How Pokemon 8-bit music was inspired by classical music

[Music] the music for the original Pokémon games was amazing not only is the soundtrack now dripping in Nostalgia for me but these songs really succeeded in casting an epic exciting and sometimes even scary mood over these classic games but what makes this music truly impressive is the limitations that composer and programmer junichi massuda had to work with him the Game Boy couldn't play back full mp3 recordings like a modern games cont could not the Game Boy as with most early video game consoles created Sound by generating simple waveforms like a synthesizer would the Game Boy sound chip had full voice pany meaning it could produce a maximum of four different notes at any given time and furthermore these four voices were also Limited in the particular sound that they could generate the first two voices could basically only generate pulse [Music] waves [Music] the third voice was more versatile and could switch between various different wave shapes that could be customized by the programmer and the fourth and final voice could only generate noise sounds so this voice can't actually be used to play pictures to play notes but instead it was used for creating percussion parts and sound effects so basically the Game Boy could play three different pitures at once just enough for a simple Triad chord but yet when we listen to the Pokémon soundtrack it doesn't sound that limited it feels like we've got a lot more going on here than just three [Music] pictures well this is because janichi massuda very much Rose to the challenge of writing music for the Game Boy like many great artists before him massuda allowed these limitations to breed creativity and the primary way that he did this the main way that he overcame this limitation of only being able to use three notes at once is by using a musical texture known as Counterpoint most modern music uses a texture called homophony homophony is ultimately when we have a melody and that Melody is supported it's accompanied by chords these chords are technically made from separate voices separate notes however we perceive them and treat them as one unified voice [Music] and this is why the texture is called homophonic homo meaning the same we are treating these separate voices these separate notes as the same voice but this is in contrast to CounterPoint in Counterpoint or music that has a contrapuntal texture the different voices of the music aren't blending together into unified chords but instead each voice has a sense of Independence it's like rather than notes in a chord we have three separate Melodies but yet despite having this sense of Separation the way that these different Melodies these different voices interact still creates an overarching sense of [Music] Harmony it sounds like we've got a chord progression despite the fact that there isn't actually an instrument here playing chords for example let's look at the music from Celadon City this music is made up of simply three separate voices take any of those voices in isolation and it doesn't sound like much is really happening but when they come together they weave into this sense of Harmony [Music] here's another example the theme from Pallet Town this time the top voice is serving as a main Melody the second voice is playing a counter Melody that sort of complements and interacts of that first Melody and the third voice is playing a sort of bass line playing a steady flow of root notes to underpin this sense of Harmony [Applause] [Music] later in The Pallet Town Theme the second voice switches from playing that counter Melody to now playing these [Music] arpeggios an arpeggio is a broken chord so the notes of a chord but rather than all the notes being played at once in a stack the notes are played one after another and this is obviously a great technique to take advantage of when writing music with limited voices if massuda had written these chords to be played in Stacks with all three notes of the chord sounding at once well that would instantly take up all three of our voices leaving us with no way to add anything further to the music by instead having these chords arpeggiated the chords can now be played by just one of the three voices freeing up the other two voices to play other parts now anytime that you hear the word Counterpoint uttered you can bet that the name JS bark won't be far behind bark is famous for his contrapuntal writing some of the clearest examples of Bark's use of CounterPoint are his two and three-part [Music] inventions [Music] these inventions are short keyboard pieces written as exercises to educate students on how to play and compose with just two or three voices Bark's use of CounterPoint served as a big source of inspiration for massuda on how he could still write beautiful and engaging music with a limited number of voices there were a lot of limitations with the hardware and the number of sounds it could create the game boy had only three sound channels so I would study a lot of three voiced compositions like those from bar and try to figure out how you could make that kind of music Bark's music sounds very beautiful without being complex B's three-part inventions would literally make perfect Perfect Game Boy Music These are intricate engaging impressive compositions that at all times are only using three different lines three different [Music] [Applause] voices so they were the perfect inspiration this perfect example for massuda to show him that it's not only possible to write great music with only three separate Melodies but that it can be a really great approach that limitation can lead to the creativity [Music] one of the most infamous tracks from the original Pokémon soundtrack is the theme from Lavender Town Lavender Town is the location of the Pokémon Tower a Pokémon graveyard full of Ghost type Pokémon and massuda has captured that perfectly with this music in fact perhaps he captured it too well the Eerie unnerving sound of this music actually inspired an urban myth known as Lavender Town Syndrome which suggests that high frequency sounds used in the music actually caused children who were playing the game to have severe headaches now of course massuda didn't actually use super high frequencies to make children ill however he did use some interesting note choices in his music to cast this uneasy mood namely the combination of both the raised fourth degree and the flat second this sets the music in what we could describe as a lydian flat 2 scale quite an unnatural and unusual sound although much of the music in the Pokémon games is very light-hearted in tone Lavender Town is an example of the more jarring and for a lack of a better word scary music that massuda wrote for Pokémon for example here is a quote from massuda discussing the music he wrote for vidiian Forest a dark Forest full of bug type Pokémon that the player has to pass through to continue on their Journey these days people don't really think of Pokémon as scary creatures but in the original games we kind of thought of them as monsters so I tried to make the music a bit scarier in places like forests and caves I felt that fit the atmosphere better with Veridian Forest I really wanted to differentiate it from the music that played in towns and on the typical Roots I adjusted the programming to make the song Loop in different places to create an eerie and mysterious sound in these more scary pieces of music that massuda wrote we can hear less so the influence of JS spk but more the influence of later 20th century composers such as Stravinsky or Shostakovich I wasn't really into classical music until I found Stravinsky is the right of spring and the [Music] [Music] firebird and shostakovich's Symphonies number five and [Music] seven I became such an enthusiastic fan that I began to collect their Works read their autobiographies and buy the scores their Works taught me about composing music we can see a Stravinsky like use of chromaticism in some of muda's writing for example here in the mount Moon [Music] theme the main motif of this theme is based on the notes of a major scale but with a lowered sixth degree what we could refer to as a harmonic major scale initially we get this lowered six Motif in the key of B so the lowed six note is G natural and then the motif gets shifted to e so now the lowed six is the C natural following this we get this figure that descends down the chromatic scale giving us a sense of sort of spiraling into the [Music] darkness [Music] we can hear a similar dark chromatic sound here in the Pokémon Tower theme the music that plays as you're exploring the Ghost Field Pokémon [Music] graveyard [Music] when massuda composed this music he didn't just have to commit it to notation like a conventional composer or record it using instruments he had to program it into the game painstakingly going note by note assigning the correct duration pitch wave sound and other parameters just to write a piece of music so with that in mind it's amazing that despite these intricacies he still took the extra time and care to make this music sound like it was actually played by musicians not just generated by a microchip have a listen here to how Dynamic this music is how the volume articulation and tone of the notes changes during the [Applause] music [Music] we can hear notes starting softly and then crescendoing up we can hear ver used these little nuances breathe life into the music and give it the same level of impact as Music performed on conventional musical [Music] instruments before video game consoles like the Game Boy I doubt anybody would have thought to create music using sounds like these these very basic waveform sounds but now music like this is actually a genre onto itself chip tune so I thought I would finish this video today with this chip tune piece that I've written and of course just like muda I limited myself to using just three part [Music] Counterpoint [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Music] I [Music] oh [Music] n

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 315,914

Keywords: pokemon, rby, 8 bit, music, nintendo, soundtrack, chiptune, music theory, explained, gameboy, Junichi Masuda, blue, red, yellow, bach

Id: WyvfKFVRqVs

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022