Music in early videogames

Music in early videogames PHD Ivan Paduano 1. Introduction Music is one of the most characteristic features of humans and acts as a complement to various manifestations of human life. It's a formative test, it tells stories and legends, talks about festivities and rituals, in addition to being used in our daily lives where the inhabitants chanted with the rhythms of the activities. Music is characterized as an essential part of human culture, defined by the relationships established between musicians, composers, and their audiences. This definition allows us to legally consider music essentially as the product of nature that is generally classified as existing. Music is defined as essentially related to the practice of art, which is the collective dimension of the ephemeral performance, made by interpreters and composers, who have innumerable themes, aesthetic style and creators that reinforce the efficacy and communicative richness of music in subjective interactions between several subjects. The pioneering research of Georges Friederici shows the auditory sensitivity of newborn babies and infants, hence showing the neurological and genetic bases for the human predisposition for music in very early stages of their vital development. This study carried out in Germany, like others before it, underlines the original use of the simplest language of music as a way of communicating images of the future intellect and emotions. This is a phenomenon particularly emphasized throughout the history of humanity, which has been present in all cultures in the world regardless of their level of development. The fact that music not only accompanies life, but that life is already arranged to coexist with it, even before birth, shows that this expression is given, in most cases, significantly to the biologically speaking. 2. Early developments in videogame music With the rise of the first companies that would become the big giants like Nintendo and Atari, the focus of music in the games was thought of differently. The same console that produced the music could also produce the sound effects in the games. Then, with all this hardware, music ceased abruptly to accompany players' actions, ceased to belong to the virtual world created by game developers. The snippets were true works of virtual art. Jonathan Crash of the independent game indie hit company Dean Dodrill, is still remembered for being a somewhat frustrating stage, but always accompanied by a fun boss battle. The sequence of musical development in the pre-console era and during the golden age of the arcades meant that music in early times was often used in a different way than we see in today's games. The early days of the video game did not stand out for the use of music in each video game. The first consoles were designed to recreate simple movements. The video game Sea Battle consoles of 1947 is considered the first video game, even if it could not be fully commercialized. It only presented small movements of missiles and torpedoes, and when the missiles hit a target, the game just disconnected sounds. The first fully functional video game was Tennis for Two consoles in 1958, developed by physicist Willy Higinbotham in one of the laboratories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the main energy research centers in the United States. Tennis for Two did not have a translator, interpreter, or any type of processor since during 1958 the complexity of electronic devices was very limited. Game programming was all done by wiring conduction cord through a commune board, in electronic systems that were grown before the appearance of PCB (and over 20 years of development). The low complexity of the electronic circuits that made the game, when the game started, it sounded "Hey, someone won". In this way, advances in music to be used in games followed the technological evolution of consoles. 3. Role of music in early videogames Firsthand accounts of early video game players who took the time to look behind the sound of games such as Missile Command are priceless. As the player plays, they may be angered by the game or energized by the action, but at the same time, they are considering the effectiveness of the sound, especially as it works in sync with the visual. Does it work together to create an experience unique to the game? Those questions ultimately give the game a lasting place both in the game library and in the minds of players. For instance, instead of the Pong tone moving closer to pure pitch, the tones used in Missile Command grew further from a pure pitch indication to more clearly illustrate how the player was affecting the game. It was the game's signature on something that intently pushed the player to continue progressing through levels. The role of music in early video games changed as hardware became more advanced. This section covers those changes and looks at the way that mobile platforms continue to influence sound in video games today. By exploring the creative and technical control over sound design that is given to video game developers, we can better understand why players' experiences are so enmeshed in sound and get a better understanding of how sound is used in other media. 4. Challenges and limitations That year in April, a lecture by Leonard B. Meyers titled "Music, the Arts, and Ideas" was included in the MIT Technology Reviews, introducing the concepts. At that time, sound's most characteristic features are all amenable to autonomous digital generation. Digital replication has reached a point of no return, and there is no logical limit to the sequence of levels of replication, culminating in the ever more perfect realization of music by programmed machines. Music technology is closely tied to economics and culture. The early history of electronic synthesizers is filled with instruments expensive and limited enough to belong to research institutions or wealthy avant-garde musicians. Designed by Bob Moog in 1964, the Moog synthesizer was the first to use an analog method for the generation of sound. When it was introduced, some thought it would lead to the total automation of music. Atari cartridges contain code, video and audio generators, and I/O controllers to handle the interactions involved in real-time gaming. When we crack open the casing of an Atari 2600 cartridge, one of the things that comes into view is a fair-sized black chip marked TIA. That chip is the most distinctive piece of technology that separates the 2600 from its predecessor as a consumer product. The TIA, or Television Interface Adaptor, was custom designed, and it is arguable that much of the culture regarding sound hardware and the constraints that soundtrack authors would work with would be founded on that particular flourished iteration of digital sound generation. One of the foremost challenges when dealing with early game music is that game musicology must necessarily be a fragmented field. Early games used a wide variety of technologies, not just in terms of the hardware they exploited but also with regard to the available alternatives for realizing sound and music on a given machine. 5. Technological advancements At the same time, the AY-3-8910 generated the D-volume in one of the four things, which could open a new scenario in the field of computer communications since the evolution of the AY-3-8910 was initially excited. Because this chip is relatively easy to use and significantly increases the sound production capacities for several systems, a large number of popular computer systems in the 1980s were equipped with an automatic reagent system through period equipment. Managers at the beginning of 1980 and the sickness of tomatoes were bursting using a programmable LSI sound chip, especially designed for this line – for the system. Pictured musicians themselves and equipped with multi-voice noise with cycle errors and poorly functioning keyboards. However, these surfaces remained very limited in performance. Several systems often have problems with amplitude emission and unpleasant noise. Technological advancements led to changes in the limitations of music production and video games in the late 1970s. The use of higher speed processors allowed the creation of digital sound, but the cost was still relevant since the relatively little memory of these computing systems had to be shared between sound and many other possible game tasks. In 1978, the first computer with the one-of-a-kind General Instrument AY-38910 sound chip was developed by MOS Technology for the TIA programmable sound generation system. This peripheral allows for independent control of three signal generators, each with a choice of four waveforms, various parameters of the envelope, discrimination frequency, and volume (and bending again). The maximum number of sound resources in the square wave mode (the cheapest to generate) was set at 3, although each study was unique. The sound issue could also be changed quickly, creating ad-hoc musical chords. 6. Composers and their contributions Almost all sound had to be synthesized, recorded, and then compressed to fit the game. In Richard Tech's first game, The Sacred Armour of Antiriad, Jon Dunn tried to explain some of the musicians' developments inside the company to the press. Rachel Cordone, known at that time as Rob Hubbard's "secretary," also worked as a sound system programmer in the Konami and Capcom conversions (32k and 48k Spectrum) during a brief period of time. Sound output has always been considered one of the weakest aspects of every Sinclair home computer. Even with the implementation of the AY (in its incarnations) in several systems: Spectrum +2 and +3, Amstrad CPC 464, 464 Plus, and 6128, sound quality was considerably substandard compared to C64 and Amiga's. This "defect," together with important British software houses and the skills of certain musicians, drove the 48k "toaster" to achieve a relatively good reputation in the international video game field. 6.2 Specific Composer's Accomplishments Joris de Monné is an important figure in early video game music both in the US and the UK. He wrote the music for Knight Lore and Lunar Jetman, which became top-selling games when he was only 20. He was one of the first musicians to work in video game music in the UK. He also composed music for non-Spectrum systems such as the DS: Impossamole for C64 and two games for Amstrad CPC: Bactron and MegaApocalypse. Another early figure is Zelda, who created the music for some popular games such as Head Over Heels for 128k Spectrum, Hyperplay for C64, and Fairlight. In the mid-eighties, the composer who used contemporary record charts music as a reference to compose his soundtracks was Martin Galway. He has an extremely successful career and was an important figure for several coder's prize winners. He composed music for C64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum games. 6.1. Instant Composers Gonçalves, 2002 7. Popular early videogame soundtracks The Legend of Zelda. Kondo appeared earlier on this list with the soundtrack to Super Mario Bros., but fish The Legend of Zelda should not be inferior. Kondo tells me about the series with the expanding storyline, the atmosphere, and the music I told the Japanese game website 4Gamers how his originally orchestrated starting tune turned into the main epic series within the series. When the assets were converted into 8-bit graphics, he realized that adding dynamics and extending notes was not cool and left out the many perfect dungeons from the match to the entrance. Megaleg in Super Mario Galaxy. Disasterpeace, the pseudonym of Richard Werner Vreeland, also composed the soundtrack to the atmospheric indie game FEZ, but is best known nowadays for its indie horror games Hyper Light Drifter and It Follows. As has often been the case in the past, disaster's soundtrack doesn't make its sound any less scary. That is why it literally sounds like an unbearable nightmare. Fans of the Megaleg boss fight – which appeared in the first Super Mario Galaxy – regard the otherwise back-and-forth number as a beautiful and thoroughly suitable Killer sitcom that formally begged in the game. HäagenKaaß, who felt that the narrator Megaleg was beating up explosives while we were moving around a lava planetoid, likes the coloratura. Original video game music was considered to be revolutionary at the time. Not only did it sound very different from regular games, but it could also be programmed not to sound as monotonous as it did in actual practice. In retrospect, soundtracks like these are nowadays even awarded and have become classics. 8. Influence on modern game music The rapid development of video game music in recent years has brought about new uses for this art other than playability or listening; its interaction with other fields can also be analyzed. The development of technology has influenced the production of dance and electronic music. The use of video game sounds or music in this domain could be interpreted as compensation, as a parody, or as an alternative to more serious genres of music. Not surprisingly, video game sounds have been used several times by pop musicians, and even in advertising. Besides, an increasing number of electronic DJs and VJs are using sound and video resources from the most popular 8-bit and 16-bit systems, becoming 'VJing'. Despite the technical limitations that early video games had, composers managed to create catchy melodies, achieving the limitation of offering a repetitive yet enjoyable experience. As technology evolved, video games have improved, increasing and enhancing their audio. Presently, the music for many video games is performed by orchestras distributed globally, and with a few exceptions, nearly all soundtracks are specifically written for the games. Furthermore, many remixes, inspired by the early soundtracks of some of the most popular games, are produced by amateur or professional DJs. Occasionally, music is created or adapted for other uses such as advertising or television, and sometimes it can be found at live performances. 9. Evolution of sound design in videogames Mechanical sounds have been a part of video games since their inception. In the first game, the iconic Pong, the electronic red blobs that bounced back and forth produced sound in sync with their movements. For instance, Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981), one of the earliest games with a complex musical structure, features a two-tone composition influenced by the music of the 1930s and 1940s to emphasize rhythm and pulse. The love song's sound becomes another element of Donkey Kong, a melancholic and intricate tune that changes throughout the game. The tempo accelerates and decelerates in response to events such as races, beers, and confetti. It is quite remarkable. In 1987, Konami's Castlevania pushed the boundaries of musical production on the Nintendo Entertainment System's audio chipset, despite its mechanical limitations. They achieved this by directly sampling high-quality audio and using wave chopping techniques to create an imaginary violin with the frequency bands of Liverpool Cathedral. In the previous sections, we have discussed the evolution of audio games and the treatment and use of music from different perspectives, alongside the technological advancements that have allowed them to exist and progress. However, we need to delve deeper into the evolution of sound design in video games. Sound design involves shaping and manipulating auditory elements such as microphone placement, dialogue, sound effects, and music to suit the timing requirements of each scene. Sound is a crucial aspect in the creation of video games as it contributes to the narrative, action, and characterization. While moving images have music, games must also incorporate music, which is even more important because it becomes an active element with which the player interacts. 10. Impact on player experience This article explored the beginnings of an innovative and creative industry that has provided millions around the world with countless hours of joy, laughter, and excitement. Music has played and continues to play an important role in many video games. It can be utilized to enhance the overall game experience, or in the case of some racing or fighting games, the music can be at the very heart of providing a player both the motivation and adrenaline rush throughout the gaming experience. Whether as a reward, a time reference, or a way to express our love and dedication, music has and will continue to play an integral role in the success of much of what the gaming industry has to offer. With advances in computer capabilities, there is sure to be a wonderful future ahead, hopefully, where music can take on new and exciting interactive roles during gameplay. Starting with the ever-evolving capabilities and significance of sound in video games cannot be emphasized enough. Even in the earliest years of electronic games, music played an essential role. Indeed, in many cases, the music or sound effects were the most distinguishing features for a particular game. Today, with the increasing importance of more advanced audio and dialogue, the role of music is even more pronounced. There are three relevant categories that can be used to describe how music has been and is currently being utilized in video games: (i) Music as a Reward; (ii) Music as Continual Entertainment; and (iii) Music for Mood and Atmosphere. 11. Cultural significance of early videogame music Forty years have passed since Tim Kantor wrote this sentence, during which we have witnessed a commercial explosion of the medium. The time of loaded pixel aesthetics and monophonic square waves is soon to be over, replaced by the hyper-realistic quality of arcade games with professional music and sounds that are becoming every day more varied, complex, and rich. Nowadays, we can boast musicians as contemporary prestigious composers and lauded graduates of prestigious publicly moment that host concerts of music of early video games in elaborate orchestral versions. Progressive video games are commonly considered to be worthy of critical appreciation that was already reserved for books and cinema. These immense popular workshops created for narratives and scripts, formal structures, and characters. Many of those who grew up playing Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, or even Donkey Kong might wonder why today's young bitcoin miners should care about early video game music, which was celebrated in the early 80s with concerts for the "Nintendo generation"? Early computer and video game music composed by synthesizer sounds was treated with the same disdain that early computer-generated images received. The sound of synths was perceived as cold, soulless, and intrinsically monotonous. These prejudices were further fueled by the stereotype that only mindless people play computer games. The sonority of early video games was also conceived to warm young generations that grew up with Pong, Space Invaders, or Pac-Man. However, not all the public used to be so negative about game music. In the document "Music for Computer Games," composed by Tim Kantor for Electronics Magazine in 1982, we can read: "The way is open for spectacular musical compositions to accompany the classic games... The games that are played most often will sustain a great deal of listening, and here there is a niche for good quality music." 12. Nostalgia and retro gaming The retro video game phenomenon has already been the subject of academic studies. There is a consensus in defining the person who consumes video games as a hipster, but criticisms of gamers are not only related to aesthetic questions. The post-culture phenomenon associated with the internet is known for feeding content to the masses and for turning innovation into an infinite recycling that has ceased to exist since making the first or more clichéd films and video games that were reinterpreted by an audience who had not been born during the phase that gave them origin; its main bond. As we have seen, the nostalgic attachment to a product is often purely subjective and linked to individual memory and age. These considerations are often born with incidental aesthetic appreciation due to a generational affinity with what is being exhibited. As a result, a halo attributed to any fad becomes totally relative. There is an ongoing discussion about the impact that nostalgic touring is currently having. How far will the wave of nostalgia from the 1980s and 1990s go? When will it have to change to be replaced by another generation of retromania, or will all nostalgic tendencies merge into one (both from completist and consumers)? These questions have not only a sociological and economical character, but also an aesthetic and historical dimension. One could argue that nowadays, based on the abundance of torn reference, great attention—and by extension, economic benefits—are being focused on all-come-back-again weaknesses. Indeed, the number of old video game titles whose rights are dormant and whose quality or game features have been adapted to the taste of the indie public. 13. Preservation and archiving of early game music The game music, from game audio in general, is beginning to draw attention from the archiving and the preservation communities. Popular and scriptural memory play their part in winning public interest and the moving images but the game music is somewhat different. This is at least a paradox when compared to other information content carriers in the creative world. Its relative scarcity compared to other information carriers can be attributed to technology and labor cost factors in production and the games compared to television or the cinema and presumably it has also had an effect on public perceptions. The Total Video Games, UK, is also one of the most famous early game preservation projects since the boom of domestic early game culture. The project traces the digitization of tape recordings, but the sound quality and coverage of existing digital resources can be supplemented with material such as record soundtracks. Computer gamers represent the first generation of many who grew up with game music and could be expected to find it engaging when recycled in a later context. Akimoto presented a paper at the 2005 Digital Games Research Association annual conference about workplace karaoke etiquette for music from early games. In this paper, he addresses the senpai-kohai relationship that he knows primarily from Japan, but which has important cultural counterparts in many Asian countries. The senpai is a senior staff member at a company and the kohai is anyone below this person in the hierarchy. The paper title highlighted the creative use of this music, when senpai used early game music in the workplace karaoke, and how the kohai might react. Because of the long-standing popularity of games in Japan since the early 1980s, the employees of many companies have been exposed to the music in early games and when they were present at the height of their respective boom periods. It was found that a lot of creative development can potentially happen when senpai use the music as karaoke features and how the kohai react to and interpret this. They should reportedly smile, but still understand how to entertain the senior people in their company who celebrate their nostalgia of youth, which is probably trying to achieve the face hopes of the company as a guide to determine the expected behavior. 14. Analysis of musical styles and genres In adventure games, the music may have pauses, just where the player must learn what to do. In driving games, the music may play independently of the progression of the game. Sometimes, the music in some cases changes phases to signal the progress. In battle games, pause games, RPG games, and wedding games, music can evolve towards new sectors of interest, either to mark the different approaches of the various characters or (in the case of action games) to advance through the game and fight more and more enemies. Overall, the music in the game can move throughout, and the compositional ideas are triggered when the music is subjected to input from the game or player. In the previous section, I presented an overview of the vast field of musical styles and genres. Since musical style is a central decision in the design pattern of a game, and since the music of a video game reflects the main style of the game's culture, it is relevant to include the most common musical styles of video games. More specifically, when designing music for an RPG, certain elements in the chosen style and genre for that RPG can result in specific musical structures that determine the musical cues. Furthermore, the function of the original music in the game context undoubtedly plays an iterative role in the design of composition and production that allows the music to be friendly to the technology of the game platform. 15. Use of sound effects in early videogames In 1958, while working on the Expensive Typewriter, the Russian computer scientist and engineer Nikolaj N. Matjušin created one of the first formant synthesizers and used it to generate sounds and special effects in musical compositions. In addition, there were pre-existing acoustic consoles, which allowed playing compositions on computers. There is no documentation of a computer game that uses traditional scoring, but it is assumed that the courts that developed the technology and documentation were too focused on the challenges of programming the games themselves as well as the scoring. The sound effects, on the other hand, had an extra dimension of immediacy, a kind of audio dexterity, which made everything seem more alive, and it had to be done in order to make the work more complete. In the wake of technology, honks and sounds were added, fireworks and clinks of champagne glasses began to resound, popular tunes were sung. The consecutive summonses of superheroes, urban vampires, monsters, wizards, and the likes had to be forces of sound in accordance and affecting and surprising. And the sound effects remained the domain of novelties of our largest and last sound man, engineers, programmers and teams of separate audio arms. The first time ever that a computer game was played was around 1950 on the premises of IBM, where a handful of technicians enjoyed playing with a creature that, shortly afterwards, materialized at a nightclub and was played, amusingly, on the same electronic music equipment. These interventions marked the beginning of digital entertainment and installation art, and the creation of a new art form, known as computer or video games. The development of more and more efficient equipment led to the proliferation of such games. The machines became personal, easily commercially accessible, and no longer had to be installed by large companies or public government sponsors. From France to the USA, from China to Brazil, the global audience is investing time and money, and gaming companies are making big profits. 16. Interactivity and adaptive music systems Interactivity using non-linear narration. According to Murray, all narratives appear to be dynamic since they can develop through time. However, some narratives add to this with the claim that they are also static, in the sense that an order is defined and it is to be followed linearly. The reader or listener moves through the narrated events linearly, absorbing a sequence of causes and effects. This can be relatively easily done in a book or in a film or play, but with computer games everything changes. A game often has cinematographic or animated elements, but the player can interfere in different ways. They can make decisions regarding the outcome of a given cinematographic sequence, they can change its internal time, its causality. Computer games imply interaction. The outcome of the game and even its story might change according to the user's interaction with the game world. This is an example of non-linear narration, something that has been the object of interest both to narratology and to the communication industry. The limited capabilities of early computers gave birth to a musical style where melodies followed the flexible tempo - and some claim - tunings of the composer. Music engines had no specific channels for sounds or music, and musical score-writers were programmers who devised fancy compression algorithms to fit in the available memory. But which principles of this style can we bring to the current context to foster cohesive and coherent new music? This question requires a detour into some elements of non-linear narration. 17. Sound hardware and limitations What strikes, analyzing closely the growth of sound capability contemporarily available to non-programmers acquiring computers, is that none of them ever indicatively received by software creators working in average materials, even in latter, to better serve the audio rendering algorithms, other techniques of synthesis as well and usually implemented at lower, to create complex sound textures in a one or two megabytes sound bank. This made these methods very hard to control and the final auditory result was characterized by artifacts and nuances which were often nonexistent but resulted merely from tricks compensating the relative coarseness and inadequacy of the synthesis method for the intended sound broadcast, unpleasant for attentive. Old visual effects (above all water animations) in which the hardware gen-lock used to synchronize computer signal output to the TVs had multiple levels of value per color channel thanks to tricks exploited in the video standards and potential left free by the fluctuating definition standards, showed hues in progressions and color mixes, assuming high quality if taken literally, without approximation. When one refers to sound hardware and capabilities of computers and video game consoles, the usual impression, and an accurate one at that, is that the less capable hardware synthesizers in computers could output only primitive sound waves and other complex synthesis methods employed periodically by low-level programming. A fact generally unknown to those not actually doing computation is that computers could accomplish far more impressive methods in audio generation, as could arcade machines and in the context described more recently in personal computer FM synthesizers. This revision aims at reviewing hardware specifications and capabilities of both consoles, in particular focusing on arcade implementation of sound handles, and underlined some of the main developments in sound generators used in contemporary personal computers, taking account of findings appeared within the hours after PC appeared. 18. Music as a storytelling tool The field of research is the analysis of different audio features of retro games. He used onset detection in order to reveal its tempo and auto-correlation to detect its main pitches. Few features across the game computer files were neural network, random forest, and support vector gave quite high variations, from 0.52 to 1.00, but tempo resulted 100% always and pitch 97.5%. Both pitch and loudness features were tested in isolation and in combination with themselves at different game locations (end and beginning). Testing 4 different classes of games, the first yielded very good classifiers all of them (with accuracies above 98%) when using both loudness and pitch. For the pitch, 100% accuracy was reached on several games. Temporal recognition could however be very low (20% at low) in specific games and game sections, such as the intro of Super Mario. Not many games of different classes were then classified (like the ones of this paper for instance), so the problem may have manifested in each case for the previous classification at the beginning of a game. Looking back closer to 40 years, to some of the very early video games, for a long time music was the only storytelling tool game developers had. This makes understanding the music and its influence on the gameplay and player's reception crucial. Although its main focus is early musicians and the music they wrote or adapted, music in this paper is limited to writing about early games and composers. The role of music as a game storytelling tool and the genres of games have not changed significantly since then, which allows the theory to be applied to the modern phenomenon itself. Although today's storytelling has gone to the high uncharted levels in other respects, in the mid-1980s 1-bit sound was the only expressive instrument and also the only chance to tell a story in a video game. 19. Soundtracks and emotional engagement One possible approach to resurrect information from the music memory requires discarding all redundant information that is present in any musical score. A musical score (valid composition) always has specific redundancy (perfection) in between the generated musical notes that appears due to properties of musical notes. This fact does not take into account temporary deviations/similarities (tonal disorders). Scores are logical abstractions with 'one-bit' elements. The total lack of redundancy moment within the musical score makes this inability to handle in musical memory awareness concept as well. Instead, music must be represented using some statistical properties of logical score abstractions. It is important to underline that music is not "syntax decodable" virtually at any level of abstraction; there is no meaningful algorithm that can be designed to decode music's syntax up to its transitory habits, using the known atomic symbols (hidden variables) from the musical memory (universe) of moments. Only the reducible statistical properties can fully decode physical objects from music. The impact of music in multimedia is not only based on the quality of the music itself, but also has to do with the emotional engagement between the music and the other media. As a result, music is considered to be the most crucial aspect of the multimedia transformation. The reasons for this are linked to the very nature of music, starting with the fact that music is fundamentally emotional. It does not need words or sentences to transfer this emotional information to the listener. On the other hand, visual arts (picture/icon) can be defined in terms of logical sentences (high-level formal descriptions). The easiest level is the realistic style drawing where we can easily describe basic elements and focal points of the scene. So, visual arts are easy to describe and understand, trapped as they are in Rationalism. In contrast, music seems to be prepared from its beginning to avoid reduction to high-level formal descriptions. Music is always an excitable, nontrivial part of theory. In theory, there is no solution, not only to the classical problems and to postmodern ones, but to music problems as well. Ultimately, mathematical and logical descriptions are not meaningful. 20. Music and gameplay synchronization 2) It is undoubtedly simpler to create joint audio-video WAVs as the last step of the frame generation. Nevertheless, in reality, the least strange approach is to consider video and music as separate layers because both are indeed separate, independent, and evolving elements. Thus, the musical layer can be changed without altering the video flow. The teacher generally frames video games into two Working Modes: Audio and Gameplay, and Music as accompanying with two activities: narratives and potential help for the activities. Although these categorization processes are interesting and necessary for didactic purposes, one should instead later consider gameplay and musical playback (a CM Video Game Action). When now combining the influence of music on a certain video action and its impact on gameplay, other functional blocks appear, in this way, better satisfying principles of systemic organization. One of the aims of the superposed CM layer is to adjust the video time frame with respect to the video game framing time. When studying the interactions between music and the game background, it is essential – at the moment of achieving a surprise effect – to be at the right point in the game, according to its evolutionary state. Unfortunately, because the system of synchronicity guarantees that each video frame and the corresponding songs are played together, some contributions on temporal structure analysis are precluded. If one wants to get rid of this limitation, it is necessary to consider a slightly more complex case plus an additional restriction: the musical layer should be stored on an independent element, such as an array of pointers where each pointer corresponds to the initial execution time of an audio frame. This may seem a suspicious hypothesis. Why would anybody wish to go against the simplicity of the coding and data organization of videos approached as mon 21. Sound design principles in early games The sound hardware in the Atari 2600 used two different ways to produce sound: 1) for simple sound like explosions, there were two identical sound generator chips that were used with the same cord allowing a switch in threshold value based on sound. This was used for Pitfall, for example; 2) to create more complex sounds, a hybrid coder was used that takes audio samples, based on which one of 4 audio patterns produced one of four different audio waveforms of increasing complexity. Doodle of drawings in order to be converted on board based on where audio data could be accessed. Ideally, the sound would be played via the multiplexed 8-bit bus where sound data would be read directly from ROM in real-time while the system was busy drawing. However, this would have required a 1M ROM and was prohibitively expensive at the time, so typically the code kind of "freeze" the graphics at an odd penalty to allow audio to be played by the 6507-bit processor. The technical abilities of first generation video game systems with embedded sound capabilities set the boundary conditions for sound design. In cartridge-based video game systems, sound had to be produced in real-time, often in very short time, and with limited computing power. The total amount of memory available to store sounds was often restricted (for instance, internally in the associated ROM), meaning that the sounds were often very short, typically just a few bytes in size. Both duration and pitch were generated by using per-frame square wave generation, which complied with restrictions already in place because these were the sounds available with the first video chips that drove television sets of the time. 22. Impact of early game music on the industry Early game music was simple yet enduring. Recent games like Star Trek Online (STO) use ambient music to testify to the enduring charm of simple game music. The simple steady pulse makes early video game side effects resemble minimal techno, but early tracks are closer to techno or electro-house music. Themes from classic 8-bit nostalgic gamers, listening to a show out exquisite serve a loyal fan base that keeps the strong video game music alive. Typical features like low fidelity melody and monophonic texture are evident in most early game music. Early game music is memorable like folk songs, simple peasant poetry, and classic rock 'n' roll, or the rich poetic language of the Beatles. Game music caused a new industrial revolution when every acoustically stimulated pixelated Mario go chosen injected pilot income into an infant industry that soon witnessed the launch of hundreds, if not thousands, of video game e-music tracks, marking the nascent of emusic. The world of video games allowed different perspectives of sounds being composed to captivate and transcend. Some composers denied the knowledge of genuine composition found frequenting game music easy, further ridiculing the video game art form. In the end, space references emerged in the form of symphony fused evoking Mozart. The period between 1972 and 1985 saw an emerging synergy between video game visuals, music, and sound. The early video games flourished in the market, populating the arcades and bedrooms of millions of people around the world by the end of the 1970s. Early video games had simple sound capabilities. Experiments with sound technology were part of early gaming development research. In 1978, Atari's game programmer, Bob Whitehead, programmed sounds for the company's bestseller Basketball game. Early composers experimented with various new technologies, such as Objective-C - a programming language, Unity - the real-time development platform, and ambient sound - the fictional planet express ship engine underwater bubbles (animated musical action-comedy). Ambient Sound is a music term used for background sound, laying the groundwork for atmospheric, hierarchically structured, spatially aware, and dramaturgically sophisticated sound environments. 23. Reception and critical analysis As mentioned earlier, Rob Hubbard was one of the great highlights. His music had such dimension that it did not become a mere secondary in the process of enjoying the game, but rather an original concept and an important part of the game itself. Every player at the time, no matter how old they might be, could remember the title for the pleasure that each piece brought as it was played. And beyond the audio function, Hubbard convinced Sid Meier to modify his original idea: if before, my friend, the simulation intended to portray the aspects of frustration provoked when the one who brakes first is the winner, it is music that surpasses this simulation. The success of a video game that transmitted with perfect precision the feeling of resisting the rapid path undertaken by a schoolchild was unforgettable. It shocked the world and had a great impact on the concept of video games, no longer seen as mere products that would soon be forgotten. Tetris was an unexpected triumph and gave a new vision of what video games could achieve. From this idea and astonishing success, several ideas were generated that sought inspiration in the concept transmitted by Tetris itself. Puyo Puyo is just one of the famous franchises that came out of this work, inspired in particular by the sound quality of the original game. 24. Cultural references and homages Similarly Thexder (Game Arts, 1985) the supposed sonic attacks of robots appear as intelligent use of white noise to the human player in the game system and were essentially composed of the synthetizers as they were not credited as sound effects.riumphant music of the American people, including the "Star Spangled Banner" as they were then known. An old-time music synthesizer player added more human "refinements" to their smoothed pronunciation. Fsh! Fsh! released by Namco in their Hilander rally racing game (Midway, 1983) was a tribute not only to Luxembourg, but also Statue of Liberty, and Joe Dimaggio. It was also a tribute to Hollywood, celebrating the large and loved movies the company was known for creating. Inspired by the idea that the creation of music and especially the music of the game must be conducted by a team composed by both reversed thinking and motivation, these first music makers designed the software with the idea it is a matter of programming codes and flows, not a matter of bit exposition. But back in time there were no clear music professionals nor music software (Beccacece et al., 2021). Consequently, with an incredible feat resulting from their creation of waveforms and sound manipulation their works were a solid art. Musicians took the traditional media and began to infuse them with cultural references and homages, examples of which are very diverse and were discussed in Semiotaxis in early video games. In SINISTAR ± 1983, for example, sailors were present in several parts of the game and their chanting and the sound of the ocean, including the 'I Am Sinistar' growl, could distinctly be heard. Players using the sound effects of acoustics could also hear the roar of his own boat. Early videogames were developed when technology was economically primitive and developers had to rely upon very scarce resources (Starks, 2014). This prompt advantages for the design of the software were by nature slightly interactive and were generally developed by people, in particular talented music-based programmers, who were capable of gathering notational music and converting it into binary code. They ultimately developed unusual music hand-coded compilers instead of being actual and classical de facto audio software. 25. Music as a marketing tool In terms of electronic music, Everything but the Girl, A-ha, The Art of Noise, or the very successful Tommy Tallarico are just a few examples. Iggy and the Stooges kept attracting older teenagers through their patented punk, while Erasure and Dead or Alive were popular with groups with a more electronic sound. And speaking of electronic sound, many of the great video game themes became memorable precisely for their electronic accompaniment. Reception halls in the eighties marveled at the possibility of enjoying them live with their counterparts in some of the best arcades. Some games used music to become famous, not just for their amusements. Such is the case of the legendary beat'em up Double Dragon, whose theme, based on a song by the group "The Art of Noise," has become more or less legendary at the time. "So what," the theme of the first level, was preceded by the company's logo; the combination of both took on an iconographic dimension. And it is that the guest theme had echoes of promotion, publicity, and marketing. There is no doubt that part of the industry's main contribution resided in the pacts of various companies with record labels and musical artists. 26. Copyright and legal issues Some musical pieces have instead posed explicit problems because they are public domain. Often, simpler re-creations of well-known songs were linked to the brands of the companies, and no royalties needed to be paid for the original material. Broadly Initials, a company famous for many arcade games, had no clear policy on the use of songs in its games. Profits from the mechanical rights for music charts are usually within reach of very few market segments; and Initials would possibly have not met with steadfast opposition from record label companies. In 1997, Anco Software re-released Jon Ritman’s Super Match Soccer to Elite Systems for a 16-bit platform with a reduced graphical resolution. Copyright and legal issues related to early videogame music are not simple, and they are as complex as any other aspect of early home computer software. The field remains full of holes as far as the identification of original authors is concerned too. The electronic games business in the early 1980s had a keen awareness of claims on copyright because it was possible to make a lot of money by simply stealing existing products. Most of the software made in the time came without software copyright and with requested instructions: the company releasing the program would simply ask for certain precautions in the code not to be used or direct bugs be corrected. 27. Remakes and remasters of early game music Super Mario Galaxy, not part of this table, is not called a remake but includes the engine and elements of the original game. Since the remakes and remasters all use the recent advances in graphics and may also feature novel game mechanics, a comparison to how the game music changed makes sense. The issue of the paper's title is of interest: why game music was considered bad for some games. Besides them, it has been successfully remade. Usually, the used term is remade instead of remastered to reflect the changes that the music underwent. In the case of Pokémon, some enhanced tracks feature a beat added to them or are played using a different instrument. For the young audience, late 2016 saw the release of remakes of the Pokémon games Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow by Game Freak for the Nintendo 3DS. Even older are the remakes of the first two games of the series, Rogue. Phantom Hourglass, a Nintendo DS game of the Zelda series, and the recent developer announcements of Battlezone made for the PlayStation VR and a new Sonic game will be remakes of games of the same names also. Remakes and remasters of six additional games of 2017 and 2018 have been announced. It's noteworthy that the typically used term to describe new versions of old games changed over time from enhanced/remastered to the more specific remake. Twenty-six remakes and remasters are planned or have been put on the market in the years around 2016, either stated by developers or found in game-overview pages. 28. The future of game music Julian Linn, a major expert in the field of interactive movies, speaks about how the dramatic action in a movie can be put under the viewer's control. He wants the effects of the movie to be experienced directly. Instead of fixed, though changing scenes of the film, dynamic scripts that can react to the behavior of the interactive viewer are needed. Computer graphics will promote the spectator's involvement by creating full interactive panoramas or virtual tours of the scenery where the adventure unfolds. Most of these results are achieved through ray tracing simulations on powerful computers. The fixed elements we were talking about are then turned into single frame images or stored in the memory of a fast graphics card to appear on the television screen. This ensures that the spectator doesn't notice any delay in the hybrid action via the computer monitor. It remains to be seen what will happen to computer music in the decades ahead. Certainly, it will move in new and exciting directions. It is hard to imagine what strange hybrids we may see caterwauling out of our computers and television sets. The days when television was a medium of passive spectators seem to be long gone. Interactive mass media are the coming thing. The film industry has begun experimenting with interactive movies and Hollywood interactive computer films have been announced. Ever since the game Myst topped the software sales charts for weeks, the demand for interactive graphic adventure games without shooting or fighting continues to be enormous. References: Beccacece, L., Abondio, P., Cilli, E., Restani, D., and Luiselli, D. "Human Genomics and the Biocultural Origin of Music." 2021. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Starks, K. "Cognitive behavioral game design: a unified model for designing serious games." 2014. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov