Adaptive Music (In Gaming) Is Amazing

[Music] [Music] hey yeah I need your help with something okay so I just need you to sit here okay but why do you think it's been a minute yeah yeah probably it's been too long since I just sat down and talked about video games for real I've been working on the script since before the Christmas video so music I you know I think it's pretty good wait wait just bear with me for a sec just think of your favorite soundtrack or song from a game okay so there's a number of reasons you could like that but it's safe to say that it made the game better right yeah yeah that's that's what a depth of music is about it's about the music adapting to what's going on up here which is good it's also about being good [Music] okay on second thought maybe I won't dig too deep into is the music good territory I'm no video game channel I assume making music for a video game this is really hard it isn't enough to stab right good music now like making music work in tandem with the game itself is equally important and I assume that would make it harder there are two sides to successful game audio in my opinion and you have to know how to write good music first of all but that only gets you so far how your sound design how your music plays back for the player is the other 50% so the absolute best sound design the absolute best music that's implemented poorly is a failure unlike other forms of media like say a movie games are way less predictable because we the gamers are in complete control of said games pacing and if you know the thing or two about music you'd know that four by four time signature does not match up with fucking whatever how do you make music transition from one thing to another based on a change that happens in the game without knowing when the change is gonna happen what the fuck well mister fuck ass game designer you have two options you just make stuff fade in and fade out and that's it that's added that's literally it that's all or you can make adaptive music you this is the part where you say what is adaptive music question mark I'm glad you asked back in the Stone Age having music at all was impressive and so transitions didn't exist we are you not going to talk more bizarre whose channel is it basically song started stop skip and that's fucking it this still exists today although usually the approaches the littlest thing is Frogger was different in that every time you got a frog to the end a new melody was played [Music] so I gave you this sense of progression it's pretty nifty but there wasn't much so secret really do back then even if they wanted to due to technical limitations see back in the day storage capacity was a huge concern and a gigantic bottleneck like check this out you you this file takes up more space than the entirety of an NES cartridges memory so to get around that games would use a variety of clever techniques such as literally generating music on-the-fly and aggressive file compression which is why stuff sounded like this thing is though where as with something like the NES where you can only play upwards of five boots at once pcs have the unique advantage and disadvantage of being able to use whatever the in views are happen to have whether that be a $700 studio grade synthesizer used to make real actual music or a shitty computer speaker and to a degree they don't work [Music] so cute it's trying its best but with that said [Music] [Music] as technology progressed so too did our ability to do more interesting and complex things like you could play video games in your home there was this thing called the World Wide Web you wouldn't know it but like it would let you watch porn for free dude I know I know it was crazy LucasArts who are responsible for all this realized early on that if you could just adjust some music dynamically depending on in-game events like movies and TV already do you could set the mood far more effectively oops this is 1990 bitch you can't just download a copy of wise and go to town that kind of software doesn't exist so instead they just said bucket make one it was called I'm use and its sole purpose was to handle music in a way that allowed it to play continuously instead of stopping and starting like Frogger and its several sequels including but not limited to frogs journey The Forgotten relic and because making an entire new piece of middleware from scratch alongside a game sets a release within the year wasn't hard enough they also have just decided hey what have we made it so that every location which there are several all had their own music and also you know wouldn't it be really cool if we wrote more than two hundred transitional pieces of music hey and what if we replaced our blood with coffee right I'm use was super-powerful but I'd argue its coolest feature was its ability to mix horizontally basically that means it could seamlessly segue between songs and a computer being able to do that in 1990 is witchcraft and debatably the craziest part of all of that is that it was implemented so discreetly that you might not even notice unless you were paying close attention [Music] that was it right there did you notice have a look I'm pretty sure this is how it works [Music] today there are loads of games that still do stuff like this but it's usually just fade in fade out which is dumb and boring and lazy and stupid and I hate it and it's not what I'm here to talk about so let's talk about vertical mixing unlike horizontal where you're essentially going from one idea to the next smoothly vertical is all about swapping out different parts of a single idea dynamically Banjo Kazooie is another early example of this done really well it's a deceptively simple game but one of the greatest strengths it has is this atmosphere which is mostly achieved through its art its level design and and with the help of grant kirkhope publishing every variant of every song online thank you grant we can see how this works you walk around the overworld doing your feelin's doing all good music you walk over here oh that's that's a different version of the Sun the game's lettin you know hey boss battle yeah okay that's cool let's go ahead and walk over here into this water dive underneath that's a water version like in Monkey Island certain areas or environments act as trigger points for the music to swap between versions this helps to establish different areas as there on the thing without being really in your face about it and it's amazing I love it okay so oftentimes the most standout examples of a great soundtrack I went to gets all fancy with the aforementioned techniques but there are some notable exceptions like [Music] living legend aka doom composer Mick Gordon stated during a GDC talk that the music was intentionally left mostly static he has a better fit the flow of gameplay what he did do to keep stuff from getting too repetitive though was set up different versions of the songs riffs verses bridges or in refrains to let the game randomly cycle through them you basically get a different version of Animal Crossing has an entirely different song for all 24 hours of each day plus two variants of each one to account for whether adding up to a total of 72 songs not including the town themes villager themes keiki sliders 92 song collection his CD releases or the fact that most people aren't even gonna fuckin hear some of those songs due to not want him to play Animal Crossing at 4 a.m. they're not DeGeneres they didn't got to do that but they did and it's cool God fucking nobody does this stuff like Nintendo like okay Mario Odyssey has so many cute little touches like out when he traveled through a power lines of the sign effect changes the key to match the background music [Music] well I can when you hop into classic levels the music changes to an 8-bit rendition of the same thing [Music] or how the pause menu like remember the observatory theme in the mario galaxy yeah you do is fucking gorgeous look look at this it's so Killer Instinct edgy as it is it's rad as hell imagine being in a room full of people when that happens they did go fucking in the same bottle - from valve god rest their soul was absolutely filled with little quirks and homage is like when you get close to them when you close to the companion cube with a little tune plays that's nice it also happens to be the exact same motif that also appears as the light bridge sound effect and the operatic finale and probably some other shit I don't know they need for speed most wanted the need for speed most wanted thank you the cop chases in this game were accompanied by this super intense adaptive work by Paul Lin Ford who also did some work for movies that allegedly exist but god damn it works so well high level chases feel like these intense cinematic struggles between you and them and the more shit you got yourself in the more intense the music died like this is level one and this is level 5 there were different Tunes for different speeds and situations and heat levels and not a hint of linear script to be found in Julian it's fucking art and by that I mean it's pretty cool you know for a video game but let's get serious let's get one thing straight here Mario Kart it's not a video game it's a rite of passage losing in Mario Kart especially to your snot-nosed gremlin of a sibling or to ruin your fucking year Jessamyn if you're watching might have might have planned your death a couple times might have talked to a dark web hitman at some point just you know don't use the blue shell and in the third lap when I'm in first that's that's just not okay unless I do it this video wouldn't exist if it weren't for Mario Kart Wii but I spent an unhealthy amount of time on this game from April 27th 2008 to April 28th 2017 this is where boys became men those don't count there is a musical queue for pretty much every single thing that happens in this game and it's all that happened the closer you get to actually starting a race the more energetic the music becomes some people might say this is a small detail but when you're 12 years old that's enough to make you feel like you're signing up for a fucking war and you kind of were don't get me started on eight you got sons a speed up and jump a key at the final left [Music] we got a song with multiple versions for different areas of the map yeah disco beats it only plays when you're on first [Music] you got sound effects created by things in the course it always matched a bead and the key of the song it's in [Applause] you got an entire course with a big band Symphony that hypes you up all the way to the finish yes I am referring to Baby Park more often than not players are so focused on vanquishing their shitty cousin Jimmy they probably didn't even notice any of this there are so many great titles that do this in some capacity and yet it's seldom mentioned the mc5 Mirror's Edge halo Red Dead Redemption Deus Ex new super mario bros mario galaxy uncharted breadth of the wild left for dead MGS revengeance mario 64 auditorium hollow knight civilization Pikmin fuckin tetris apparently [Music] [Music] okay that's actually really cool fuck you I could go on for hours about how much I love this shit I probably am down in the comments but if there's a central point I want to hit home on it's a man I don't know I just it's cool as hell god dammit more people need to notice and to put it pretentiously games are most effective when every single element works in perfect harmony and I feel it's a shame that this kind of attention often goes unnoticed by the passive player and underutilized by most developers I need money honey is a single easiest way to spend less money while shopping online in case you haven't already been sold by 4,000 other YouTube channels it's a free browser extension that automatically hunts for and applies the best promo codes for when you buy shit it works on basically everything oh but noodle if it's free how are they making money are they selling my information to the hot single Russians who keep emailing me I am also paranoid so I looked into this and they themselves tell you exactly how they pay the bills they don't say your data that's the important part watch me as I purchase valuables with my famous youtuber money amazing joking aside my friends and I have used honey for probably over a year now and I really like it so it's cool to support them and be supported by them it's free it's so easy to install it even a forsaken bitch like you could do it and it massively helps to support me I'm going away now goodbye [Music]

Channel: Noodle

Views: 1,652,326

Rating: 4.9758472 out of 5

Keywords: games, gaming, music, video games, videogames, videogame, video game, adaptive music, noodle, animation, analysis, essay, funny, monkey island, banjop kazooie, doom, doom 2016, animal crossing, mario odyssey, portal 2, need for speed, most wanted, mariokart, wii, hollow knight, egoraptor, nakeyjakey, jontron, dunkey

Id: yLd5wmBNCBM

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2019