Saturday, June 14, 2014

Analysis: Amount of music in NES games via My Gaming Audio History.

My next few posts will be analyzing the data I gathered by examining all these NES games that I played growing up in My Gaming Audio History.  I've spent a bit of time creating a chart that describes the amount of music in these 33 NES games (including Wizards and Warriors, whose blog entry has gone missing...).

My thought process when I first started examining these games was that I wanted to find tonal commonalities.   In other words, Super Mario Bros would be in the key of C, like some grand musically crafted symphony by Mozart, and all the various music in the game would have tonal significance and relevance.  While I do think that Super Mario Bros is in the key of C overall (and in fact, I would argue so are SMB 2 and SMB 3), I didn't find as much tonal planning in that way as I was hoping.  As I continued this work, I learned that game composers are often paid by minute of music, and thus also began to note how much music was in a game.  Recently, I returned to some of my first entries and added duration calculations as well.  Now, I doubt that this early period of game music creation had as strict of a pay scale and calculation as there is now, but still, it's a way to organize the amount of music in a game.

So check out my chart and I'll have a few more reflections after the jump.



As you can see, the amount of music in NES games increased overall through the general "life" of the NES.  By this I mean the period from when the NES came out through the release of the SNES, when the NES and game development for the NES was Nintendo's main focus.  I had definitely expected to find an increase in amount of music as the importance of music for home systems became more clear and programmers and composers became more crafty with system resources, and am pleased to have the data support it.

A few outliers jump out at me, most notably The Simpsons: Bart vs the Space Mutants, the next to last game I examined.  This game has shockingly little music compared with contemporary titles.  I believe this is because the game was rushed to release before the SNES came out, much the same as Atari's infamous ET game.  Mega Man II also stands out as having quite a bit more music than its contemporaries.  This is because of limitations in the way I considered "amount of music" as I describe in detail below.  However, to be brief about it here, MM II uses variations and looping transpositions that undoubtedly saved memory, but made for much longer musical loops.  These reasons are why it seems to have much more music than contemporary games.

I'm curious as to any trends you notice here.  Leave me a comment, if you like.  It's really cool for me to see the data expressed in this visual way.  Looking forward to blogging some reflections on my NES game study.


*For those particularly interested in details and data...  A word about how I calculated the amount of music, which is far from an exact science.  I considered the music in the game to be from the start of a loop to the repeat of that loop.  In the case of the SMB overworld music, that's a 90 second loop.  Now, all of that music isn't brand new, the form of the SMB overworld music is A-B-B-C-A-D-D-C-D.  As you can see, there are repeating internal sections of music.  However, the whole loop doesn't repeat until after the final D section, so I consider this to be 90 seconds of music.  Another easy to visualize case is the SMB star music.  It's a much shorter ~2 second loop-- even though that same 2 second loop repeats for the duration of invincibility ~ 10 sec.  In that case, because the loop of music contains nothing new after the first two seconds, I only count that as a two second loop.  That may seem arbitrary, but I considered the repeat of an entire musical loop to be "amount of music" rather than judging small inner repetitions.  I did not include the same musical loop if it was sped up or slowed down, for instance, when you're running out of time in SMB, the same music loop plays faster.  Or in Dungeons and Dragons, as you descend in a cave, the music loop slows down and is lowered in pitch.  Because these were the same musical loops, transposed up or down or sped up, and then played in completion, I didn't include them in the musical total.  However, I did include musical loops that transposed within a loop...  If you're thinking that sounds crazy and potentially subjective, I agree.  And what of sound effects-- are they music or not???  I'm happy to discuss particular decisions I made and why if you're interested.  Having examined these early games in detail, I now see it's very difficult to precisely calculate "how much music" there is.  I often wondered if amount of memory might be a more accurate gauge than duration, but I suspect that it too would leave complex questions.  



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