern, musically useful tracker software aptly named Renoise, at least. For me the two things that make trackers unique are the fiddly, rather mechanical sequencing and the badly interpolated machine-gun sound of too few samples being used, with too few bits, often recorded with Amiga in the nineties, and carried through ages, like a souvenier, proudly used in new songs, as to say that you want people to know you are 1337 and will not multisample or filter stuff if it kills you. Renoise kind of retains the second unique feature/constraint but by allowing the use of plug-in instruments and effects, and by having a good interpolation manages to become a tracker relatively unconstrained by the legacy of kilobyte-saving, letting people focus on the wonderfully mechanical sequencing.

Wonderful nowadays, that is, that whole songs don’t have to be constructed around a single bass sample, one for a synth and a few short, clippy drums, without effects. And it seems some of that original compositional sparseness and, well, rudeness imposed on game composers by the old technological limitations has been carried to the compositions of a lot of modern game music, if not always the sound.

Let me take another detour here, since I’m drunk and rambling, to synth preset sounds. The problem with those is, for me, that they try hard to sound like synth sounds. Take an acoustic piano, a beautiful, hulking beast unfit for handling by someone like me, sample it really well, with microphones SO precise that the sample sounds a bit cold if anything. Then clean up the sample, add tons of reverb, maybe layer it with a synthetic piano or another canned one, clean it like you were cleaning your own crime scene. You have a preset piano sound. It’s not piano, if it were, I’m sure people would complain about it’s lack of spaciousness and power or simply not_be_impressed when demoing the synth in a store.

Game music, as a genre, is a bit like that piano. It’s trying to be like game music so it’d fit the games that are trying to be games like people remember games to be. Think Epic Japanese Hair Metal Techno, as heard in the action sequences of half the nipponese games in the past 15 years. That’s not any music genre, it’s game music and it seems to have its own hectic set of rules. Those rules are often derived from the way music used to be sequenced and from the formerly good ethics of making the music small in kilobytes (thus, with samples, reducing the sonic richness). Now, it usually takes a certain love for gaming for people to enter the field so the ones deciding on the game art style are almost certainly hardcore gamers and after they have come to expect this kind of soundtrack in certain kinds of games they might specifically ask for it and that’s what they’ll get. Turn-based action sequence, cue in a general midi sounding but probably hugely expensive orchestral theme with an electric guitar solo. In 2009. And we WILL hear the same final fantastical synth guitar wankery in 2019, too. There will be people loving that shit in 20 years. Probably myself included, all bald and raving to the FFXV love theme!

Bioshock, Ico, Warriors, Fallout 3, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory; these are fine examples of games that have music, made or especially fitted for the game, and it’s not game_music, it’s actual music. Music that, in most of those examples, someone like me wouldn’t be educated enough to make. Music not constrained by the history of computer games but blessed with the history of music, maybe that’s what I’m getting at. In general, if you ask me, Game Music should think more about games and music, less about conventions. Game companies should try, more and more, to use actual breathing musicians in their productions and, if possible, not ask for that wanky guitar-and-a-hyperactive-orchestra bit in the turn-based fight scene even if it suited FFn so well. And even if your producer likes trance, well, it’s all too possible he’s a massive cock right but how will it differentiate from all the other two-stick arcade shooters playing that same futuristic trance music? Is he in the target demographic?

Playing it safe might be the right choice when doing the gaming equivalent of The Young and the Restless but it never really gets people anywhere interesting, sometimes the right choice might actually be to just hire that hippie you know who is ready to experiment a bit and makes the kind of indian/nepalese kind of ritual music that your game designer thought might fit the Aeon Flux-inspired RTS game you’re working on. Luckily people do this more and more and musicians (a scary word) not from a computer music background, often meaning: “with some musical training” have also been lining up for game soundtrack work since games have been allowed to have real audio tracks in them.

From where I’m standing, my money not in my mouth, invisible clothes and all, unless you aim at making a game that sounds like games sound (you can put it nicely but the word is “unremarkable”), or are Popcap* doing a casual hit, it is always worth it to try something exactly suited for the game, the experience at hand, rather to do something for the genre. If someone’s opposed, they can always mute the sounds. With iPhone for one, it seems to be what most people do anyway.

*Of course the Popcap example brings out a nice point about why game music often sounds like elevator music – how would you create hours of game time worth of music without hogging an album’s worth of space? Or: “How long would people listen to this before getting annoyed?”