#more head chop references but subtler this time

[suntails]

it literally doesn’t matter what happens in book 7 at this point, im gonna cry no matter what

[scoundrels-in-love]

its xenophobia not racism. i beg you please delete that post or at the very least scroll up in the replies from POC and not white people.

yes, xenophobia is a huge problem. but when you consider points in the post referring to skin colour, its linked to this idea that they might be mistaken for being brown and therefore are being mistreated. not because "they're a different shade of white" but bx they're mistaken for another race - in such situations the words "im italian" and "im indian" will have VERY different results.

the easiest way to differentiate xenophobia from racism is of course how we are perceived. the post mentions names so consider this - we both arrive at an interview and are both called Sarah Brown. Im south asian and you're white who in this situation is more likely to be discriminated?

white privilege is the ability to hide (even though you shouldn't have to) aspects about yourself that would be discriminated against. something that poc will never have.

If you want to talk about xenophobia go ahead. but that post? that post just aint it.

Hi there love!

Thanks for dropping by - the post has been deleted. I do agree at its core, it’s a lot/mostly xeonphobia, not racism, in this specific application, and I didn’t entirely agree on sentiments of post as is, just, broken arm and hard to write tags (this post is taking a huge time to type up), plus, fear of saying the wrong thing, which in this case, in some ways I did by staying silent.

But at the same time, it’s the only post I’ve seen bringing these topics that would absolutely impact my life if I was trying to make my life in another country. I don’t have pretty English name, I have accent, there are ugly ass beliefs about my nationality in a lot of other European countries. Would I still retain white privilege when placed next to person of color? Yes. Not denying that.

I reblogged it more in heart of ‘please stop thinking that Europe is some kind of united family, treating its own white people kindly across the board, and that people haven’t always found even the slightest reason to be horrible and treat others like shit’. Which is feels like sentiment some of people here from USA almost seem to have.

I do agree that racism is the primary issue to face and fight, but one of its cornerstones is ages old xenophobia that still thrives even in much more less-known application. It is way more pervasive than I sometimes feel conversations about racism make it to be. It’s the way that even slightest perceived differences will put your head on the chopping block or at least in the line to be hanged.

And I feel like sometimes it’s overlooked (particularly with white people outside of Europe, I think), disregarding how impacting this view is, how Europeans aren’t free of it even toward its own white people.

I don’t know if there can be huge and drastic change in society and racism as a whole can be done, without facing this truth about xenophobia just being something people still breathe here about their own neighbor of slightly different shade or Slavic name or other small detail. Hence the tag ‘Europe is full of shit’. We are. To people of color, most of all, but oh boy, we’re not lazy about finding reasons to be horrible, disgusting people. It’s bred and cultivated in older generation. Newer one, too. The ‘they’re stealing our jobs’ narrative has been used by white Europeans against other white Europeans immigrants as well and immigrant white women are more vulnerable than their local native counterparts. And yes, POC are still the most affected and the most vulnerable.

I hope that between my arm and being bleary eyed and half awake at 1:30am, I’ve managed to speak properly. I didn’t reblog that post in thoughts ‘oh, I am just as oppressed as POC in Europe’, I am not making that argument and I thought the post wasn’t either. (Like you said, most of the dire consequences in it were brought up in clear ways that’d impact POC the most always, just that it’s so deeply bred even white people get some taste of it, too.) If it did and I missed, I am sorry about that. It wasn’t intention. I mostly just wanted to bring up Europe is a shithole through and through, even in much more subtler ways than USA gets to see or think about. And it’s sad it’s literally only post I’ve seen about it over like 5 years I’ve been here, so if I want to reblog something about it, it’s that post, although it’s inaccurate/misleading.

If I’ve said something wrong or been accidentally offensive, I apologize. It wasn’t my intention. You can call me out for it, I will acknowledge and I will learn, although I can’t promise a long response, because it’s truly rather taxing to write right now,

[ludomusoetme]

Through the Corridors of Time

Blog for Introduction to digital music final.

Hello again and welcome to my process diary for creating yet another composition for digital music.

For this task I decided to take a section of music from a popular game and create a piece of music that expands upon the original. My artistic vision was to create an electro-acoustic fantasia on a theme that would carry across the feelings and impressions that a player would experience when they play through the scene or level in the game itself. I wanted the music to transcend the simple musical material provided and instead convey environmental, contextual, emotional and narrative connotations.

I wanted to ensure the theme I selected came from a source that used basic midi tracks in its design. This would allow interesting flexibility in  instrumental choices as well as provide a rich dichotomy between the source material and my own work. I also wanted to ensure that whilst my piece remains faithful to the core concepts of the theme, it would not just be an arrangement of the original with new instruments. I wanted to synthesise new parts, combine themes and motifs from other areas of a game that related to each other, and overall create something experiential that builds upon the original and is not a derivative of it.

I was originally tossing up between some of the older Zelda games, but decided to forgo that series as I was far too familiar with the music of that series and was originally inspired to this concept by the artist “Theophany” who creates exceptional recreations and adaptations of the music from “Majora’s Mask”. I saw Theophany’s work as a guidepost for the general kind of piece I was aiming for, one that can take very basic themes and expand upon them in interesting ways.

Eventually I settled upon the game “Chrono Trigger” (1995). “Chrono Trigger” is a game that involves many different characters traversing portals through time to try and prevent the end of the world through an apocalypse. This force was known as Lavos, and is referred to in the game before it is revealed as “The Black Wind”. The game features many unique characters that have interwoven stories and themes that are perfect for me to play with and draw inspiration from. The game fit my criteria of beautiful sound design and great use of themes that resurface throughout in a traditional leitmotif style, yet also worked with extremely simple midi sounds to create the audio palette. My favourite song from the game is a piece of music called “Corridors of Time”, which is the music for the level in the game called “12.000 B.C.”.

In this level, the players’ party of characters have escaped from certain death through a portal in time into the frozen past. Upon arrival the characters find themselves on a barren stretch of land with no one in sight and only icy tundra to greet them. After travelling for a short time however, the party stumbles upon a temple that teleports the group to a set of floating islands in the sky that are lush and highly advanced through the use of magi-tech. This is where the music begins and is the setting of Corridors of time, a location and song that has always amazed me with its depiction of a fantastical world and a very memorable soundtrack.

Corridors of time features heavy use of an ostinato that repeats throughout the entire track. The musical material is quite simple and can be broken down into just a few fragments: 1. Piano Ostinato, 2. Sitar melody. 3. Bass, 4. Percussion, 5 choral “Aahs”. These instruments all fit together in a very simple AB structure that is repeated Ad Nauseam for the entire duration of the level. Thankfully the ostinato is catchy and the melody compelling enough that I can (and have) listened to versions of this song for honestly hundreds of hours over my life. 

The difficult part when working with this material was how to seperate it from its original. Ostinato’s by their nature do NOT like to be interfered with, and the frankly minuscule amount of musical information makes it particular hard to work in variations. There isn’t even a variation of a theme in this piece, just a simple theme stated as the A section, and then a choral chordal-movement B section before repeating. 

In order to capture the contextual and environmental aspects of the level, I decided I needed to begin in the frozen lands below and ascend to the islands above. As such I begin with a sample of a blizzard being played. I used extensive panning in this section to make the wind feel like it is howling around the player as they trudge through the snow. Before the we hear any hint of the Corridors theme, I wanted to pay homage to the main theme of the game itself, what I will call the “Chrono Theme”.

To evoke the sensation of traveling through these frozen mountains I recorded myself playing the Chrono Theme on the trumpet and mixed it using space designer with a very large room size and a lengthy tail. I also made sure that the sound was wetter than it was dry so it felt like it was coming from a long way away and echoing across the mountains.

So far we have provided environmental information (blizzard), context regarding the source material (Chrono theme), and are ready to introduce the listener to the contextual information regarding what we should be experiencing. For this I added footsteps trudging through snow. To simulate the experience of walking into the temple I made use of automation on the reverb for both the blizzard and the footsteps. I cross-faded the dry sound of the blizzard into the wet sound of a cave-style space, along with dramatically reducing the dry sound so it reduces in intensity. Concurrently I had the footsteps move from a relatively short reverb space outside (347 ms) to a longer (2.96s), wetter and larger cave-style reverb space that I used with the blizzard as well. This gives the feeling of leaving the blizzard behind as you head indoors.

This then leads into the teleportation sound to take us above to the floating islands and the introduction of the Corridors theme.

Initially I just used a combination of Alchemy’s “Laser Canon” in a few different configurations to try and simulate the purely high pitched sound effect used in the original game. After feedback however I combined this with some “Aftershock Rumble” to get the ascending rise but also a low rumble to make it feel intense. I also used a reversed cymbal crash to build toward the crest so we can feel a sense of resolution as the music begins.

The introduction to the Corridors theme begins with a descending strum on a vintage organ and, the primary solo instrument, a Chinese Ruan Moon Guitar. I wanted to create a spacey and ethereal feel and used a stereo delay so that the fragment echoes throughout the space. This descending strum is almost a repeating touchpoint for the piece as it heralds shifts between sections. For the ostinato I initially wanted to retain the simplicity of the original, however trying to create a standalone piece of music is very different to a backing track for a game and requires interest, flexibility and tension and release. As such, I set up multiple iterations to provide variation throughout the piece. In order to provide a pulsing interest the ostinato is always paired between two versions of the same instrument. These different lines are constantly shifting their panning in alternating directions so they cross over each other. To ensure that there was still a clearly distinct main instrument, one is significantly louder than the other. Further to this, the softer track is a single semi-quaver behind the main part of the ostinato which evokes an echoing sense of stereo delay. The initial introduction of the ostinato is the “main version” of it, and makes use of LABS “Soft Piano”. I particularly liked the sample as it was gentle and with some reverb has this spacious tone that I felt fit the mood I was aiming for. It also has the barest hints of the actual keys being pressed which gives a rhythmic counterpoint to the melodic information. Initially I went pretty hard on the ostinato by combining a few instruments together so it was packed full of interesting sounds! However this gave the piece very little room to grow and as such I stripped it down to just the piano by itself and saved some of the other instruments for later iterations.

In order to give the Ruan guitar more gravitas when it comes in with the melody line, I wanted an instrument with a similar yet more gentle tone to introduce a variant on the Corridors main theme. I decided a Celtic Harp carried the same plucked string vibe but was subtler than the Ruan. The song is written in F#m and this variation gave me the ability to set up the overall vibe of the piece and hint at some of the melodic contours that are to come.

The percussion joins at this point and makes use of a high Timbale, as well as a Conga line. I also wanted to have an homage to the original choral “aahs” before I replaced them with something else, so we have a single introduction of the choral section at the beginning just as a callback for those familiar with the original song.

I use an upright jazz bass for the bass line and played with its ADSR so that it had a punchy attack and crisp release. Replacing the Choral sections are LABS string ensembles. I found the original choral movements to be taking up too much of the layer cake orchestration with their density, so I chopped up the line into short, sharp string stabs, juxtaposed with longer descending movements.

This brings us to our first statement of the Corridors theme, what I’ll call A1. I use the texture of A1 as a base point for building density in the piece and try to vary it around that touchpoint. This featured essentially all of the information of the original song but in a different format. We have the melody line on the Ruan Guitar, Piano Ostinato, moving bass, percussion and then short string stabs taking over for the choral “Aahs”.

The first iteration of the B section reduces the material to a sparser variation. The bass holds long notes as opposed to its plodding lines before. The percussion becomes just a Tamborine, and the ostinato is fragmented into an extended variation as well as moved to a muted plucked guitar-harmonic instrument.

In order to soften some of the shaper sounds like the tambourine, I applied a plate filter to mellow out some of the harsher frequencies, which also left room for the choral section to fit into a higher pitched dulcimer sound. None of the original instruments are carried across from A1 to B1, yet the overall tone feels similar due to instrumental choices. It feels like a relaxing rather than a massive change.

The A2 variant returns with our roving bass line and percussive elements yet reduces the high Timbale so that it feels sparser. I wanted this section to have a similar textural density to A1 yet feel like it is building towards something. To this end I changed the ostinato to a plucked guitar version that is far more sprightly than the piano. The Ruan guitar I also elevated by adding variations to the main theme as well as playing with its articulation so we had some tremolo notes.

It is at this point we are introduced to the saxophone. It is difficult to find a “good” sax sample out there, but I was able to create something workable by using logic’s studio horns with some decent reverb through space designer and an almost invisible echo that gives it some added lift. You can barely hear it when the echo is on, yet it adds some much needed richness to the sound. 

The saxophone needed to be introduced now so it can become a focus in the upcoming bridge section without feeling like it came out of nowhere. In order to do this I slowly introduce it with fragments of the Chrono theme. The original Chrono theme is in G#m, so thankfully it is just a simple transposition to get it to mesh with the Corridors theme. The sax builds at the end of A2 towards our bridge section.

For the bridge section I wanted to really break away from the literal sense of this track and instead bring in narrative and emotional connections. The bridge section makes heavy use of themes scattered throughout the game and weave together in a dialogue between characters.

To understanding the bridge, we really need to take a step back and understanding some context for the game… So strap in for exposition time! In the middle of this level, the party encounters a small child named “Janus” who tells them that “The Black Wind howls… one among you will shortly perish”. This is both a premonition and a callback to a previous encounter earlier in the game, for little does the player know that the small boy Janus they meet is in fact the younger version of Magus, a foe whom they have spent much time struggling against. For the first half of the game, the nemesis of the party is this “Magus” character. The journey to fight and best him takes up a solid 50% of the game and he is foreshadowed as the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) for much of the establishing segment of the game. When the player finally enters combat with him, before the fight starts he states “Again, the bitter Black Wind begins to howl”. 

Magus’ main theme is the theme stated at the beginning of my bridge section. The original Magus Theme proved tricky to adapt and fit into my piece. The song is written in 3/4 with segments in E Phrygian that do not translate well with the F#m tonality. Thankfully the chorus section is in Am and after some extensive rewriting I managed to make it fit with a 4/4 backing time and not sound out of place. This introduction of Magus’ theme functions as a representation of meeting Janus halfway through the level, whilst also foreshadowing the reveal that he is in fact Magus’ younger self.

The second iteration of the bridge features “Frog’s Theme”, which is stated by the trumpet. Frog is Magus’ arch nemesis who joins the party to try and bring Magus’ to justice for his crimes. Frog’s brother was slain by Magus, who proceeded to turn him into an anthropomorphic frog just to provide even more cause for vengeance against Magus. Frog’s theme is written in G#m and 6/8 time signature. With a quick transposition and some rewrites I managed to get it also situated to work in the 4/4 timeframe. The fact that both Frog’s and Magus’ themes both now sound with a triplet feel to them makes them feel related in a way.

Getting two melody lines to sound out without feeling like they were clashing took quite a lot of work. The initial statement of Magus’ theme on the sax was mixed in the centre and placed low to give other instruments room to move. When I added in Frog’s theme I placed it on the trumpet and transposed it quite high. The two different themes thankfully occupy different pitches in the scale for their opening phrases. Magus’ chorus theme begins on the dominant and moves around the tonic without actually settling there until the end of its movement. It also has a large degree of melodic motion. Frog’s theme on the other hand has an AB structure. The B section is also focused around the dominant and features large melodic movements, but thankfully the A section begins on the tonic and remains close to it. By combining the chorus of Magus’ theme with the A section of Frog’s theme the two parts occupy different melodic positions in the scale and therefore do not clash or interrupt each others themes. To further seperate the individual themes I ensured I mixed them so their frequencies were separated, as well as panned Frog’s theme in the trumpet to the right and Magus’ theme on the sax to the left. This becomes a metaphorical duel between Magus and Frog as they battle for supremacy. 

As the third iteration of the bridge begins, we have 4 doubled recorded trumpets that reinforce Magus’s theme on the left side, whilst a variant of the Chrono theme is stated in the centre, played on the harp. The harp also occupies the middle ground in regards to register (C#4) between the trumpet (F#4) and the sax (C#3). The trumpet sample I used is sufficiently sharper than the real trumpets and through some panning the real trumpets just act as a doubling to the sax playing Magus’ theme. I needed to ensure that adding a third melodic fragment wouldn’t muddy the already complex interwoven lines of Magus and Frog’s battles. I resolved this eventually through contrasting instrumental choice and using short and sharp plucked tones of the harp to cut straight through the bell tones of the horns so that it is still clearly audible despite the duelling themes in the background. This is symbolic of the main character, Chrono, who's eventual death forces Frog and Magus to work together as allies.

Finally we take our metaphorical battle and return it to the scene from which it came by introducing a variant of the Corridors theme on the Ruan Guitar with heavy use of tremolo so that its textural form would cut through the mix again without displacing the other sounds.

This required quite a bit of work as the tremolo on the Ruan only goes for 1 beat and nothing I could do would extend it further. What I eventually did was create a second Ruan line that would hocket between the original to extend tremolo notes for the longer duration I wanted. It took some time to make them mesh smoothly and not sound like 2 distinct instruments

This bridge section is the climax of the piece and took a lot of work to make it fit without clashing or sounding muddy, but I think each of the parts sings out its own phrases and when you understand the context between each of the melodic lines and how they joust it becomes not just interesting musically, but an emotional section that plays with the understanding of the greater narrative and the motifs utilised within.

After the battle that was just resolved we need pathway back to lower tension. For this B2 section we introduce our ostinato back with a bit of a pep in its step. The piano is joined with the plucked guitar quietly above it to add some lift to the quieter section. The trumpet accompanies the chordal line being played in strings and plucked on the harp.

Following this descent through the Corridors B section, I juxtapose a variant of the Chrono Theme on top of the ostinato backing of the Corridors theme. This variant morphs into a statement of the Corridors theme and functions as a recapitulation to the opening motif connecting back to the Corridors theme.

I wanted the end of the piece to mirror how the actual level finishes. The players find themselves stymied by a mysterious hooded prophet (Magus in disguise, who has travelled back in time), and are banished from the time zone. The next time they return, the main character is slain when encountering the evil power of Lavos (the Black Wind) for the first time. As such I wanted to include a combination quote from adult Magus/child Janus that heralds what is to come. 

As this happens I start to reduce the density of the orchestration, there is no epic battle the first time you leave 12,000 B.C., simply an anticlimactic dismissal. The ostinato begins to reduce and the repeating form is discarded. As we close to the final iteration the ostinato fragments even more, like it is running out of power. The final iteration of the Corridors theme features the Ruan guitar and harp playing together as they play a quieter version of the main theme that stutters out in the end. The very end of the song features the time portal sample from the original game signalling the player being forced to leave the time zone.

I feel like the artistic vision I set out to achieve is encapsulated in this piece. It guides the listener through an environmental setting that ties many disparate themes and ideas together and tells a story not just of the notes themselves, but of what each theme represents and how it connects within the greater scheme of the game and the motivic representations.