This week I wrote some video game music. Specifically, I wrote for an RPG, which is interesting because RPGs are typically set in really big fantasy worlds with lots of opportunity to explore different environments and, in the case of the music, a good variety of genres and moods. The excerpt from the project that I’m featuring today was conceived as a theme for a village, although the production is currently in progress so the track may be used in a different context or possibly not at all.

I wrote this for real instruments, intending to get a proper recording, but then the project lead specifically asked me to mimic the sound of a 90’s era console game so I rerecorded my mockup using some really simple synthesizers and reduced the audio resolution and bitrate to match the specifications of one console in particular. The bass became a sawtooth, the fiddle a square, the accordion became a triangle and so on, each with attack and decay envelopes to more or less imitate the sound of the real instrument, and each with limited polyphony as if they were constrained to only a few audio channels.

The visualization that I used in the video reveals a few interesting things. Even though it’s not consistently easy to hear, you can see where the guitar’s open strings would be on the piano roll. They’re still there, though not as prevalent, when I modulate into the modally borrowed major submediant just because the idiomatic way guitar music is written tends to prefer those tones. It also seems as though the proportion of the harmonic regions to one another, here indicated in orange and green, very nearly align with the Fibonacci sequence. I didn’t even notice that until after I had written the music and was preparing the graphics, so only then did I count up the measures and find that I wrote 59 measures in A, 33 in F and 22 in A again. Those are proportions of 1.788:1 and 1.5:1 respectively, which is only just close enough for a visual resemblance (the ratio of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence approaches the golden mean or about 1.618:1). There was nothing intentional about that, but I thought it was interesting to discover afterward.

The recording is available at soundcloud.com and here’s the score for your perusal.