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Music in Games in General
I had wanted King Haggard to write this section, but he said "I'll write
it when I know more about music," so I'll just do the best I can. Music
is more than atmosphere for when you play the game. As I write this section,
I'm listening to videogame music (Revelations Persona - Mary's Theme).
If your game has original music, and it's good, it will have a life beyond
the game file itself: it will be collected and listened to long after the
person has completed the game, reminding them of the game's world each
time they listen (that is, if they like the music enough to want to keep
it on their computer).
(Listening to Suikoden - Main Theme). Why have music in games
at all? Is it only because without it the game would feel incomplete? Is
it only because most other games have music? Or is there some reason more
important?
(Listening to Mega Man X - Storm Eagle). My current understanding
of why music is necessary in games needs to fall back upon my understanding
of music in general: music is pattern recognition in time. I feel that
the reason other animals don't like music (often don't even know the difference
between music and noise) is because they aren't obsessive pattern-recognizers.
Most of human intelligence comes from pattern recognition. Better put:
recognition of a pattern (that is, anticipation of future events based
on a created model adjusted by past events) is common to most of what we
normally think of as 'intelligence'. If someone never knows what is going
to happen next, can't connect any present event to past events and can't
predict any future event, they aren't very human. Music is one of the purest
forms of pattern recognition, to see this, just listen to one of your favorite
music files and witness how you mentally 'sing along' with it (even if
it doesn't have lyrics), anticipating what is coming next, and being delighted
when it arrives. You can wish for no purer form of what being human is
than this.
(Listening to Xenogears - Lahan - Creid album). What, then, is
the difference between different types of music? There are differences
in key, in temp, in instruments, in melody, but beyond all of this, there
are differences in complexity and integration. No accurate terminology
for this aspect of music yet exists to my knowledge, but subjectively I
do find a differences between music in terms of simplicity (at the extreme
end of simplicity would be music that repeats every 8 seconds, or repetetive
drum beats) and in terms of unity (at the extreme end of disunity is music
made of unharmonic random notes).
(Listening to Final Fantasy Tactics - Holy Knight Zalbag). Music
in games is really not too different from music in movies or on the radio,
except for the obvious difference that it needs to repeat itself after
some time (if you stay on the same map doing nothing for 250 minutes, the
game (usually) has to continue to play that map's music for 250 minutes).
Beyond that distinction, thre is also a need for music to be centered on
something: Caves have 'cave music', castles have 'castle music', overworlds
have 'overworld music' (which, when you collect them from lots of different
games with caves, castles, and overworlds, you see a lot of simularities).
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Music Programs
Noteworthy Composer is the best shareware music program I've encountered,
and the one I use for instrument changes. It can be found at www.noteworthysoftware.com.
It works much like standard musical notation, so knowing how to read music
would be quite helpful.
Another music program which works in a similar way is WinJammer, at
www.winjammer.com/wjsw.htm.
Blue Ribbon, here,
has some 'auto-composing' software which may interest beginning music composers.
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Midi to Bam
If you're going to write music, either you're going to use Notate.exe
(the music creation program that comes with the Ohrrpgce), or going to
make midi's and important them in. The advantage of using Notate.exe is
that you hear what the music will actually sound like in the game as you
make it. The disadvantage is that if you want to later use that music in
a game for another engine which supports midi, or want to show other people
your music easily, you'll need to convert these .not files to midi files,
which requires another program (found on the Hamster Republic).
Midi to bam is not simply a matter of running midi2bam.exe on an midi,
because some of the instruments sound terrible in BAM (Bob's Adlib Music)
format that sound good in midi format, and the opposite is sometimes true
as well, though less often. Lead1 and Lead2 sound terrible in BAM. Oboe
sounds much better in BAM than in midi. I suggest that if you are a music
composer that you build a table of which instruments sound good in bam
format (with notes on how they sound good), with respect to octave (some
instruments sound horrible at low octaves but work in high ones, etc.).
I would like to give you such a table here, but I've never built one (although
I started to do so once). If anyone builds one which works pretty well,
send it in and make Ohrrpgce music history.
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Making Music Tips & Tactics
1) Listen to a lot of music. And don't just listen with diverted attention,
listen with full attention (don't eat or read while listening). Then open
them (if they are midi's) in an midi editing program and observe how they
work in those terms. This will take awhile, but after enough practice you
should be able to (or so I hear, I have aways to go) hear the music without
playing it, just by looking at the music notation. This familiarity with
notation will make writing music easier.
2) Make up music in your head first, clearly and precisely, playing
it over several times, and only after it is perfect in there should you
start to write it. I have the ability to make up music in my head quite
easily, and do so in moments of boredom, but since I have no real ability
to write music, most of it is lost after I forget it. That's why I suggest
1) before 2), even though I'm not able to do 1) myself.
3) Learn to play a musical instrument. Composing music on a keyboard
(or other instrument) is often easier than composing it in an midi program,
because there is a quicker 'development cycle' (that is, it's faster to
test out alterations on an instrument than it is to test them out by writing
down an midi note, playing the midi, changing the note, playing it again,
etc.).
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Ripping Music, and the Public
Domain
For those of you who don't want to write your own game's music or get
another to do so, there are the alternatives of musical theft and the using
of music not designed for your game but 'free'. Even here, however, effort
and ability is needed for selection of music that fits your game and placment
into different areas of the game. In Tilde, for example, since it was a
Christmas game, I naturally sought out Christmas music to use in it. Some
didn't conver to BAM too well, so even though I ripped music I had to spent
time in an midi program converting instruments.
The public domain is the set of music (and other information) which
is not copyrighted, usually due to either the copyright owner being long
dead, the owner being born long before copyright laws, or the author expressly
putting what he creates in the public domain (so that anyone who wants
to use it can, without restriction). Some public domain music sites are:
http://www.classicalmidiresource.com/
http://www.pdmusic.org/
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
(for free sheet music)
There are likely many more, go look around on google.
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