Designing away from the derivative

 

No medium is as beholden to its sound design and production as video games. It is an industry which, despite being worth $84.1 billion last year, is never given recognition, be it creatively, contextually or in the sense of its world building and immersiveness.

Video games are not a passive medium like movies or tv. They require a world to be built to then be inhabited by the player. Every footstep, every door opening, the weather effects or the visceral blast of an explosion, everything is carefully crafted.

Few games outside of the $100 million production values of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series can afford to license real world songs so it is made from scratch and, Clint Mansell's of the world aside, it is already surpassing its more established celluloid counterpart.

The 2012 Grammy's saw a games first nomination at an unequivocally mainstream event. “To be nominated alongside John Williams and Hans Zimmer is something I genuinely never thought would happen”, Austin Wintory told Wired magazine, adding, “its a long way from Streets of Rage 2.”

Wintory's work on Journey, a mesmeric and ambient game for Sony's various consoles. It would eventually lose out to Trent Reznor's 'Girl with a Dragon Tattoo' soundtrack but, regardless, it was another step on the medium's own journey to true appreciation.

Unlike film, video games don't find themselves as crushingly tied to preconceptions. For every Jack Wall, Mass Effect soundtrack with its huge orchestral strings, sci-fi theremins and Solaris ambience, which cost Canadian developer Bioware almost as much as their entire physics engine, there are indie darlings embracing obsolete technologies and out moded methods to recreate the ear-worms of the 80's and 90's.

Of those earworms, it is Streets of Rage 2 (1992) for the Sega Megadrive which is considered the high water mark both contemporaneously and historically. Yuzo Koshiro was the Bowie of 16bit beats. Working as he was at the time with already outdated technology, an NEC PC-8801, utilised; PSG sound-chips, SID chips and waveform generators to create a retro-futuristic soundtrack that still elevates the game today.

Ed McMillan and Tommy Refennes 2008 release, Super Meat Boy, could have come directly from the realms of Super Nintendo or Sega Megadrive and utilises the same technology, or at least digital emulations of it. Re-embracing the SID chips, FM synthboards, Music Macro Language and Midi interfaces to lead a lo-fi, low bit renaissance. Unlike film the finished product doesn't feel dated as a game's mechanics, controls and visual ambience work to create a polished whole.

In the case of this pixellated, punishing, platforming tale of a skinless boy and the bandage based soul mate, it is not just the tight controls and rapid response gameplay of yore but vibrant, pulsing, catchy soundtrack complete with chip-based synthesis of electric guitar solos and driving riffs, which make it so compulsive.

The most common Chiptune video game music is Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. theme from their 1985 NES console debut. It's distinctive sound was generated accidentally as the console's chips couldn't accurately capture the steel drum calypso sound Kondo wanted.

The theme was to be scrapped before the father of the series and its lead designer, Shigeru Miyamoto personally stepped in and decreed it to be used as the canonical theme. Thirty years on and it sounds as fresh as ever and is still the most recognisable piece of game music in the world, the second being the Tetris theme.

Modern sampling and synthesizer technology grew in complexity and abundance throughout the 90's and 2000's as games grew in stature and scope so did their soundtracks. They became grand and cinematic in many cases, mimicked the dance electronic music of the time or slipped into art-house inflected minimalism. Dynamic masterpieces such Harry Gregson-Williams' scores for Hideo Kojima's behemoth of a game series, Metal Gear has given the game's worlds contextual consistency across time periods and locales. The third instalment, Snake Eater's Bond-esque theme, is superior to any 007's recent themes.

Speaking at the awards, “it's been a long time coming,” the 28 year old Denver native, Wintory, went on, “I almost feel ashamed that so much great stuff has been done over the last decade that for reasons unknown has never got the recognition it deserves from the music industries.”

Role playing game Rogue Legacy boasts a 16 bit soundtrack filled with sinister synthesised strings adding a level for tension and foreboding otherwise impossible due to the game's cutesy graphics and 80's schlock-fest Hotline Miami embraces 80's syths and modern Chiptune to create a sense of place and depth as effective as those created through similar techniques in Nicholas Winding Refn's 2011 film Drive.

Regardless of how any individual may view the games industry or the old SID driven styles of music and sound design, their growing significance in and around creative industry sectors point to more opportunities and branches for all and the cross-overs into mainstream popular music with acts like Crystal Castles, The Prodigy and Daft Punk shows that the beeps and bloops are back and this time, here to stay.

Copyright 2012

 

History Through Music – Part 2: Christmas Canceled – Macka B, 2000

“It’s Christmas!” Slade’s opening shout will usually start ringing out in the UK’s shops sometime in November, here is the States I’ve heard Jingle Bell Rock about a million times already – though I will never be able to shake the association with John McClane and ‘terrorists with smaller feet than my sister’.

All rambling aside, the factual roots of Christmas have been long lost in most parts of our society, if we ever knew what it was in the first place, but most of all in our mass media. Music litters itself with clichés and movies seldom refer to anything other than 19th century machinations such as Santa, reindeer, pine trees and child abducting snowmen.

To offer some alternative, here are the wikibombed lyrics to British born reggae artist and activist Macka B’s song for a more ‘conscious’ take on it all.

Christmas has been canceled it's been postponed
No longer celebrated inna we home.
Pagan things we try to leave them alone
Incorporated into Christianity by Rome
We're using our brain we're breaking the chain
We're not playing the Christmas game what a shame (2x)

All the drunkenness and the overeating.
Is it the birth of Christ they're celebrating?
Mostly non Christians are partaking
Fi some it's just an excuse fi money making
They say peace and goodwill to all men
So how come they're putting up the prices then?
Targeting the parents through the children
Well them nah ketch I and I again no way me friend

A long time the 25th of December
has been a special date in the pagans calendar
Long, long before the birth of Christ
It was a day for partying and celebrating and to rejoice
From Nimrod to Saturn to Mithra
These Gods were always honoured on that day in December
Worshiping of sun Gods and idols
Why you think Christmas is never mentioned in the Bible

You see the tree and the ivy and the mistletoe
All of these were pagan things a long time ago
People have them in their house and they don't know what they mean
They just come see them so they just join in
Santa Claus what a fraud never once come a me yard
A me parents have to work, work so hard
Christmas put people under pressures
Don't you see that Santa and Satan have got the same letters

Christmas has been canceled it's been postponed
No longer celebrated inna we home.
Pagan things we try to leave them alone
Incorporated into Christianity by Rome
We're using our brain we're breaking the chain
We're not playing the Christmas game what a shame (2x)

History through Music Part 1: We Didn’t Start the Fire – Billy Joel, 1989

It only takes five letters of this song’s title for Google instant to suggest Billy Joel’s 1989 hit single. The song’s lyrics cover forty years of history and reference over 100 significant events and figures..

Billy Joel, a self confessed ‘history nut’, once wanted to become a history teacher and said in an interview at the time of the single’s release that the idea had come to him when talking to a young fan who told him ‘you were born in the fifties, nothing happened in the fifties’.

Joel told author Bill DeMain: “I had turned forty. It was 1989 and I said; "Okay, what's happened in my life?" I wrote down the year 1949. Okay, Harry Truman was president. Popular singer of the day, Doris Day. China went Communist. Another popular singer, Johnnie Ray. Big Broadway show, South Pacific. Journalist, Walter Winchell. Athlete, Joe DiMaggio. Then I went on to 1950.”

Despite the song’s success at the time and longevity to this day, Joel added: “It's one of the worst melodies I've ever written. I kind of like the lyric though”.

Here’s the lyrics all wikibombed up courtesy of ItinerantChild.com:

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray 
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio 

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television 
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe 

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom 
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye" 

Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen 
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

CHORUS
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev 
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc 

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock 

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland 

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez 

[Chorus]


Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Zhou Enlai, Bridge On The River Kwai 

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California Baseball
Starkweather homicide, Children of Thalidomide

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo 

[Chorus]


Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land,
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs and Beijing 

Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson 

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say

[Chorus]

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and Roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on...