To continue in my recent tradition of biting diplo threads when I think of mutant variations, herein we can discuss experimental game music.
Mostly what I’m thinking of is interesting adaptations of music to the interactive and/or programmed nature of vidya games, like semit-random music generation, novel uses of procedural scores, interactive or cued scores, or maybe riffs on serialism. Y’know, Rez would be a boring choice, but if you can explain in specific terms some sort of technological or compositional intent behind Metroid II’s score, I’d be all ears.
diplo’s time signature thread made me think of the bizarre and so-far unexplained Taz-Mania soundtrack:
Which I summarized on Facebook thusly:
As far as I know, it’s still a
total mystery as to what’s going on here. Game historian Frank Cifaldi
has guessed that the music is being loaded from RAM or otherwise
algorithmicly generated in some way. Based on how close the seem to
composed songs, I wonder if there was some sort of porting issue. Like,
they were written for the Genesis soundchip and then had to be
downported to whatever the Game Gear had (which was maybe similar to
what the Master System had?).
Better explanations are definitely welcome.
Anyway, the idea of generating music from RAM made me think of what I think may have been the first game to do so:
While probably overrated as an “art” game, Moondust does have the distinction of being created/programmed by a super interesting dude, who seems like he probably has wonderful opinions on The Matrix: Jaron Lanier - Wikipedia
Also, if you’re enjoying the music from Moondust, I highly recommend “Wild Piece” by Raymond Scott, which seems to be…pretty much impossible to find streaming. But you can probably torrent Manhattan Research Inc., and you should anyway.
Anyway: what other music experiments have made it into gaming? Don’t be afraid to list “obvious” recent stuff. I’m so out of touch that I’ll probbably be surprised by anything new.
