Why game music (and baroque) fits the modern lifestyle. And Beethoven not.

Some people complain about the death of the Album format. The single-track mentality is called a loss of culture and a listening strategy for the poorly educated. I think that is far away from the truth.

The technical spectrum of audio playback

We can create a whole spectrum here from full control over the order of pieces to no control: On the one end there is the single track which you can access directly. In our days that would be a digital (compressed) wave file and some player device.

On the other hand there is the (live) concert. You have no choice except leaving.

In between are: The CD, with a fixed order but very easy access to a single track and the (in)famous random feature. Then the Vinyl-LP which is the low-quality, analogue version of the CD. And the cassette, still in use for children audio-drama and hipster mixtapes, where it is very inconvenient to even skip tracks. And maybe FM radio, where the only choice is switching the channel. And for the sake of completeness movie soundtracks are on the concert side, too. Even if you listen to a single track on a soundtrack CD it is a miniature concert format which resembles the matching scenes on the screen, in order.

So from now on we can forget the CD album and talk about

Single pieces versus concerts

A single piece is the maximum choice and a concert is the minimum choice for an individual. I have nothing against concert situations (which include recordings or situations like the mentioned FM radio) but I see them as the rare exception where you give away your control for a manageable amount of time.

Control? What does that mean? I think humans want to control their own emotions. You want to be in charge and decide what mood you are in or at least decide how you react to the mood you just have. Typical concert music, like that of the 18th and 19th century, "Classical" and "Romantic", does not allow that. It is an emotional rollercoaster: Emotions develop and change over the whole time.

That does not match todays listening-style. Some people call it a loss of culture that you have so many music to choose from and can listen to it in any order, I call it autonomous and a sign for educated listeners.

You are the DJ of your own life. And now it is technically possible. With earphones it is even possible to be stronger than the surrounding music and noises, which is sometimes the same thing. I remember my music teachers in school in the 90s. For them one of the biggest enemy (besides cover versions) was background music in stores. I agree that I find this annoying as well, but it doesn't matter anymore, because you can carry your own music with you.

The power of choice is now yours.

Individuals with self-reflection and rational thinking abilities have most likely constructed playlists to match their common moods with pieces that don't have a broad emotional spectrum. Internet radio stations are on this side of the spectrum as well. If you want to chill out and listen to music you don't switch to your local "Ethno, World music and Classical Music" FM radio, you listen to an internet "chill out" stream.

Back to your very own playlists. If you didn't live behind a rock the last 20 years there is probably game music in your list. The majority of games has a non-linear time flow. That means the player decides when to move on, to a different scene. Can you imagine emotionally unstable music here? Of course not. One or more pieces loop and the mood stays the same until the scene changes, triggered by the player. In other words: It fits perfectly for the self-reliant listener. Take 10 very similar games (cough J-RPG) and you get a several 10-track-playlists for a variety of moods. Mix in a few 17th century ("baroque") pieces and you are there.

So if you see someone with headphones the next time try to imagine that this person wants to have the power over his or her own emotions and temper.

P.S - The Rant.

Naturally game composers know all that and compose emotionally stable music. So whenever you hear somebody saying "Game music is the ugly little brother of film soundtracks, which are the real deal. Game music should be like film music" then you know now that they don't know a shit what they are talking about. Other than combining visual media and a story with audio there is no connection.

Sadly some game publishers and developers believed those musicians and we got low-quality, uninspired "atmospheric" soundtracks which are "just like in a movie!". The Japanese composers maintained the old tradition to compose real music for games and did not just mix drum loops with SFX and a few boring chords like their American counterparts (or the few German composers that there are). In the "West" you have the famous famous Main Theme and that's it. No wonder there are so many Japanese Game Music Concerts (all over the world) and there a next to zero "West" concerts. Yes, I know, Blizzard... but they play the Warcraft and Starcraft music there, which is still somewhat melody based AND you can't produce more famous and AAA grade games. From Diablo you get the Tristram Theme (the one with the guitar in the beginning) and a medley. Because Diablo uses atmospheric music. High quality, very good, nothing at all like a movie soundtrack, but still atmospheric.

I got lost. I began with "concert music is evil for the modern human" and now I say you can't play certain music in a concert, which is bad as well. But there is no contradiction. A concert is still good and it consist of pieces which can be listened to without the game. That means a quality composition which is art. Without its game compound.

Building a free sample library for free music. Or: license chaos (with links!)

This article is not centered around creating music from illegal samples. You can get away with that just fine. This is about offering download mirrors of free samples so that people can share work and create music in the same style, with the same instruments.

If you are a composer or musician you eventually will need sampled instruments (or synths, to say it once), especially if you are a composer for games or movies. How does this work in an open source ideology environment?

Usually you buy those instruments. A few euros for a single downloaded instrument up to a five digit sum for a complete orchestra library, shipped on an external drive.

The license agreement is usually something like this: You can use the libs for anything you like, that is, to produce any result which somehow resembles "music", and there are no restrictions to the music. So I'll buy a lib for 10k Euro but once I render music with it I can freely distribute the music, sell it or whatever. Needless to say if you distribute the samples directly, parts or the complete set, it is a copyright violation. One step more in this 'critical' direction would be to modify the samples itself, derived works, and then distribute new instruments.

This leads to a situation where, once you purchased the libs, you can produce Creative Commons licensed music, if you want. But distributing the sources (lets say a midi file) for your music does not work because other people do not have a license for your sampled instruments.

We need free libs

What we need here are open or free libs. Analogue to the restrictive licensed samples the degree of freedom can vary:

Multiple Authors

In the following lines I will make distinctions between authors, copyright holders and the people who build the actual library. Counter-intuitively they are not that often the same. If they are the situation is clear. But often enough people browse the net and take wave recordings from here and there and compile them into sample libs. This leads to several problems:

Only free to use. Even commercially

On the boundary between closed and open libs you will find instruments you can download without spending money and you can use them, commercially. On the other side of this gap you'll find the same, but you can't use them commercially.

But you can't redistribute them. Or in normal words: "You are only allowed to download these on their original page. No mirrors, no sharing on USB sticks or per mail".

This may work short-term, but we know the internet. After two years the site will be gone and nobody can legally download the samples anymore. Example: Ethnofonic It is not even easy to download the samples here.

Free to redistribute, if you are careful!

Here begins the real deal: Additional Instruments you can download without restrictions, you can mirror or redistribute them; but only in their original form!

"Keep the readme file, don't change anything, distribute the original zip file!". This is usually enough to make music. It is equivalent to CC-by-sa-nd-nc.That means you can't change the samples themselves (and redistribute) and you are not allowed to sell them. On a first glance you would think the net is full of these things:

Hammersound, sf2midi, The game instruments at woolyss and various other places.

But it quickly becomes clear that this is not the case.

Sometimes it is obvious, like the Woolyss sf2. These are game rips, unlicensed copies from the games themselves. This is enough to make a YouTube video, maybe it is even permitted by law in some countries. But it is not a solid way, especially not if you plan to sell your music.

Sometimes you simply don't know the legal status. Many libs of these sites come with a readme that says "don't redistribute", so there is already a violation! Some say "I am free" but say they are parts of some larger bank or recordings from a hardware sampler/synth. Unusable, as well.

If you really find the rare gem on hammersound that explicitly states that the author of the lib is also the author of the samples and permits you the necessary license, then you are lucky. If you know such things, please leave a comment!

Free by design. Open Source samples

The ideal way. The sample is explicitly released under a free license that allows you the typical open source things: Redistribute, Change, Use(aka. Sell), if you respect the copyleft. Normally this happens if the author of the sample-library is also the recording engineer and owner of the original instrument as well.

In case of synthesizers it is simpler. We have 'only' software here, which can be released as GPL and the situation is clear.

Examples of this holy grail category are the Salamander Piano and Drumkit, ZynAddSubFX aka. Yoshimi. Maybe you could add the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra to this category, but the author writes that he doesn't know the sources or licenses of some samples. Strictly this sets the Orchestra back one category, maybe even to "not legal". But at least it is not our fault, we can blame the Sonatina author for releasing it under the wrong license.

Do you know free samples?

To repeat the intro: Imagine you want to release a song in its source format, lets say midi or a qtractor project. Other people will need your samples as well. Your source license also permits the commercial use of the song. Do the samples allow the same?

If you know such sample libraries (or synthesizer programs, to say it again) please leave a comment (no registration needed) or leave me a google plus or Facebook message (or add me). I know there are many sample lib link-lists in the web, but they are not license-safe at all. Maybe we can compile something good here.

WYSIWYG propaganda and Wikipedia

I have just read Comparison of Scorewriters on Wikipedia for a future inclusion of Laborejo.

I am half amused and half angry that the color scheme there indicates "good"(green) and "bad"(red). One entry, Crescendo, has sound support so it gets a red field "No".

And WYSIWYG is the same. So... that means not having WYSIWYG is bad?? How have the editors of this table tricked their mind into accepting such propaganda as correct? They should only have asked themselves how they wrote the table itself. Surely they did it with Excel and then exported an image... not.

I can see why for some, limited, tasks WYSIWYG might be prefered. If I only want to write a few words on a sheet of paper, as big as possible (like notes for a talk, or lyrics during a recording) I use LibreOffice as well. But for bigger tasks it gets more and more problematic and seperating data from layout becomes more and more important, like TeX, huge Websites, Database visualisations or music sheets.

I do not demand that the colors get reversed, indicating anything what is superior or not. Why must there be colors at all? Not even the GPL vs Proprietary column has colors. A project like Wikipedia, with the Mediawiki software behind, should clearly prefer GPL here and make it green. But they did not because this is simply for the sake of information.