African Americans created a pillar of videogame music: Techno

[jamie]

This is going to be a fun post for me.....


I see at la least 3 pillars of videogame music.

• Orchestral
• "Chip tune"
• Techno

Orchestral - This would be your standard fare RPG, Adventure game, music. Typically very similar to a movie score. A popular version would be something like "one winged angel"

Example: "One winged angel"


"Chip tune" - Music made for/on a sound board native to the videogame systems hardware. Think 8-bit 16-bit music. It's easy to call this a genre of techno but I wouldn't go that far. This tends to feel like whatever type of music you'd here out in the world, especially movies and tv shows but filtered through the stock sounds available on whatever board used. (I borrowed this term because I had no other means of describing it.)

Example: "One winged angel" originally was Orchestral music rendered through synthetic instruments



Techno - Music generated from a sound board without a preceding filtered genre wholly present. While the dance variant is essentially "electric disco music" (very loose definition)





Historical Context:
Just as blues & rock eventually went "electric" in there instrumentation so did R&B, funk, punk, new wave, pop, metal and even jazz(heralded by people such as Miles Davis & Herbie Hancock). By the 70's -80's Damn near everything was "synthetic music" or had some combination

GTA vice city actually had a joke about this on their radio station



So What's the Key difference between techno and everything else?
The key difference between techno and other genres of music is that while others essentially took whatever genre they were currently in and played the same music but with electric instruments; techno simply started with electric instruments and a love of music then just started experimenting, eventually making their own sound.

To be clear elements from prior genres made there way into Techno music.(we all have influences) but Techno isn't comprised wholly or mostly of any specific prior genre as other "synthetic music" being made at the time.










"A little extra something"

[jamie]

To further talk about the "chip tune" distinction.
With "chip tune" a lot of it's variations were dependent on the genre of game. The music would be the same genre as movies and tv shows of that type/genre. But it would be rendered on whatever chip they had to synthesize that type of music.

Example: A song taken straight from a tv show of the same genre/type.





Example: Soundtrack inspired by tv/movies of the same genre/type (not lifted from, but bears the type of music used in that genre)



...this is exactly what I mean by chip tune is when you take an established genre and render /compose a genre piece on a native sound board.

Point being that techno doesn't mean any music made with "synthetic instruments"

[jamie]

This metal/rock soundtrack actually reminds me of the praise that lords of thunder and gates of thunder got for their soundtracks ...though this was around the time CD were started to be used as a medium so you had better sound which makes it easier to tell what they were going for.