Pixel Town

I made a music composition!

So when I joined grad school I wanted to make the best use of the opportunities and I wanted to join a class on music within the University. The video game music ( PAT-305 ) sounded very interesting without looking like a lot of effort so I took it, which was one of the best decisions I made. So the classes were all about the evolution of music within video games, and each class we looked at some history of a particular genre or a particular artist and their work. We would look at clips from a particular game and try to understand what made the audio stand out, what sort of emotions it evoked in the player and how that enhanced or deepened the gameplay. We understood different purposes of music and tricks that the industry employed to make the audio pop and make sense.

The course was structured as a RPG game, where instead of getting scores for your essays or assignments ( quests ), you get exp points and level up based on your exp. As a part of the course, the final project was a composition quest, where you are expected to put all the knowledge learnt in the class into a music piece of 2 mins in length, with contrasting or opposite purposes / genres. I have always wanted to play around with vocaloids and DAWs and see how well I fare in making music, but never got to sit down and do it, and this was the time for me to explore.

With two days to go for the submission, I allocated 20 hours for my 2 minute piece, to learn a DAW, understand how music theory works, and how plugins work. I knew from the start that I will be doing 8 bit chiptune music, as orchestral music never interested me that much, but the vast amount of creativity that pours out of very simple audio channels was always interesting.

To give a brief of what 8 bit audio is - It is basically the poppy hyperactive music tunes you hear in the old NES video game sets like contra, duck hunt and the more famous super mario bros. These were released in the 1970’s and during that time, having a full fledged audio system within such a small device is a huge engineering task. So for that time, the audio system consisted of 5 different channels -

  • Lead square wave channel - used for chord progressions
  • Melodic square wave channel - melodic lead part of a song.
  • A saw ( triangle ) wave channel - acts as the bass.
  • first Noise channel - usually percussion like snare and hi-hat
  • second Noise channel - deep and heavy percussion

Variation is generated by modifying the amplitude of each of these channels. So music is just an order of modulations that happen during playtime.

In order to make my composition I used FL studio as my DAW and the magical 8 bit plugin to generate the different waveforms.

Process

My library has an amazing recording and audio workstation, which is where I spent almost 2 entire days on the composition. For the first few hours I was just listening to random chiptune mixes on youtube and looking at tutorials for DAW, and various material on how to get started with composition and music production - like composition and music theory. During this time I randomly stumbled onto a new genre of music called jpop and found artists like Zutomayo and listened to a whole bunch of them. One song that stuck was plastic love And I decided, I have to incorporate the happy upbeat vibes in my music. So I looked at a tutorial on jpop music, and there were a bunch of ideas that made jpop stand out.

  • The chords are chopped and layered to create upbeat vibes.
  • The music was very similar to video game music in that, there was a lot of layers and a lot of things going on at a single time
  • There were multiple melody tracks that run around in the same key.
  • The bassline should Slap.

But this meant I could not stick to the 5 channel sound, which was fine by me.

I started with the chord progression first with a square wave laying down a foundation key for me to work with, then I chopped up the chords to give the classic jpop vibe. Then I added a percussion track with a noise channel, and a snare and bass drum, which you can hear as the zzzzz white noise in the final music piece. Finding the bass track was probably the hardest part. I had to make it go along with the chord progression while not stealing away from the smooth chord transitions. The most fun I had was with writing the melody part. This was so much fun than I expected. Having played guitar for a while, I started with a random progression but, then I could realize that the note lengths were a bit off and I ended up fixing them one by one.

The final touches were to sort of add and remove some instruments at certain places so that the music is not the same all through and there was a proper beat drop before all the layers came together.

For my second contrasting piece I chose a dark scary theme, which contains very low sounds and unresolved chord progressions that create a really scary dark vibe. Although I used too much low octave sounds and this sounds weird on mobile speakers.

My favourite part of the melody is around 0:22 where I wanted to incorporate the video game pause and play audio into the music and it came out well. I also like the brush hi hat effect before each beat drop.

Overall I learnt a lot about the musical process and how DAW works, but I think I added too many layers, which clouds some of the interesting variations in the music.

Here is where you can listen to the pieces

Pixel Picnic
Pixel Dread