Hey guys,

This is a piece I've written about video game music and some of what makes it different from other styles of music. It has a few interesting unique characteristics — 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.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/200 … er-a.shtml

I'm trying to get as much feedback and discussion going on this topic as I can, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

Not to sound unduly harsh, but is there anything in this article that hasn't been put in writing already? You're preaching to the choir on this forum, and I suspect most folks around here have already read enough articles aimed at informing those who don't consider game music very seriously. The actual quality of your writing is very good, I'd just prefer to read something that seems like it has more purpose.

Smeg, that's entirely possible, that this is already familiar ground to most people in the game music scene, and you might get a lot more out of it if you were someone with less familiarity. I've written more technically about the usage of the various musical modes in video game music, but felt like there was something to be gained writing about it for a more general audience with less background in music and gaming.

I guess the kind of feedback I'd be looking for are if my classifications related to the topic and the points  I made make sense, and if I'd missed anything major that's worth commenting on.

Well, the audience of that site really doesn't seem the same like for this forum. So I'd assume MarkN isn't expecting comments on whether he wrote anything novel, but rather whether everything he wrote stands the test of "hardcore VGM listeners" or something...?

(Bah, beaten.)

Thanks Datschge, don't worry, your post was not entirely in vain

I guess I am partially looking to see if my community cred on the subject still stands up, but as long as I've got your attention, I'd be interested if any of the music theorists among you had any comments on the usage of different modes and scales in video game music, this is something I researched with another game music fan I found who had written a little on the subject: http://newheiser.blogspot.com/2008/02/m … music.html

I poked around and found that article after reading the one you linked in the original post. I'd have probably explained modes a bit differently, but it was a more interesting read. I especially liked that you were able to cite specific examples, as my ear isn't trained well enough to pick out all of the modes. I thought it was funny that you had to rely on Rush to find a Locrian example, though

Sadly yes, Locrian is so dissonant that it's hard to find any conventional examples of it. I'd be interested if anyone has any more examples of video game pieces in unusual modes, it's interesting to see how they're used since it gives you a sense for their potential.

One amusing fact on the modes btw, the earthbound sequel, Mother 3, had a series of characters named after the musical modes, Ionia, Doria, Phrygia, Lydia, Mixolydia, Aeolia, and Locria. Sadly the music doesn't mirror their musical namesakes, but it's a clever idea anyway.

I agree with Smeg. There's nothing in there that people who play video games do not know, and from what I gathered Strange Horizons is a game-related site, so you probably won't enlighten a lot of people there. Perhaps it would be more at place on a general music site where people don't know about video games and would perhaps find it interesting to read about.

Also, just for ONCE, I'd like to see an article about VGM that does NOT have the phrase 'beeps and boops' in it.

Strange Horizons is a magazine focused around topics relating to science fiction and fantasy, which can bring you into the realm of science and technology, movies, the arts and so on. Over the last year the current editor has tried to partially shift its focus to talk about developments in gaming as well, as it relates to areas that might interest their readers. It's kind of an old-school sci-fi mag trying to become more modern, which is why they thought it'd be an appropriate topic.

Most of the people who heard video game music in its early days probably formed their first impressions of it as "beeps and boops". While acknowledging that that's what a lot of early game music started out as, I think the best you can do is just try to get past that impression for where it is now.

I thought this but I didn't say it

I think that calling the original Mario theme a series of beeps and boops is doing great disservice to not only that particular theme, but NES music in general.
Just because a lot of people have that beep-boop prejudice firmly engraved into their minds doesn't mean that every single VGM article should refer to it.

I liked the article. It was well written, factually accurate, and accessible to those who don't listen to VGM much. I think your choice of language as 'static', 'dynamic', etc. is pretty cool and avoids making too many generalisations while categorising. I would have liked to have seen a few more non-Nintendo examples, but then again I guess these are the most well known game titles. I'm also so glad you didn't continue down the Myst route and end up stating Jack Wall's scores are the best ever. Blatantly not true. So, yeah, good article. Clearly a lot of time went into it!

.

LOL

I got a good laugh out of that.  Nice one.

- Justin

P.S.  I agree about the phrase.

Mark, I share your curiosity about tones and modes of game music, perhaps not to the extent of categorizing them under Plato's modes, but I definitely feel that a specific "genre" of music has been born through video games that no other medium possesses.  Theoretically speaking, are certain musical tendencies that occur in games that I've noticed, such as the way a melody is resolved or the arpeggiation of a bassline.  I'm speaking mainly of Japanese-composed music, starting from the 8-bit era that has continued up to today.  I mentioned this in a post about Raiden's music a while back.

- Justin Pfeiffer

I'm a (print) magazine writer myself, so I'll give a critique that's probably more skewed toward that than my love of game music.

First off, very well done overall. Anything I'd point out is pretty minor. I find the juxtaposition of the intro and body a little difficult to swallow. The intro comes off as rather light, trying to pull in people that either don't play video games at all or simply ignore game music, but then the body gets more technical and detailed than I think is appropriate for said audience. It's sort of like two different articles are going on - one being a general introduction to game music and another devoted to revealing the early conceptual period of game music creation. Since the latter appears to be the true nature of the piece, all I'd recommend is a little tweaking of the intro, just to cement what direction it's heading to. Other than that, there's a slight bit of redundancy at times, so trimming it down with some editing couldn't hurt. I have a love/hate relationship with editing myself, though, so I know sometimes you get to the point where every word feels crucial. If you feel you need the length, you could try to use some language that's more flowery, just to help the reader digest all the technical concepts.

Oh, and I gotta admit that I've used "bleeps and bloops" in an article about soundtrack collecting myself. But I used it just to point out that the term is a disservice to game music, so does that redeem me? :P

Apparently beeps and boops are a pair of dirty words to look out for then, I'll have to wrestle down my urge to rely on clichés

Thanks, I spent some time scrubbing for freely available public sources of music that weren't likely to be taken down or require maintenance. The game music samples posted on wikimedia common, the smash brawl nintendo website, and a site of sierra soundtrack archives made convenient sources, which probably narrowed in the range of examples in addition to my own background. That's why it's always interesting to hear from other people about their gaming and musical backgrounds.

That's a very astute observation. A lot of times in my writing I'm guilty of coming up with all the things I want to say and all the technical points I want to make, then scurrying back around and trying to come up with something I think will make people stick around for all the nitty-gritty I want to dive into. I may be thinking of the intro a bit like an abstract or introduction to a paper, coming from my background. And editing is brutal in some ways, I largely scrapped this piece and started over once as I was realizing the progression of my thoughts wasn't working as well as it could, and I think it came out much improved for it. And it's always a challenge to say everything I want to get out on a topic without ranging too far, and be able to focus in on a specific topic.

And thanks again to all of you guys who've been commenting, all very interesting to hear.