When one thinks of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., what is the first thing that comes to mind? For many, it is the bright colors and jovial landscapes, the round and fun character designs, or the snappy platforming gameplay. For others, it is the jaunty, unmistakable theme that has followed the series since the launch of its first entry in 1985.
Music is inextricably tied to the gaming experience. Consider Animal Crossing's soothing soundtrack, matched with its easygoing play of talking to friendly animal neighbors: or, perhaps, the heart-pounding heavy metal of Doom, where one tears through hell itself to gun down demons. Both these games' soundtracks, in combination with other factors such as visual style, contribute artistically to the tone of and enhance gameplay.
What, then, makes a good song for a video game? For one thing, the theme must be varied and interesting enough so as to not become grating as it plays on repeat through a scene or level. Secondly, it must be composed with attention to atmosphere. For instance, Koji Kondo, who wrote for both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda series, explained that he would watch others play the games he was writing for before beginning composition. The original Super Mario Bros. displayed the titular character walking through a grassy field, so Kondo wrote a calm, airy piece to mimic that visual. However, it did not feel right when paired with gameplay, so he rewrote the piece to be more lively, filled with Latin rhythms that bounced along with the character. Each era of gaming had its own unique set of limitations to work with - chiefly, the amount of memory and number of voices a song could use.
The first era of gaming, known as "8-bit" in reference to the amount of memory a system had to work with, is characterized by pixelated graphics and simple sounds. Music that uses these basic sound waves is referred to as chiptune.
The first arcade game to feature continuous melodic music was Rally-X in 1980. As was the case with most games at the time, the game itself was incredibly simplistic. This simplicity is reflected in its music: early arcade music is characterized by very short, repetitive motives and were monophonic to allow for the usage of sound effects. Junko Ozawa was a key figure in game music's earliest stages: an employee of Namco, she designed her own waveforms and programmed them into games by hand. She remarked in an interview about how competitive the market surrounding games was at the time; she had to keep her employment entirely secret. However, she was given almost total freedom in her composition, and her work in games such as Gaplus and Tower of Druaga are often considered to be the best of Namco's early arcades.
With the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1983, video games were brought into the home. Many popular game series - such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Final Fantasy - saw their beginnings with this console. With the innovation of containing individual games on cartridges, rather than programming them directly into the system, the NES allowed for longer and more complex experiences. This included its sounds.
The NES operated with a Ricoh 2AO3 sound chip, a Programmable Sound Generator (PSG) that synthesized basic sound waves. It had five channels, meaning only five sounds could be used at once: two square leads, a triangle bass, a noise generator, and a Pulse-Code Modulator (PCM) that utilized analog samples. Typically, the PCM was not used in order to conserve the NES's limited memory: it requires far less memory to synthesize sounds, rather than storing sound files for later use. Because the noise channel is used for sound effects, this means that music on the NES could only have three voices. Thus, in order to prevent sounds from muddying, composers would utilize open chords. The Gameboy, a handheld console, faced similar audio limitations.
Take the overworld theme from The Legend of Zelda (1986) as an example. Note the limited voices - two leads, a bass, and percussion - as well as the clean, processed sound associated with chiptune. Kondo here utilizes the interval of a perfect fourth and a climbing scale figure to create a heroic and adventurous mood. The descending bassline and mode mixture add a somewhat darker flair to the otherwise upbeat piece, speaking to the dangers the player is sure to encounter as they explore the game's world.
While most NES titles were restricted in this way, games released by the company Konami had unique sounds through the use of multi-memory controllers (MMCs) - additional chips in game cartridges that allowed for more memory. These chips added three extra oscillators to the NES's synthesizer: music from these cartridges had four square leads and a saw bass, allowing for a far more layered sound. Konami overall is credited with having some of the most rich music for the NES. Their sound is characterized by high-energy arpeggios that heighten the action-oriented style of their games, such as Contra and Castlevania.
Another unique challenge facing 8-bit music was the need for sound-effects. Music composers for games at this time acted primarily as sound designers; with the limits of the types of waves they could use, they had to be creative with just how to design their sounds. For example, the boing! that is synonymous with Mario's jump had to be created from scratch: a more realistic sound of a person jumping, perhaps a dull thud, would have been boring and impractical when the limited sounds the NES made called for something more bombastic to fill the space. Music, too, would have to be rewritten around the sound effects; perhaps a note would be removed here or there to better let a sound shine through.
Hirokazu Tanaka has been referred to as "the godfather" of music in gaming. Behind the music of Earthbound, Tetris, and Metroid,
Tanaka was deeply involved hardware design for both NES and Gameboy
sound cards. He also crafted sound cards for arcades. Reggae was a
massive musical influence for him, but he also attempted to mimic rock
while programming for the Gameboy: he wanted to make sounds like a
distorted guitar, with a heavy bass and drums to wow players who used
headphones. Nobuo Uematsu, who composed for Final Fantasy, also cited a major rock influence in his composition. At first upon listening to the high fantasy, orchestral music that is now associated with his work, one might be surprised to hear him name Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd as his musical heroes. The influence becomes very clear in direct comparison, however: "Purple Haze" can clearly be heard in "One-Winged Angel," for example.
In 1991, Akio Dobashi revolutionized gaming music in the Japan-exclusive title Lagrange Point. It is one of the two games Konami released using the VRC7 MMC - a chip that added six channels for frequency-modulation (FM) synthesis. FM synthesis differed from a PSG in that waves were layered on top of one another to alter their sounds, such as creating vibrato or altering tone color. The sounds that Dobashi created for Lagrange Point's soundtrack were very similar to the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer that was used frequently in popular music at the time, and thus reflected gaming music's drive to sound more and more like popular music.
Later in the same year, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was released and gaming launched into the 16-bit era. More memory led to a massive upgrade in both graphical and sound quality, allowing for details such as moving backgrounds and fully implementing FM synthesis. Nobuo Uematsu compared this leap in quality to moving from black and white to color television; it allowed the music as well as games overall to become more cinematic and dramatic. The SNES had a total of eight sampled sounds, rather than limiting to three purely electronic ones, which could mimic the color of real instruments impressively for the era.
Compare the overworld theme for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) to its original release. Though both pieces build off of the same melody, chords, and bassline, this later rendition is more layered and mimics the instrumentation one might expect of a heroic fantasy theme. Synthesized trumpets, strings, snare, and cymbals are clearly identifiable, and an extra harmony was added to the main melody.
It was during this 16-bit era that a second gaming company came to truly rival Nintendo: pitting their Genesis against the SNES, Sega took the world of gaming by storm. It was by all measures attempting to be "the cooler Nintendo" - best exemplified by their mascot Sonic the Hedgehog, who acted as a parallel to Nintendo's Mario. Like many of Sega's games, Sonic music took of its influence from popular music - namely funk, techno, and hip-hop - while Nintendo tended to rely more on classical styles or world music. Composers like Masato Nakamura, Sonic's main composer and member of Japanese band Dreams Come True, were sourced from the J-Pop industry to lend to their more modern sound.
One of Sega's music influential artists was Hiroshi "Hiro" Kawaguchi. He strove to imitate the sounds of "real" bands; in fact, music for the arcade game OutRun (1986) was expressly designed to be something that could play from a car radio and immerse the player in the driving simulation. He joked that creating music at the time was "a nightmare:" he described recording a musical sketch on cassette, then translating it to a score after compositional trial and error. Only after then translating the score in a dev PC to break it into code and then transferring the code onto a soundboard could the final piece be heard. However, he also expressed that it was a lot of fun to work with the technology as it developed.
Yuzo Koshiro was one of the first composers to be credited by name for his work on a game: his name appears front and center on the title screen of The Revenge of Shinobi (1989), now considered a Sega classic. He frequented nightclubs that he cites as his primary inspiration, stating in an interview: "I believed people loved club music, so I thought if I could put this into game music, then they'd be really happy." Indeed, his work in Streets of Rage is considered to be remarkably authentic to old club music.
The era of chiptune would come to an end around 1996 with the release of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. Games were delving even further into story as companies became more accustomed to the rapidly-developing technology, calling for even more dramatic and emotional music. While the PlayStation moved forward to use CDs, the N64 kept with cartridges to keep loading and processing times down. This came with a massive benefit for their music: the music on an N64 cartridge utilized MIDI. This way, music could in real time adapt to gameplay, such as changing timbre when moving underwater or transitioning a battle-specific theme when encountering an enemy in the overworld. This did, however, have a major drawback in that cartridges had far less memory than discs. However, MIDI helped circumvent this limitation in the case of music. Rather than storing completed musical tracks as CDs did, games instead stored code that would tell the game to play a certain sound value at certain intervals, lengths, and pitches, thus forming the music during gameplay itself. Each game drew from its own library of unique sounds for its MIDI commands. To save further space, sounds were reused as frequently as possible, often altered in pitch or speed to make it sound different: for example, in Ocarina of Time, laughter from ghost enemies are the same file as the main villain's laugh, but sped and pitched up. With the use of samples and 16 channels, the music was also more layered and complex than ever - though voices would have to be dropped if more visual data was loaded on screen, for memory's sake.
Ocarina of Time (1998) has an excellent example of reactive music in its "Hyrule Field" theme. The song was composed in 8-bar sections that flowed easily into one another. Different sections played depending on what the player was doing: a more menacing variation would play when encountering an enemy, for example, while something calmer will play if they are simply standing around, and a bright flute will play with every sunrise.
Damian, Arthur. “Keep It Reactive: Composer David Wise Explains N64 Cartridge Advantage over CD.” Destructoid, 22 May 2020, https://www.nintendo.destructoid.com/david-wise-cartridge-cd/amp/.
“Interview with Namco-Legend Junko Ozawa.” Spillhistorie.no, 30 Oct. 2020, https://spillhistorie.no/interview-with-namco-legend-junko-ozawa/.
Kondo, Koji. Interview by Game Maestro. Translated by Shmuplations, Shmuplations.com, 21 Jan. 2022, https://shmuplations.com/kojikondo/.
Kondo, Koji. Interview by Nintendo Online Monthly. Translated by Shmuplations, Shmuplations.com, 21 Jan. 2022, https://shmuplations.com/nintendogamemusic/.
Levy, Karyne. “This Is the Incredibly Complicated Way They Made the Simple Music in 1980s Video Games.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 30 Nov. 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/8-bit-video-game-music-2014-11.
Richtmyer, Steven. “Zelda Music: The Original Samples in Ocarina of Time's Soundtrack.” ScreenRant, 9 Feb. 2021, https://screenrant.com/zelda-music-ocarina-time-sound-samples-original- instruments/.
"The Cool Kid | Diggin' in the Carts | Red Bull Music." YouTube, uploaded by Red Bull Music, 3 Oct. 2014, https://youtu.be/m97Zh7Uu-sE.
Comments
Post a Comment