Kenny McAlpine
Kenny McAlpine is a musician, author and academic at Abertay University. Kenny is interested in everything, from music technology and video games to PG Tips and PG Wodehouse.
Location Dundee, Scotland
Activity
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Scott Mac
Ah, but there's an important difference, Scott -- with a movie, the composer can see the cut of the footage, which will determine the pace and the mood. In a game, what defines the pace (and to an extent the mood), and also the order in which events happen is the player. Each game will unfold differently and at different rates -- the composer can't predict in...
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Very interesting point about how the technology and how we use it shapes our expectations of it, Chris.
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Not specifically because of that, no. The SNES, for example, had a capacity of around 120 MBits (about 15 Mbyte) and had a very capable Sony sound chip inside, so could definitely move into different musical territory.
There were loads of SNES games (e.g. the fun racer F-Zero or the movie tie-in Demolition Man) that definitely move away from the 8-bit...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Scott Mac
Amiga music is still pretty big. There's a very active scene, and still a lot of musicians making tracker music like that.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Scott Mac
That's an interesting comparison. The Amiga's hardware 8-bit sampling effectively made it the first machine that could create music that could credibly sound like production music.
Interestingly, there were a number of music acts, particularly on the Drum 'n' Bass scene, in the early 1990s that used Amigas and Soundtrackers to produce their commercial...
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Thanks Scott. I think that the only point I'd disagree on is that I could quite happily listen to the Overworld theme on its own quite happily for ages! In fact, one of my favourite game soundtracks is the Overworld theme for Super Mario Bros. 2. It's short, catchy and I can (and do) hum it or listen to it on repeat for ages!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Alison Armstrong
Is one of the risks with that approach, however, the commoditisation of games? Does creativity and innovation take a back seat when there is a proven framework for a successful game?
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Andrew Fisher
So do you think that the Seal of Quality had a constraining effect that led to that conservative (or formulaic?) approach to development?
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Chris Mitchell
A very good point, Chris. Certainly what it might do is shut off those ideas that come completely out of left-field and the diversity that comes from a thriving indie scene.
That said, however, Nintendo have always been pretty good at developing or supporting quite unusual or experimental game concepts. Check out Otocky and Elektroplankton.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Andrew Fisher
What a thorough response, Andrew, thanks.
There's another interesting difference: many of the characteristic elements of chip music, particularly the arpeggiated chords, that were popular in Western games you don't hear in Japanese games. While UK and US game composers looked write music that pushed the hardware beyond its limits, Japanese composers seemed...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Alison Armstrong
That's a very interesting comparison to make between music and language, Alison -- with the train example, different pieces of music carry useful semantic information. How do people learn that abstract association between music and place?
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Kenny McAlpine replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Hi Dean,
You might be interested in this:
https://data-discs.com/collections/all
Data Discs have released the Streets of Rage soundtracks on collectors' edition vinyl. They're really top-notch products. I'm just waiting on Outrun being re-released...
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In the UK, most games were sold on compact cassette tape.
There was an expansion port, and a number of interesting peripherals, from joystick interfaces to speech synthesisers, samplers and synth drum machines.
The Spectrum *could* definitely do other things, but I think the vast majority ended up being used almost exclusively as games machines.
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On the integration of the SID chip into hardware synths, you could also have a look at the Twisted Electron TherapSID and the SID Guts, which is a Eurorack format synth.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Jamie Howard
Check out the Project Hubbard Kickstarter -- he's recently started revisiting his old 6502 code and is reworking some of his old compositions. He also plays sax with a big band in the NE of England.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Zoe Nolan
Good point, Zoe.
In fact, it's maybe important to recognise that more generally, it's very difficult to divorce yourself from the here and now and imagine what it would have been like to experience those games and that music completely fresh. Just to have a box in the corner of the room that approximated arcade games and made sounds was thrilling!
I...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Rod Selfridge
Yup -- the TIA was never really designed for music. When they conceived of the VCS, Atari thought that people would be playing variants of Pong and Pong style games for eternity!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Chris Mitchell
That's definitely true! Everyone I've spoken to who was working at that time has made exactly that comment. There's no scope to bury bad ideas with fancy sounds and production. The limitations of the hardware forced them to write catchy, well-crafted melodic music.
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More than that, I think. In creating a role that only a few very highly-skilled specialists can do, you limit the scope for inventive, left-field ideas to come in and disrupt things.
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Yup -- I've got one of those at home, or rather, I've got the British one. There was a bit of a spat when these were released, because it looked like some 'industrial espionage' had gone on when UK-based SFX and Sight and Sound both turned up at the same trade show to launch identical devices.
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Absolutely -- that also led to a sense of competition as David, Tim, Ben Daglish and others tried to better each other's music and prove that they were the 'alpha geek'!
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Wham! The Music Box was a really early example of a dedicated music editor on the Spectrum, and was really pretty sophisticated. It even came with the excruciatingly-named 'Whampiler', which allowed you to compile your music into a standalone machine code routine that could be incorporated into your own games.
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You're maybe doing the VCS a slight disservice there! The TIA was the more powerful chip. The Spectrum didn't have a dedicated sound chip at all, just a speaker.
You could still do interesting software tricks with the VCS, most notably sample playback (see Quadrun, for example). It was memory that was really the limiting factor there -- the Speccy had much,...
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The title music to JSW was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. It uses a different technique to the two-channel title music of Manic Miner. It plays the tune in broken octaves, much like the LH patterns that a boogie woogie piano player might use. The in-game music in both uses exactly the same technique, just different melodies!
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Thanks for sharing this, Rich.
I love that there's still a really vibrant home-brew Speccy scene out there, and that people are still finding exciting new ways to use the hardware. I still fire up the Spectrum+ that I got for Christmas in 1984, although for convenience, I find myself loading Fuse on my Mac a bit more often...
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Absolutely. Tim Follin was an amazing composer. He did some pieces for the NES too -- Silver Surfer, for example.
He released the code for his Spectrum driver as a type in listing in Your Sinclair (you can download a complied version here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0024221)
I remember seeing that as a kid and trying to work out how...
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I had completely forgotten about Trantor!
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Hear hear!
Generally, you can get a handle on the underlying method used in beeper music by listening to the quality of the sound. The more channels/complex the waveform on a PWM method, the 'fuzzier' it becomes. Other approaches can introduce 'ghost' frequencies, and time slicing gives the music a 'blipiness' that the other techniques don't have.
I like...
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Great summary, Andrew.
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I think that's quite a nice characterisation, Juliano. I'm sure we Brits will wear that 'hardcore enthusiast' badge with pride. :-)
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That's an important difference, I think. Here in the UK, gaming and home computing grew up together, and there was a hobbyist community around that who would write and publish their own games and other software. I spoke to Ben Daglish, the C64 composer a while back, and he said:
"Back then the ‘industry’… it was all fourteen- and fifteen-year old boys. I...
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I was in the States last year too, and visited the Replay Beer Arcade bar in Lincoln Park, Chicago, and the Galloping Ghost -- the biggest freeplay video game arcade in the USA. Wonderful!
I got to bust out my ninja skills on a bunch of arcade games that I haven't played properly in years, and ended up with the highest score on Circus Charlie and Return of...
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Great suggestion, Chris, and a good companion book to 'Bedrooms to Billions'. I'd also suggest Andrew Hewson's 'Hints and Tips for Video Game Pioneers', which tells the story of how he established and ran his (very successful) games company from an upstairs bedroom in his house -- a wonderful example of that homegrown industry.
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Gaming didn't disappear completely, though -- the C64 still sold fairly well in the states following the crash.
Do you get a sense that there was more of a home-grown feel about the UK industry (at least in the early days), and a corporate feel about the early US industry?
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Pac Man and Dig Dug are both still very playable games!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Jamie Howard
Jungle Hunt is a conversion of an arcade title that had a great little tune that ran throughout the action in the background. (I'm humming it as I type this!) If you get a chance, try playing the arcade original in MAME and compare the two.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Eva Capanni
Absolutely, those early games were generally simple (in concept) and quite playable. Pitfall is quite tough, but persevere...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Chris Mitchell
Interesting Chris. I'm exactly the same -- not really a fan of any of the Bounty Bob games, but I've often wondered if that's just because I grew up playing Manic Miner (a perennial favourite -- I still have nightmares about Eugene's Lair and the Kong Beast...) and was conditioned into thinking of Miner 2049er as a second-best proto-version!
It's maybe a...
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As ever, it's a little more complex and nuanced than that. The '83 video game crash was catastrophic for Atari, but it also killed the market for consoles. There's a very interesting story in how that next generation of console broke through against consumer hostility. We'll touch on that next week when we look at the NES.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Richard Ackon
Great choices, Richard. That later video game music is much more cinematic, and functions much more like a movie underscore. It's interesting to compare that with the much more melodic, 'ear-wormy' music of the 8-bit and early 16-bit machines.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Eleanor Walker
Absolutely -- I still fire up Space Invaders for that very reason. Simple, but compelling!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to mira wardhani
My pleasure Mira. I hope you enjoy the course!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Brandon Swing
Do check out the Ludo conferences in Europe (http://www.ludomusicology.org/2017/12/03/ludo-2018-call-papers/), @BrandonSwing, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music (https://vgmconference.weebly.com).
I'm sure we'd all love to hear some of your transcriptions -- do you have any links on YouTube? And if you haven't already, check out Martin...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Jaison Lobo
Welcome Jaison.
As you'll hopefully discover, today there are a great many similarities between production music and video game music, at least in terms of how they're produced, but back in the 1980s, it was very different!
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But never really became popular. Why not?
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Zachary Cummings
Prof. Layton is definitely an interesting example -- the music works really closely with the action to create a sort of 'interactive cinematic' feel.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Dmitry Kochkin
Hi Dmitry,
BEEP -- that was exactly how I got started too. There are some amazing pieces of music written in BASIC using just the BEEP command.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Rhys D
Hi Rhys -- we'll be looking at Super Mario in next week's activities!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Wonderful! I like a gamer with a proper retro collection!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Levi Ward
Welcome on board Levi! I hope you enjoy it.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Zoe Nolan
Hi Zoe,
Yeah, I am especially fond of the chip sound. I think that for people our age, that sound is particularly evocative of those formative gaming experiences when we were kids. Like a musical Creme Egg... :-)
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Yeah -- non-gamers often think of gaming as a socially-isolating activity, but it's always been the very opposite. As a kid, I used to swap games incessantly, and we would all go round each others' houses in groups to play games together -- Codemasters' ATV Simulator and BMX Simulator were particularly good for that!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Andrew Fisher
That sequel, though, had a very clever additional sound chip on the cartridge, so the music is, indeed, one of the best on the Atari VCS, but it's not really the VCS that's creating it!
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That's a very good point, Andrew -- Atari suffered very badly from that cultural shift, where it went from being a company of 'professional hobbyists' to one that was very corporate. Apparently it happened more or less overnight, and the dress code went from jeans and T-shirts to suits and ties. Many felt that creativity was stifled, and wasn't valued. Once...
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But many of those cheap, multi-release games were really, really awful!
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The other thing that perhaps stopped Atari redeeming itself and getting back in, though, was the video game crash of 1983. That essentially killed off demand for consoles in the USA, and allowed home computers (which could be multi-use and justified for 'homework' -- see Chris's comment above) to gain a toehold.
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To an extent that's true, but Atari also tried to get a share of the 8-bit market with its 400 and 800 computers. Why did the other platforms overtake Atari?
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You're absolutely right, Chris.
Certainly, when I was pestering my parents to get our first home computer back in the early 80s, one of the key arguments was that it would "help me with my homework"... How many times was that argument trotted out, I wonder...? And how many parents realised too late that the home computer as an educational tool is a myth...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Jamie Howard
Thanks for sharing the link to Amplifire, Jamie, and it's really interesting to hear that you do SID covers of pop tracks -- one of the activities later in the course touches on exactly that.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Kathleen Littlejohn
Hi Kath --
Lovely part of the world Yorkshire, with some great music! [As an aside, though, I've just started catching up on the BBC crime series Happy Valley -- it's given me a completely different perspective on Halifax and Huddersfield!]
The music in Lazy Jones is a real favourite of mine. A great early example of an adaptive C64 soundtrack, and it's...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Scott Mac
A very similar story to mine, Scott, although I took a slightly more circuitous route -- from the Speccy to the ZX81, then to the C64, an Amiga, another Amiga, a PC, a bunch of other old machines (including an STe), a few more PCs and now mainly Macs.
Did you ever come across the Currah Microspeech? It was a phoneme-based speech synth for the Spectrum,...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Chris Mitchell
Hi Chris,
Dynamite Dan was a great (although very tough!) game. I don't know if you've come across it, but Andrew Hewson wrote an excellent book about his experience as a video game publisher: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01FG1VO3E/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
It's well worth a read!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Rich Hollins
Hi Rich,
Agent X is a great track (although I prefer Chronos, which I remember knocked me for six when I first heard it as a kid -- I still think it's one of Tim Follin's best tracks).
Glad to hear that you're still an active 1-bit musician -- keep that sound alive!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Rod Selfridge
Tetris Theme A (actually an old Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki) has become one of the most covered pieces of video game music @KathleenLittlejohn.
You might like to check out this one by Dr Spin (actually a manufactured front-end for Andrew Lloyd Webber): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9TeaSAlVkY
I also really like this a cappella version by...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Juliano Zucareli
A great selection Juliano, and interesting to hear that you were doing your own video game covers way back in the 90s. Are you still doing that?
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Paul Hubbard
Hi Paul. No relation to Rob Hubbard?
You raise a very interesting point there -- the sound hardware on those early machines was really very limited, and on occasions, getting any sound of those consoles and home computers was an achievement. That the composers/coders of the day were able to produce such memorable music is really testament to their musical...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Rod Selfridge
Great choice, Rod! Interestingly enough, Jon Hare, who coded Sensible Soccer (and Cannon Fodder, another Amiga gem) now plays video game music covers in a 'chip tune supergroup', the SID80s, along with fellow game composers Ben Daglish and Mark Knight (who's interviewed later in the course). They occasionally get together for game festivals and play live rock...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Robert Dent
Great choice, Robert, and yes, I remember getting really excited when I heard my Spectrum speak -- Death Star Interceptor and Activision's Ghostbusters (both by David Aubrey-Jones) were the two earliest games that stick in my memory.
The music for Fantasy World Dizzy was composed by David Whittaker, if memory serves me right, who was one of the most...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Christopher Davies
Hi Chris,
Thanks so much for sharing the link to this soundtrack. It's one I hadn't come across before. I've only been able to dip into it so far, but I'll give it a proper listen later in the week.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Andrew Fisher
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for sharing your experience. How do you compose on the 64? Do you still hard-code music in a music driver, or do you use one of the music cartridges to hook the 64 up to a sequencer? Or do you "cheat" and do it under emulation or using something like the Plogue plug-in on a DAW?
Master of Magic is a great soundtrack, and there's an...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Sam Tomlinson
Hi Sam --
Quite a difference in sound and style between full-on metal and NES soundtracks! Have you discovered any points in common between the two?
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Kenny McAlpine made a comment
Hi,
I’m Kenny, and I’m a proper video game music geek!
My earliest experiences with game soundtracks came well before I got my first home computer: I remember pumping ten pence pieces into Pac-Man and Dig Dug arcade cabinets on family holidays in 1982 and 1983.
The one that made the biggest impression back then was Atari’s Paperboy. Everything about...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Richard Winter
Autographs cost a million pounds.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Emma-jane Cosgrove Smith
Thank you, Emma-Jane. Glad you enjoyed it, and delighted you've been engaged enough to take notes! I hope they come in useful some day... :-)
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Eric Gold
Thank you Eric, that's really kind of you to say.
Yes, I think that point where technology, craftsmanship and creativity meets is a very interesting place to be!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Martin Carver
Thanks Martin. I'm sure you'll have a great time with Robin's course too!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Gerrit Wessendorf
Thanks Gerrit. I think that the release date for the Commodore documentary is spring 2018. I was down doing some filming for that a few weeks ago. The crew have done a great job in getting some big names (including Rob Hubbard, Mark Knight and Chris Huelsbeck) to appear on camera and share their recollections.
I have another couple of interesting...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Andy Perratt BA (Hons)
Thanks Andy, and yes - I'd echo that, thanks everyone for your contributions. I've really enjoyed working with you all.
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Sorry Andy...
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Remember, though, the music is designed to be a part of something bigger: it's a form of media music.
Think about the music cues in a film. There are exceptions, of course -- think of Bernard Hermann's 'knife theme' from Psycho -- but while they are really effective within the context of the film, as pieces in their own right, very often they don't work:...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Colin Odell
Thanks Colin, much appreciated.
I've really enjoyed dipping in and out of the comments, so thanks for engaging so fully with all the activities.
Yes, prostletize widely! I'm not sure when the course is scheduled to run again, but hopefully it'll be sometime soon.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Jay S
Thanks Jay, I really appreciate you taking the time to post that. I'm all for celebrating geekery in all its forms (don't get me started on Hammond Organs...)
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Kenny McAlpine replied to NIck G
Thanks Nick, that's very kind of you to say, and I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Thanks also for your thoughtful contributions throughout.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to NIck G
Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that we discourage enthusiastic amateurs, but rather, how do we discourage 'churn', because in a vast ocean of mediocre content it becomes more and more difficult to identify and get to those islands of exceptional quality.
This isn't just an issue of gaming -- music, literature, photography... Technology has...
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Thanks for the plug, Willy. You can find the TEDx talk here: https://youtu.be/bAQKSgZR314
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Thanks Emma-Jane. All down to the skills of the interviewer of course! ;-)
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It's not been released yet!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Stephen Nichol
Thanks Stephen. Keep and eye on my Twitter feed, or drop me an email to find out about the release date (probably early 2018).
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Mike B
Thanks Mike. Much appreciated. Do feel free to recommend to any geeks you know -- it'll be running again sometime soon.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Andrew Wilk
Yup, you're quite right - although the 6510 is a variant of the parent 6502!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Stephen Nichol
Although that wasn't really a design decision, it became a necessity when they couldn't secure the movie rights for the gane, so the game-of-the-soundtrack-of-the-movie was a conceptual dodge that perhaps stretched a point just a little too far...!
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Colin Odell
Yeah, that's an interesting point. Although the Amiga was the more powerful music making machine out-of-the-box, it was the ST with its MIDI ports that made big inroads into studios as a sequencer, and while the Amiga had some interesting sequencing software (e.g. Bars & Pipes), the big innovation happened on the ST with Steinberg (now owned by Yamaha) and...
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Not in my household! ;-)
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You're right - Nintendo has used technology to thicken and polish the sound, but it remains (on the whole) cutesy, with a definite 8-bit vibe. I think it's partly to do with a 'house style', which stems from Nintendo's closed development model -- think back to the question on consistency from a couple of activities back.
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Jay S
Absolutely - working with trackers was analogous to programming patterns on a drum machine.
The big innovation with tracking was to display all the musical information as alphanumeric data in a grid -- like a musical spreadsheet -- which gives users a complete top-down overview of everything that's happening *and* the ability to precisely control each and...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to Diego Saldivar
It's not just a problem of resolution, what you lose with this sort of approach is a sense of musical drive and momentum (primarily melodic, since the harmonic and rhythmic movement is unchanged between variations). Randomness doesn't take any account of musical direction and the development of those fragmentary ideas into longer musical statements -...
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That's exactly my point: these (and chiptune) are used today as stylistic devices.
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Very well argued, Diego, although I think that the black and white/colour and silent/talkie film examples are maybe closer analogies.
You are absolutely right, though: video game music is a form of media music, and so cannot be divorced from that context.
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Kondo also plays around with the sequencing of each of the sections, and so the main 'loop' in the overworld section has an irregular musical structure. That also adds to the longevity.
I think that the floaty underwater waltz is also perfectly judged in capturing the feel and visual tempo of the swimming levels.
I agree, though, I think SMB works...
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Kenny McAlpine replied to NIck G
Excellent commentary, Nick, and you're absolutely right. There are a range of pros and cons to this approach, and you outline the very important point that Nintendo definitely had a vested business interest in maintaining a tight control over its developer network.
It might also be worth drawing comparisons with the approach at Atari in the very early 1980s.
