Nintendo Shaped Modern Music?

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

-Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc. 1989

Also, didn't the minimoog sounds on The Chronic owe something to Dre's love of Super Mario Bros? Or did I dream that?

And, Blueski, I totally agree w/ you, but re: the Nintendo influence, I'm just thinking of it in the same ways as, for instance, hip hop influencing young li'l kids like Freddy Durst and Kiddy Rock et al. Granted, there's not much to say (from my end) - I mean, so-and-so can credit their interest in techno to, say, their parents' chronic flatulence as to anything else. It's hard to suss out influences like this - whether it's a direct application of said influence, or something more insidious manifesting itself atavistically.

Tangent: What's the deal w/ that CD of GameBoy-created music, anyway?

Another silly tangent: if Man or Astroman? can incorporate a dot-matrix printer into their show, what's stopping any self-respective rock star from rockin' the Colecovision on stage?

I haven't heard that, but the new album by the Scratch Pet Land guys (Sun Papa...) is like an improv Gameboy orchestra.

did it REALLY though or are all these idm odes to video games just silly exercises in connecting the dots?

the PARALLELS are obviously similar enough to beg some interplay between the two (hence the goodiepal thing that mark mentioned, and the gameboy comp that came out recentlyish) but i've yet to see any hard evidence that one tangibly INFLUENCED the other

the generation of twenty-somethings dominating the idm scene seem to have embraced the otherwise silly sounds of beeps and boings as something genuine and true

if i had more energy i'd attempt to link idm's nostalgic bent back to all of this, but i'm afraid it's been a long, long day

or perhaps not

Millions of kids into videogames = Millions of kids watching Tron = Millions of kids into Wendy Carlos.

Or something like that. Videogame music from the eighties was mainly faux-classical or prog rock. The sounds are similar to new stuff, but the structures aren't. I'll bet the music used in the culture that was built around videogames, or that used videogame imagery to promote itself may have had more influence on people than videogames themselves.

I always thought the "True Faith" video seemed like a video game.

the structure of music, the rationale for its shape, is VERY VERY DIFFERENT for the sounds in a videogame, from that of a dancetune, say (let alone or rocksong or even a bit of film-use ambient or mood stuff). so does "influence" mean "hommage mimicking a tune every playa recognises" or does it mean "shaping a work according to the rules and reasons blah"?

i'm surprised though that no one has mentioned the Input 64 and Output 64 albums on Lado, cover versions/remixes of old Commodore 64 tunes by various electronic boffins. for once, this kind of thing actually sounds quite nice taken out of its jokey context of ooh retro nostalgia wankfest. if you listen to it as contemporary IDM/sub-electroclash it works just as well.

d.

I'm not sure it means either of those - in my mind, anyway. I guess I'm getting @ what impact the technological revolution of the 70s-90s had on society, and it impacting the most impressionable folks possible - the kiddies. Eno et al were monkeying around w/ this stuff back in the day (and those fancy modern-day composers) (and even a stick in the mud like Wendy Carlos!), but surely it was "easier" for folks growing up 20 years ago to get into this music than their contemporaries, due to the pervasive presence of MACHINES (oh no!)

Not just video games, of course (though I'm pointing to that, based on the experiences of me & my friends in happy middle class suburbia killing cones & rods in front of Combat & Space Invaders), but that ambient hum in power lines and refrigerators, that unending rhythm / drone, the white noise we take for granted. (For the record, I can't sleep well @ all w/out my computer fan running in the background - I used to use a regular ol' fan, but the breeze upset all my important papers, so now the MACHINES are regulating my sleep patterns.) (I am assimilated, you betcha.) (cf. that scene in Superman III, where the evil lady person gets swallowed up by that machine thing and turns into some Metropolis-lite automoton.)

Computer games (and I use Nintendo more as a generalization for games than as a specific example) are to this technological omnipresence as, say, Nirvana was to punk rock - more palatable, more conventional, more "saleable". It's a crap analogy, though, in this form. But something like that.

HELLA + VIDEO GAMES

and he fuckin rips!!

Groups:
http://www.ymck.net/
http://www.lo-bat.be/
http://www.nullsleep.com/
http://www.glomag.com/
http://www.markdenardo.com/
http://www.rugarandi.com/
http://www.bodenstandig.de/
http://www.rugarandi.com/

xpost

Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka is Metroid's music and sound fx creator (amongst many other things, like he "invented" the gameboy camera, and guess who did the included DJ mini-game?).

Here is what Tanaka said in an interview at Gamasutra:

HT: " The sound for games used be regarded just as an effect, but I think it was around the time Metroid was in development when the sound started gaining more respect and began to be properly called game music. Even the media had put spotlights on it, and we began to see many articles on game music.

Then, sound designers in many studios started to compete with each other by creating upbeat melodies for game music. The pop-like, lilting tunes were everywhere.

The industry was delighted, but on the contrary, I wasn't happy with the trend, because those melodies weren't necessarily matched with the tastes and atmospheres that the games originally had.

The sound design for Metroid was, therefore, intended to be the antithesis for that trend. I had a concept that the music for Metroid should be created not as game music, but as music the players feel as if they were encountering a living creature. I wanted to create the sound without any distinctions between music and sound effects. The image I had was, "Anything that comes out from the game is the sound that game makes."

As you know, the melody in Metroid is only used at the ending after you killed the Mother Brain. That's because I wanted only a winner to have a catharsis at the maximum level. For the reason, I decided that melodies would be eliminated during the gameplay. By melody here I mean something that someone can sing or hum.

I suppose some of the players felt it was little bit too heavy. Back then, many people said the game music for Metroid was too serious. However, I believe I succeeded in emphasizing the characteristic of Metroid by synchronizing the theme of the music with the theme of the gameplay where a player must escape from an underground maze.

When it comes to music, I didn't discuss it with anybody. They allowed me to be in charge of the game's music. I even insisted that game designers change certain graphical concepts in the maps from my point of view. Indeed, I named all the maps. In Japan, Metroid was released as software on a disk system and it's a bit different from the U.S. version. The Japanese version has one more voice of polyphony, and it sounds much better. Mr. Yokoi didn't give us any requests, and let us have a very free working environment."

Interviewer: "What was it like working with the technology to create music for the original Nintendo games?"

HT. "Most music and sound in the arcade era (Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers) was designed little by little, by combining transistors, condensers, and resistance. And sometimes, music and sound were even created directly into the CPU port by writing 1s and 0s, and outputting the wave that becomes sound at the end.

In the era when ROM capacities were only 1K or 2K, you had to create all the tools by yourself. The switches that manifest addresses and data were placed side by side, so you have to write something like "1, 0, 0, 0, 1" literally by hand. Such prehistoric work makes me laugh every time I think about it.

There was a dedicated sound design tool available when the Famicom was introduced. It was common for most sound designers to use sound tools in the PC and convert the MIDI data into Famicom's sound data. But then I didn't use any sequencers specialized for music and sound. I always created my own sequencer and used assembly for programming language.

It's a small thing, but being a programmer and a composer using my original program was a strong element of my uniqueness, I think. I was always particular about me directly accessing the music source and wielding the sound from there. I'd never changed my way of doing things, starting from understanding the buffer in order to write every parameter for sound controls, to writing the data directly to them. I preferred to stick to my way because I believed that could maximize the sound chip capability, which was limited to 3 to 4 tones, and generating more detailed sounds."

octamed anyone?

We're coming out with a new record this year, I swear.

Half of it is going to be dreary catacomb music from the dark ages and half of it is going to be musicbox renditions of pieces from the opera "Carmen". And another half of it is going to be a videotape of the record lit on fire and run through a washingmachine.

The video of that will be converted into audio and then shot into outer space on radio waves.

My nick is from the Casio VL-Tone the first Casio synth on the market in 1981 up to 1985?. This is the little foot-long programable synth keyboard with a built-in calculator. The one used in "Da Da Da" for the main high pitched beat. It sounds pretty much like a NES, and it uses the same semi-analog setup than the NES and GameBoy . The sound is modified depending on the power remaining in batteries which can be a good or a bad thing depending on your point of view.

What's the deal with this quote, is it fake?

/unhelpful

http://rainwarrior.thenoos.net/music/moon8.html

Likely origin of the Pac-Man/rave-culture quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Brigstocke

http://www.8bitpeoples.com/images/8bp_top_left.gif?1238272051

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EGPOkP-9II

i hate my generation

but boy do i love that song!

To answer the question, sure did, I figure. A little gift link for you:

https://wapo.st/3Ic6Td1

Weird that they're only inducting the theme song when a lot of the other Mario music — like the underground music or the invincible star them — is iconic too. It's probably less than 12 minutes of music all told

thanks ned! this kondo quote is otm:

“The thing I would be most happy with is if they weren’t looking at the music in and of itself,” Kondo said. “Rather, focus on the music and how it enhances the gameplay. If they come away with the music making their gaming experiences more fun, that would make me more happy than anything.”

...but i do think it maybe sells his musical accomplishments short a _little_. composing music that fit the gameplay was kondo's stroke of genius, it changed video game music forever. if it was all that he'd done, then sure. it's also something of a "right place/right time" thing? i mean, aside from that One Weird Trick there's not really much _to_ the SMB soundtrack. there's six minutes of music in that game. it's catchy, sure, but there's not much there. i mean yeah, "here's a water level, let's do a waltz", that was a genre-defining move, but it's not exactly something that only he could have done, given that "the blue danube" is quite possibly the best-known waltz of all time.

...no, hold on. i'm thinking about it more. because that's _not_ something he just did with "super mario bros." that wasn't One Weird Trick. that was a consistent practice of his throughout his career. i'm kinda thinking about his SNES and N64 work as compared to, say, david wise's "aquatic ambience". it's interesting because "aquatic ambience" _is_ clearly something written with the gameplay in mind, written to enhance the experience of the gameplay. but it's something that people listen to a lot outside of donkey kong country. partly i guess that's due to donkey kong country not being an all-time classic game. i mean it's a good game, but it's not an all-time classic. more than that, though, david wise - he's a really great video game composer. one of the all-times of the era, if you ask me. kondo's stuff from the era, though, it's on another level - not in terms of _creativity_ but in how _inseparable_ it is from the game itself.

i mean, like, listen to "legend of hyrule" from the ocarina of time soundtrack. listen to it on its own and it's a fucking _incredible_ piece of music. it's like some ligeti shit or something. it's like brian wilson levels of making incredibly weird shit and having its audience think of it as "normal" popular music. at the same time, if you've gotten far enough in ocarina of time to become adult link... it's really hard to disentangle that from the game experience itself. ocarina of time is one of the greatest video games of all time, and koji kondo's soundtrack is _inextricably_ part of that. _by design_. yeah, that's what makes kondo one of the goats, i'd say.

yes thank you Ned, for my own part, many years before I had the agency/equipment to listen to/explore "proper" music, I did have the NES, and a few games + maybe a rental here and there, so Kondo's SMB score was hugely influential, I can remember arranging the main theme for a fantasy rock and roll band in my head, long before I ever played an instrument

that and the mega man 2 soundtrack, I'm really not sure how interested I would be in music had I not heard these tunes at the age of 5 or 6