| KUOI Kuoirner: The beeps, bloops of video games |
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| Written by Marcus Kellis - Argonaut | ||||||
| Thursday, 12 February 2009 | ||||||
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More than 45 million Nintendo Wiis have now been sold, and so it’s easy
for us to forget once upon a time, adults didn’t play video games.
In fact, video games were once considered the exclusive domain of not only minors, but specifically boys. Don’t get me wrong: a visit to any video game conference or a peek at the credits of any popular video game will suggest there’s still a strong apparent gender bias. But it is unquestionable the field has expanded, and with it has grown nostalgia, respect and interest in video games as an artistic medium. Music composed specifically for video games and music composed using the tools of video games provides a perfect example of this phenomenon. Early on, circa “Pong,” developers chose to synthesize sounds instead of relying on audiocassettes. It wasn’t until the advent of the CD era with the Sony PlayStation in 1994 that games — notably among them, the first “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” — featured full-length sampled audio. As happened with synthesizers as a musical instrument, the technology behind music in video games was incremental. One key issue was the ability of synthesizers to produce multiple sounds simultaneously, like hitting multiple keys on a piano. The Atari 2600 could produce only two notes at a time, and earlier games – think “Pac-Man” or “Dig Dug” – could produce only one note at a time. The Nintendo Entertainment System is the console many people my age still remember fondly from their youth, though soon enough college seniors will remember instead one of its successors. I need not spend much time defending the scores from games like “Super Mario Bros.,” or “The Legend of Zelda.” A cursory search at YouTube will reveal any number of performances and homages to these and others – they’ve been arranged for classical guitar, for piano, for symphony and so on. When Del tha Funkee Homosapien played the Student Union Ballroom at the University of Idaho several years ago, I remember his DJ played the cave theme from “Super Mario Bros.” and Del rapped over it. He’s not alone. Nerdcore is its own full-fledged genre now, with ensembles such as MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme putting it out. The influence is much more far-reaching, however. There exist bands solely dedicated to the arrangement of video game music for rock bands, among them the Advantage and Minibosses. Because the songs were originally performed by machines, they frequently require extraordinary dexterity and skill. As one might imagine, the theme to “Wizards & Warriors” was never published in sheet music form for guitar. Credit is due too for the game designers’ ingenuity in transcribing the songs. Another track some musicians choose is the movement called chiptune. I could bore you with the technical details – it would be a lot of discussion about square waves, ring modulation and other terms rarely heard on this campus outside of the electrical engineering department – but the punchline is some artists use the exact same tools used in the creation of sounds like those heard on Nintendo consoles almost 30 years ago. The chiptune movement is – big surprise – largely confined to New York and Los Angeles, at least for live events. But it has birthed a four-day conference in Brooklyn, called the Blip Festival, which itself was the subject of a 2008 documentary film “Reformat the Planet.” One chiptune compilation, released on the New York label Astralwerks, is named “8-Bit Operators,” in reference to, respectively, the computer technology behind the NES and Kraftwerk’s song “Pocket Calculator.” “Operators” is in fact a 15-track Kraftwerk tribute.  Add as favorites (55) | Views: 778
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