Why is fucking modern game music so generic and forgettable?

That's not really true in music. Machines can program memorable music with rhythmic dissonance and euclidean rhythms mixed with a few simple statements about how melodies should be constructed. Music is math at the end of the day, even the dumbest drummer is dividing rhythms, and every instrument's very structure is based on even division and the golden ratio so even the most ignorant musician can have their performance broken down to math.

The more true statement for this situation is you can't make anything memorable without skill.

Nier Automata
Super Mario Odyssey
Cuphead
Splatoon 2
Gravity Rush 2
Sonic Mania(Even if it is mostly remixes)
Persona 5
Just to name some games from this year with good OSTs.

you forgot Zelda BOTW
I really enjoyed those 4 chimes on the overworld once every 20 minutes

Hyrule Castle theme is great. But I'm talking more about consistently good OSTs

Because they don't have an identifiable main melody. The majority of the song is setup to be background and unlike most great game music, isn't very catchy. We remember songs we can hum to or tap our feet to, not some masterpiece that has too much that the average idiot gamer can appreciate.

I would say you still need the human element or you will end up with generic synth or orchestrated music. Without someone to actually go in there and make a proper melody it comes off as lifeless. Skill IS needed but skill without soul will always sound bland. Look at Braid's soundtrack vs Bastion. A truly good song will stay with you long after you are done listening to it.

Witcher has fucking great music.

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persona 5 had great music

There are always examples of good and bad music. For the part of Final Fantasy, it hasn't been the same since Uematsu went independent, which is just one facet of the series' slide into oblivion.

Nah, catchy melodies are as simple as even divisions, harmonic dissonance, and cyclical melodies. Take it from someone who writes catchy melodies. Soul doesn't even exist to be quite honest with you, you're confusing soul with skill.

The town music in FF15 is decent. I recognized it pretty fast in one of Dunkey's recent videos.

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And you are confusing skill with an imagination which comes from the concept of having a soul.

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I'm sorry, do you make music?

Enjoy making fruity loops.

And I really can't stop myself from double posting here: You do realize that the scales on which modern music is built are, themselves, an equation for memorable music… right?

shove this argument from authority up your ass mate

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/thread

OP sucks big black chick's

The Exception =\= The Rule
God, you're pathetic.

Though, to your defense, he DID say all.

Music fans are the worst. Think they know everything and are passionate but really they don't know shit and are arguing from a point of ignorance.

Like I said, enjoy your fruity loops. I'm sure you will break into the "industry" one day.

I'll go ahead and post this one too. I like it the best, but the whole soundtrack is pretty nice.

Post your catchy melodies, user.

I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure I made my arguments, let me go over them for you again since clearly you're too ass blasted to acknowledge them, in fact let me recap this whole conversation for you:

Reminder they never put the Hyrule Castle theme onto the soundtrack CD that came with the limited edition.
I'm still furious over it.

At this point I won't be posting anything in this thread because I'm sure ass blasted autistic faggots will shit on it regardless. At the end of the day I'm not making my argument from authority and if that's all you can see then you're not reading my whole posts or are retarded.

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No he didn't.

I think the best era for vidya music was just after the shitty beep boops stopped, but before budgets got so big that they just had to go for the french horns and drum beats for everything.

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I mean, I get it, but eh.

You're TOTALLY not mad, how could I be so confused. I mean I came in here and to you how and why you were wrong with technical terms and information and you then totally didn't throw a fit. I mean I don't know how I could be so confused.

Also:
It's been fun user, but I only have so much time to argue with music autists who think they know everything when they don't even understand what a scale is. This will be your last (you) from me, but keep in touch.

I still hum background music from the 80s and 90s, up to about 1996.
After that I don't think I remember any tunes at all.
Music being significant in games ended when midi was replaced with cd/mp3.

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More horns, you say?

nigger I stopped and waited for this song to loop the first time I heard it

The opposite reason old music is so memorable. No strong central melody hook. Old systems had to rely on shitty sound chips with only a handful of sound channels, which is why all of the music is centered around one main melody, a beat, and either bass, countermelody, or a harmony or two, rather than ambiance and generic movie scores style songs that pervade the medium now. It was necessary to have music with a good hook, because the alternative was to have nothing but an unbearably boring series of deets and doots.

Movie scores usually fucking blow for general listening, because most of them are only meant to set the emotional tone and stay out of the way of everything else, rather than be enjoyable on their own. In terms of movies, John Williams is revered as God-Tier because he can make music which accomplishes both simultaneously, which for some fucking reason, almost nobody else in his medium can do. Hans Zimmer rarely does it for some reason, despite having the ability.

This is why any retard on the street can hum you a tune from Mario, and anyone with more than a passing interest in video games can hum you the main theme of Zelda. It's why everyone knows the main theme to nearly every movie John Williams worked on, but fucking nobody knows the main theme to The Emoji Movie. The problem is that the most emotion in music is attached to the main melody, which means that it's the most risky. Why take risks, when you can be as generic as possible and still get the lukewarm but overall positive reaction from normalfags who have no appreciation for the artform, but know that they felt something?

The thing these fuckers keep forgetting is that human beings attach melodies to other concepts and meanings, which makes those melodies an emotional shorthand for that concept or meaning. Just the first few notes of Wily Castle or Proto Man's whistle are infinitely more meaningful than anything in Generic Soft Piano Fantasy MCXV. That emotional attachment is so much more powerful than any generic score that it blows my mind that anyone would willingly choose to go with the generic score unless they were on an extremely tight deadline, (which most game composers are not) or they just knew they didn't have the skill to make anything better. It drives me up the fucking wall that fucking SQUARE of all companies, whose most well-loved soundtracks were made by people who get it, like Nobuo Uematsu and Yoko Shimomura, is failing on this front. A game like VII is in the same series as a game like XIII.

Of all of the Extra Credits videos which qualify them for a firing squad, their video on this topic is probably in the top 5. They explain exactly what I just did, but then immediately revert to "No, modern games are fine, games are better now because we have better technology and because they're new, even though I just completely blew that notion apart with my own argument."

Holy fuck, this topic triggers the shit out of me. Vid fucking related.

The point still stands, cherrypicking about cherrypicking isn't magically fixing vidya.

That's horse shit.

i also think you remember old games songs so much because they only had like 5 of them some games only had one song. hardware limits.

so you would get the same songs for hours.

The fuck is wrong with you.

late 90s and early 2000s had the best music IMO

With midi music, space was not a problem in the 90s.
You could have a decent song be 11k.

Not my fault the nip version sounds like the singers are half asleep.

Like Hollywood when making a movie they use generic place holder music or rather music from a previous project. Since now games are made in 5-10 studios at the same time they can't put an original soundtrack in because the other studios are all working to the place holder.

Because they use really basic stuff in Vegas music maker
Which has a lot of prefab loops and shit for fast music making.

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3DS generation of pokemon in a nutshell.

Says the plebbitor

this tbh

If I can't recognize your main theme drummed out on the bottom of an upturned 5 gallon pail, you have failed.

Holy shit, that was beautiful.
Please sir, may I have some more?

I'd only ever seen that webm, but your post made me think to throw the name in the webm into YouTube to see what came up.

Have an entire fucking album, I guess.

Nicely put
There's no love, only business and easy profit

Man, you're the best! I've never seen an artist this good since +TEK
Thanks!

can you record yourself playing in a midi keyboard using a tracker (like FL studio)?

You're gonna make me blush, user. You're welcome.

I don't see why not.

Is milky tracker good enough?

Temp music.

You can.

I'm really not the guy to ask. I only have tangental contact with music development.

It's easier to make

Final Fantasy XIII was a shitty game

You're describing orchestra music in general. When you have more than ~5 instruments playing at the same time, it all just sounds like auditory mud. This orchestra/symphony meme has to fucking die already.

You're entirely right, forget about that other user.

Not true. It's that people take orchestra as an excuse to not write good music. It's the same thing as the "the tech is better so so is the music" bullshit. Take something written to be good in minimalism and play it with an orchestra (that is arranged fucking competently) and it'll sound amazing.

Another huge mistake generic orchestra makes is that it feels like it has to keep reminding you "YEAH MAN WE REALLY GOT 180 INSTRUMENTS IN HERE" by never letting there be any quiet. All the instruments are going at once. Unless it's a sad song, then enjoy your violin, a few background strings, and maybe a piano. For some reason, people also think "orchestra" also means "no vocals allowed".

Embedded is an orchestra arrangement of Touhou, but if you want some competently applied orchestra in a videogame itself, I strongly recommend Yoko Shimomura's works. Kingdom Hearts music really brings her style out.

Then it's a flawed equation, because people move from popular song to popular song really fucking fast

Then what was the point in even claiming you can make catchy melodies if you knew you were unwilling to prove your claim?

Imho vid related is a good counter example. It's memorable even though it plays in a single location, one where the player doesn't really spend that much time when compared to the rest of the game.

Yes, but you'll have to enable the device in preferences, which isn't done by default for some reason. Pic related.
milkytracker.titandemo.org/docs/MilkyTracker.html#MIDI

You're only describing how people use orchestral scores nowadays, which is exactly why we're in the mess we are now.

they include vocals… as an additional instrument..

Yeah, I was about to correct myself. Thanks for pointing that out. There are vocals, but always as generic meaningless vowels that just carry under or over the instruments. God forbid there be lyrics, maybe something that has to do with the situation.

Here's some of the Yoko Shimomura I mentioned. A recurring boss theme from KHII. It has its own hook and also reprises several other major themes from the series.

Actually, here. This is probably the most impactful rendition of an old vidya song turned orchestra that I can think of. It's just the generic dungeon theme from the first Zelda game, but holy shit. Listen on the best headphones you have or with your best speakers turned up.

Skip to 11:06.

mega.nz/#!qRMRgTLA!DRDMFbiAx4YXCSgGc44RigKp3FBTGbtJqL1PViwyZVs
Here's the bandcamp 4 U

If you like it, buy it

Woah, nice. Thanks, user.

It's only 128kbps
I bought it but honestly didn't see much of an audible difference between the FLAC, m4a and MP3 so I just uploaded this one to save up space
Here is the downloader.
github.com/Otiel/BandcampDownloader/releases/tag/v0.1.9.2

Bigger deal than some might think. There's a reason for the saying "music is the silence between the notes".

FF15 had a good soundtrack though.

youtube.com/watch?v=FPt6_iXo3fU

Just want to point out that John Williams stole literally everything from Holst. Listen to Mars: Bringer of War and you can literally see scenes from Star Wars in your mind because it's basically the same thing. In fact, all modern movie composers took great "inspiration" from orchestral pieces of the early 1900's. It's as blatant as when rap artists use "sampling".

On topic: memorability of a piece is mostly down to simplicity. Everyone knows Beethoven's 5th because of the "da da da dunnn", but most don't even know the rest of the piece. Anyone who's even passably familiar with Undertale's music will recognize it if someone hums a short stream of notes; how "good" it is will largely be up to opinion, but it's impossible to deny they're catchy.

The thing is: it's relatively easy to take a simple, chiptune-esque piece and make an orchestration out of it. But doing to reverse is nearly impossible, except for the simple parts of the piece.

Anyway, more generally the problem is that all the harmonization that comes from orchestras allow composers to mask shitty, uncatchy melodies with a bunch of nice-sounding strings. Whereas back in the days when orchestral sounding scores were impossible to create, you needed to at least create something catchy as the base melody, there was nothing covering it up.

People actually enjoy Persona soundtracks?

Among other things, it also seems like the overdoing of underdoing music comes from wanting audio greeble, or "grain" so as to cover unwanted aspects of other sounds. You can mask a lower recording quality with a little music, or to hide the fact that a live action scene was dubbed over. In those cases music is nothing more than motion blur for your ears.

I'll be honest, I've seen only their absolute shortest videos. I struggle to ever want to watch them. They're like the fucking special ed of understanding video games.

Indeed.

If any classical symphony is memorable as a whole, it's probably Beethoven's 5th too, and I'd wager that people not being intimately famililar with it is mostly because they've never consciously listened to the symphony as a whole. It's an extremely catchy symphony because each of its movements essentially just is very cyclical and built from a few central themes, with no meandering or useless notes at all, and just enough variation to keep it fresh but not enough to break the repetition that makes it catchy.

And that is why the FM version of the soundtrack to Etrian Odyssey 5 is shit compared to the ones from 1 to 3. They made it in generic style, then went and just made "eight bit versions" of it, and it sounds like shit. Anyone with half a brain could see it coming the moment they announced that they would make an FM version of it, but retards didn't. When this is pointed out to them, they just go "you wanted an FM soundtrack, why are you complaining when you got what you want".

These games aim for the biggest audience, they are designed by committee.

I liked the OST for XV but it's more for the relaxing themes. Some of the more grand battle themes do sound good but generic. Which fits into the larger audience they were going for. I think FFXIII had a better OST overall. It definitely had more identity to it.

Also you say modern game music but there are tons of games that came out with great music. Though most have been either from Japan. Most good western composers left the industry or don't get to really do anything creative. It really shows when video game music threads are constantly filled with japanese stuff and most of the western music is from older games.

Older vidya consoles also had their own unique soundboards so they could make sounds that you couldn't make with normal instruments. You'll really notice this with games on both the SNES and Genesis having soundtracks over the same tunes but sounding completely different. 1st webm being a good example.

I fucking loathe that shit. I wonder why things like that even happen.

I listen to those all the time and it really depends on the composer. 2nd webm being a good example with the 3rd webm being something from another popular series.

It has some good music scattered about. I enjoyed The Almighty from P4 and Mitsuru's theme in P4A.

NEETs is pretty nice. I like their jazz arrangements more than their orchestrated though. Also non vocal versions because I prefer male voices when it comes to most orchestrated works.

Agreed. Recently got the Orchestrated CD but honestly it was just good. Nothing special about it. It doesn't compare to the orchestrated versions of some of the older games like FF8.

Why should they give a shit? The average consumer will never buy the CDs to their games so why bother making a good soundtrack? If you're making an interactive experience, then going for the shit stock music used for movies may fit the bill.

Can you not make assumptions?

Because you touch yourself at night.

implying this is "generic and forgettable"
OP needs to play good rpgs

mah nigga

It's not just that the sound chips incentivized creativity, but that games as a whole have shifted directions, I feel.

When all they had to work with were chip-tunes, they had to create melodies. A good piece of music should sound great even in 8-bit form and visa-versa; old 8-bit songs can sound fantastic when they're given a modern remix.

Jojo music because fuck, I really can't think of any memorable game music from recent years.

What this asshole's wall of text says, pretty much.

Someone post daytona usa.

Don't tell me you guys already forgot about one of the best tracks of 2017.
I'M THE TALLEST OF MOUNTAINS

There are two iconic Western game soundtracks for me : Command and Conquer/C&C Red alert and Halo.

KH2's soundtrack was constantly reused throughout other games up until d3 and there was a reason why. Certain tracks from kh like Vectors To The Heavens and The Other Promise being series defining compositions for her.

There's a process called using temp music, they do this in movies.

Temp music is literally when you use a real song you don't have the rights to to set a scene or idea, and it's full of problems that fuck over soundtracks.

They use these songs to set scenes and build around these songs, but can't use the rights to them because of budget issues, so they contract their own folks to make music similar to it so it ends up bland and crap, because it's not a piece made specifically for the scene using an artist's passionate vision, it's just a worse version of what's likely pop music trash.

The practice is borderline plagerism, and movie students are taught this process, fail in the movie industry because Hollywood has a tight monopoly on movies, and they instead move to games since the positions are more open.

So not only do you have people who don't want to make stuff for games in the industry producing trash, you have creative directors who are literally just plagerizing instead of creating content. Good games cannot come from a corparation, they can only make good graphics, but anyone working for one is effectively creatively bankrupt due to the various processes that prevent people from having sway in improving the thing.

You realize that almost every single track from the Metal Gear Rising ost is so iconic it has a meme associated with it right?

That's 4 years old by this point, most stuff for big AAA games sounds like it was written by the same guy.

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Step aside, ladies. The best soundtrack to ever exist coming through.

Martin O' Donnell's musical prequel for Destiny was recently leaked, and it's pretty fucking awesome if you ask me. Way way way above anything Halo in terms of composition and instrumentation. It's a fucking masterwork, and those kikes at Activision kept it from the general public for 5 years just to spite the man who made it.

mega.nz/#!f0wiSBTJ!D5Qu8WetGun6JJOFVlvxKjt5eCDLYaj4D8ZFaS5TsQE

Only freaks of nature enjoy persona soundtracks.

Being aqua is the 13th struggle

I'm pretty sure a bunch of it is sampled from a single symphony, Dvorak's "From the New World" and the associated suites, the japs seem to be rather attached to it, honestly, it's been used a lot in their media.

Hot

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Did he steal the Harry Potter music?

Secret of Mana 2/Seiken Densetsu 3 ingame OST track.

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In what universe is MGS Rising triple A?

Ace Combat 7 will change that

Because you didn't grow up with it :^)

Clearly they don't need good music. Look how many people praised Destiny for ages on end.

OP never mention AAA nor did he. Why do you think we're only talking about AAA games?

Ace Combat wouldn't be Ace Combat if it didn't have good music.

Damn right

World of Warcraft has had consistently good music since TBC. It's surprising really, the game has gone to (even more) shit but musically and environmentally things have stayed good throughout.

Watch me call Jeremy Soule's work in Shitrim "modern" even though it's 7 years old

Early Jeremy Soule works were amazing.

It's one of the weakest of the mainline FFs, along with XIII-2

There are lots of western game with good soundtracks. Generally speaking I would say that Halo and tloz have the most iconic soundtracks. Even people who are not into gaming heard or like those tracks.

its the exact same story with Runescape

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Somnus and Omnis Lacrima are god tier but everything else fall into generic (which is most of it) or just good. Prompto's DLC has some nice music but I'm just a sucker for anything that sounds cyberpunk. Doesn't stop it from being forgettable to most people though.

because most original catchy music has already been created and it's difficult not to unintentionally rip off /replicate another piece of music

Listen to these tracks:
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance - Rhiza´s Way of the Hightway
Ace Combat 4 - Megalith
Super Mario Galaxy - final battle
Max Payne 2 theme (one of the greatest main themes of all time imo)

Plenty of great, memorable orchestral music out there. Orchestras are not the problem, the "music should not be heard" meme is. Older games didn't have a choice here, but ironically created some of the best video game music because of it.

New games have inoffensive and bland gameplay, it's no surprise the music is the same way.

Same reason modern game graphics are so generic and forgettable.

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the remake offers the original amiga OST as an option. Really happy they did that. Also makes an otherwise poor game into a pretty great one.

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I saw that. Really good of them.

Apparently this game got an "Official" release a few months ago.

What do you guys think of this one? Does the game ruin it?

Meme song is better than the other stuff out there

That's cheating, those are not soundtracks but real songs used in a game.

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FFXV has some good tracks but it can't compare to Ikaruga. Also no one seems to know if John Williams stole the Harry Potter music.

Not true at all.

Because you're blinded by nostalgia and are generally delusional?

That's true…

Which song is this actually? I can't figure out if it's a Mega Man Battle Network song or a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon one.

TES always had good music.
Even if it has strayed from its CRPG roots the music is nice.

If the NPC pictured is correct, then it could be the UnderNet- guys like that only appeared there.
Unless it's one of the CopyMen, but I think he first appears in the UnderNet anyhow.
I only know the UnderNet theme from MMBN3, and that ain't it.

Finally found it after 2 years!

But lots of shitty games have great music, too.

See

Just in case no one knew the source

You tried.

Now I just want to talk about memorable classical music. Here are some of my favorites.
Danse Macabre.
youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1.
youtube.com/watch?v=ItSJ_woWnmk
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no.2.
youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w

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Have another

Danke

5-ish years ago, WayForward put out an action game soundtrack that you could dance to

only pe3, pe4 got too gay and pe5 used a choir of chimpanzees

Downloaded this recently. 85+GBs (MP3 version) of classical music including operas and plays. Scanned after I downloaded and found no viruses. I'm really glad I got a hold of this.

musicaclassic.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/free-download-105-great-masters-of-classical-music-a-huge-collection-of-classical-music-flac-mp3/

Your arguments are shit, and so are you.
The furthest we got to automatic machine composition was with Wolfram's musical cellular automata, and it required heavy user/developer input. Anything else is based on previous pieces invented by humans.
I would consider anyone using muh golden ratio as an argument for aesthetics to have their arguments automatically dismissed, but it's okay, I will entertain you.
divisions, harmonic dissonance, and cyclical melodies.
That's like Music 101, not Catchy Music 101. Except for the harmonic dissonance thing, as it appears it's been studied music that is "off" in one way or the other is often significantly catchier.
An equation for memorable music would allow us to ONLY make memorable music, and yet we still have people who know about music theory producing less than memorable music, which is exactly what this thread is about. In fucking fact, LISA's music is, for all intents and purposes, outsider art, and yet it manages to shit on most shitty generic epic music OST Hollywood or AAA games can shit out.

>Kirby still consistently has great iconic boss music

C

This was the only song I could think of. Ironic that they where making fun of music like this but its the only song out all the marvels movies I could think of.

no, these composers just compose generic and forgettable scores.

Completely fucking false. There are tons of great tracks. Both AAA and indie. AAA generally does orchestral because it more epic and they want to hype up retards. But that doesn't change that they manage to do great tracks while indie go for a different approach. Something great can be buried in a shit game. Take Skyrim for instance, its has great scores on it own, more specifically the melancholy/peaceful tracks. DOTA 2's main menu is also great. And instance for great indie tracks is Isaac's main theme and FTL.

you all dont really care about soundtracks mostly because you dont bother to listen anything else as long as you flavor of a the months is posted its okay.

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I can remember this from 2006 during the beta(never did play the final game), I think its a made up language.

Your nig nog brain just can't handle the complexity hun

why dont you make a real video game music thread instead of indulging this "ironic" twat