80’s memorable chiptune to the latest orchestral soundtracks.
First of all I’ll give you a quick explanation and some examples of what I mean by ‘chiptune’. Developed in the early 1980s small groups of musicians picked up a couple of out-dated hardware and created their own style of some audio and visual art. Being a blog based around sound we’re focusing on the audio side of the story. The audio work is known more commonly as Chiptune. Chiptune was massively produced in the 80’s to the mid-early 90’s and were a part some of our most classic gaming systems such as the Nintendo Game Boy and the NES. Here is a couple of our most well known game soundtracks themes from that period of time, Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros. , The Legend of Zelda… Etc. Now due to limits of the technology in the 80’s the video game systems (game consoles) could only produce three notes which luckily is just enough to make a chord, so developers could make at least a simple tune. However the music developers were still very limited with what they could do, knowing this they based their work on simplicity. This also happened to work in the game industry and the game developers favour as because of the simplicity in the songs they became easier to remember than an entire orchestra, also because the song was memorable so of course was the game it was composed. Those first game Chiptune theme songs are now nostalgic s icons to gamers.
It is rumoured that video game music got worse as time passed but that is simply untrue listening to the recent versions of the old arcade games still give the beautiful nostalgic feeling and in fact improve the song greatly. What I would criticize is that the music is nowhere near as memorable as it used to be, this is most likely because there since then we have more to work with, we have specific software and hardware designed purely for recording, synchronizing, editing such as NI Massive which unlike most editing software which remove noise from the sound file this software creates noise. However it is not only reason recent video game theme song have become less memorable it could also be because of the limitless capabilities we now have, we’re not limited to three notes anymore we can use as many as we like and import it into the game perhaps it is that because the music developers don’t work around simplicity is why it is less memorable. Although not just the fact that we have more to play with a produce with but also these days at least for our most recent games have a much higher budget for developing music then they used to back in the 80’s especially for video games meaning that the producers can really stick their hands into their pockets and hire professional orchestras and composers such as Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman who recently been composing for games for example Hans Zimmer composed the music for Crysis 2 with which he did a beautiful job.
So in music from the 80’s to the present has developed by far, many of our limits have gone and we are still researching our technology in audio for an example recently people have developed immersive sound which could be a key asset for games in the future. Immersive is also known as 3D sound and using different layers within the audio file the listener can hear where the sound is coming from, its quite manipulative as it can sound like some thing is behind you to a far distance away, this could be very useful for including the player and making them feel within game.
First of all I’ll give you a quick explanation and some examples of what I mean by ‘chiptune’. Developed in the early 1980s small groups of musicians picked up a couple of out-dated hardware and created their own style of some audio and visual art. Being a blog based around sound we’re focusing on the audio side of the story. The audio work is known more commonly as Chiptune. Chiptune was massively produced in the 80’s to the mid-early 90’s and were a part some of our most classic gaming systems such as the Nintendo Game Boy and the NES. Here is a couple of our most well known game soundtracks themes from that period of time, Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros. , The Legend of Zelda… Etc. Now due to limits of the technology in the 80’s the video game systems (game consoles) could only produce three notes which luckily is just enough to make a chord, so developers could make at least a simple tune. However the music developers were still very limited with what they could do, knowing this they based their work on simplicity. This also happened to work in the game industry and the game developers favour as because of the simplicity in the songs they became easier to remember than an entire orchestra, also because the song was memorable so of course was the game it was composed. Those first game Chiptune theme songs are now nostalgic s icons to gamers.
It is rumoured that video game music got worse as time passed but that is simply untrue listening to the recent versions of the old arcade games still give the beautiful nostalgic feeling and in fact improve the song greatly. What I would criticize is that the music is nowhere near as memorable as it used to be, this is most likely because there since then we have more to work with, we have specific software and hardware designed purely for recording, synchronizing, editing such as NI Massive which unlike most editing software which remove noise from the sound file this software creates noise. However it is not only reason recent video game theme song have become less memorable it could also be because of the limitless capabilities we now have, we’re not limited to three notes anymore we can use as many as we like and import it into the game perhaps it is that because the music developers don’t work around simplicity is why it is less memorable. Although not just the fact that we have more to play with a produce with but also these days at least for our most recent games have a much higher budget for developing music then they used to back in the 80’s especially for video games meaning that the producers can really stick their hands into their pockets and hire professional orchestras and composers such as Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman who recently been composing for games for example Hans Zimmer composed the music for Crysis 2 with which he did a beautiful job.
So in music from the 80’s to the present has developed by far, many of our limits have gone and we are still researching our technology in audio for an example recently people have developed immersive sound which could be a key asset for games in the future. Immersive is also known as 3D sound and using different layers within the audio file the listener can hear where the sound is coming from, its quite manipulative as it can sound like some thing is behind you to a far distance away, this could be very useful for including the player and making them feel within game.
