The article goes from adoration of few particular video game composers/engineers (not undeserved one, mind you), to presenting few tidbits that attempt to show very tentative link to pop music and blowing it up to "changed popular music" doesn't do justice to either creative genres.
One just needs to listen to few Japanese synthpop bands from the 70s like P-Model or Yellow Magic Orchestra to see which direction stream of influence was flowing back then. I'm pressed very hard to believe that bleeps and blops of the 70s arcade cabinets impressed any musician, when you had much more powerful tools to do synthesis far more advanced and relatively inexpensive. After its peak in the late 80s, as far as pop music was concerned, synth went in sort of hiatus, to come back slowly in last decade or less, and still, bleeps and blops are just a single drawer in an immense cabinet of instruments employed.
I admit not to play too many games recently, but from what I've seen in AAA titles, it's dominated with bland orchestral ambientals. There's still no adaptive phrasing, AI composition, and really no intelligence behind it all. The medium holds immense potential, but I'm still waiting for it to unlock itself. We had serialism (though I don't enjoy it myself) almost 100 years ago. What's the hold-up?
I hope this doesn't fall under gratuitous negativity. I just don't see it.
> I hope this doesn't fall under gratuitous negativity. I just don't see it.
I agree. I love chiptunes and the demoscene to death, but people (nostalgically) overstate their influence and underestimate the musical ability of early video game designers.
The simple fact is that the space of video games and pop music is too damn large to nail down any large veins in 11 paragraphs. Since about 1992, there has been so much activity in this space fueled by technological advances in audio hardware and software driving composition, publishing, synthesis, gameplay, etc. that a dissertation could be written about every five year period over the last 25 years.
The VGM world has taken at least three major shifts since SMB. 1. The shift to using whole mp3 tracks, a la PS1. 2. The shift to multi-track recorded audio, instead of chiptune/wave synthesis. 3. The shift to dynamically generated audio (see SSX for great examples). The first quite simply was pop music (with a techno edge). The second certainly lagged pop music. The third one has nothing to do with pop music.
> bleeps and blops of the 70s arcade cabinets impressed any musician,
agree.
> still no adaptive phrasing, AI composition,
It doesn't exactly exist, but there is at least adaption through bringing in layers, changing volumes, triggering phrases, scene synthesis through location/reverb, etc. Although this has even less to do with pop music which is still blocks of 3.5 minute audio, although there was a remix/mashup trend a few years ago, it's faded.
"I've seen in AAA titles, it's dominated with bland orchestral ambientals. There's still no adaptive phrasing, AI composition, and really no intelligence behind it all."
AAA is in a sort of ironic position for this sort of thing, because on the one hand, they're the games dripping with money during development, and on the other hand, the games least able to innovate on things like music because if a manager has to choose between "3 more guns" or "adaptive music engine", the AAA manager will choose "3 more guns in DLC" every time.
I don't expect a full-industry crash like 1984 but I could see an AAA-crash sometime in the next few years. Their monomaniacal focus on such a narrow sliver of the possibility space for games while trying to bash each other over the head with MORE MORE MORE is still sustainable, but one does wonder how long they can keep it up.
If you go Indie, "music game" is it own subgenre and there are a variety of takes on the question of how to more richly incorporate music into the game. The entire "Bit.Trip" series is pretty good at incorporating music as a direct effect of the player's actions; it's not really "composing" anything but it's still quite viscerally pleasing. There's a lot of variants on musical shooters where the music somehow ties into gameplay.
I felt the author was like:"ok, I know a bunch about videogames and their composers, let's write it down and try to get to some point" the problem is that I don't see the point.
Moreover there is no mention of Welle Erdball, I understand they are not "pop famous" but to my knowledge they are one of the pioneers experimenting with C64 & the like!
Not gratuitous negativity, it's a very good point to bring up.
Game journalist Jeremy Parish focuses on the Japanese industry and retro games and has interviewed a great deal of Japanese game composers. According to him, amongst game composers, YMO is widely cited as a huge influence.
Please don't understand this as insult to your esthetics, but yeah, that's exactly what I'd call bland. Layering string section and exposing folk-inspired motif is what composers do when they're uninspired and on deadline.
I should have mentioned Neverhood of course. Its OST is always in my playlist :) Terry Scott Taylor is great. Armikrog is coming out next month by the way.
Anyway, I find Witcher soundtrack to be pretty good. Sure, it's not extra unusual if you compare it to good folk music. But I don't see why one has to make a point of making the music extra unusual for the sake of it. The music should set the mood, and it does it perfectly in the Witcher games.
From more musical games, inXile's satirical The Bard's Tale has fun songs:
To stress the point - that music set the mood so perfectly (it should be combined with ambient whispers to get the same effect as in the game). That's the main purpose, and whether on its own it's super innovative or not is really pretty secondary to me.
One of the guests they have had on is a composer who was influenced by his love of video game music, and listing to the podcast has made me appreciate how much amazing video game music is out there.
One just needs to listen to few Japanese synthpop bands from the 70s like P-Model or Yellow Magic Orchestra to see which direction stream of influence was flowing back then. I'm pressed very hard to believe that bleeps and blops of the 70s arcade cabinets impressed any musician, when you had much more powerful tools to do synthesis far more advanced and relatively inexpensive. After its peak in the late 80s, as far as pop music was concerned, synth went in sort of hiatus, to come back slowly in last decade or less, and still, bleeps and blops are just a single drawer in an immense cabinet of instruments employed.
I admit not to play too many games recently, but from what I've seen in AAA titles, it's dominated with bland orchestral ambientals. There's still no adaptive phrasing, AI composition, and really no intelligence behind it all. The medium holds immense potential, but I'm still waiting for it to unlock itself. We had serialism (though I don't enjoy it myself) almost 100 years ago. What's the hold-up?
I hope this doesn't fall under gratuitous negativity. I just don't see it.