Task 18. Sound

Music on tapes and phonographs were impractical for use in the games industry in the 1970s though some arcade machines did use either of these two methods of sound production. A more acceptable means was to use a computer chip to change electronic pulses into sound.

In the 1980s new chips were produced and technology prices fell, this allowed for up to 8 channels to be used in producing the music. Sampling a real instrument then became used but due to the large cost per kilobyte it was not often used due to it taking up a large amount of memory for that time.

By the 1990s prices again dropped on technology and this allowed music to be even more detailed allowing vocals to be included within songs. Street fighter saw the beginning of using large amounts of voice samples along with lots of use of percussion and sound effects. By the time the SNES was released with its 16 bit sound chip this allowed for a greater range of acoustics to be used within games.

The release of the Playstation brought sound quality similar to that of a CD, which then led to music moving towards being streamed when the game was on a CD format.

Famous composers in the computer games world include:

Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda)

Koichi Sugiyama (Dragon Quest)

Rob Hubbard (Monty On the Run)

Hirokazu Tanaka (Metroid and Kid Icarus)

Martin Galway (Times of Lore)

Hiroshi Miyauchi (Out Run)

Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy)

Yuzo Koshiro (Ys)

I believe that my first favourite music experience in gaming must have been either playing sonic for the first time or playing final fantasy. Sonic had possibly the most advanced sound in a game that I had ever heard with different music on each level and even theme music for Dr Robonik battles. Final Fantasy had CD level music along with great composition and music that brought emotion and could even describe characters for each of their acoustic themes.