tuesday de: background music

[inlovewithwords]

What does the soundtrack of your character's world sound like, or what would it sound like if it were scored?

And how would your character react if they could hear that soundtrack?

brought to you by breath of the wild musical cues for enemies around even if i can't see them, and also imagining what would happen if anakin could hear the imperial march leitmotif before the fall (if you know the tumblr post in question feel free to share it)

Comments

[cottoncandypink]

Weirdly enough, while movies, TV, comics, etc tend to be made up parodies across the board, game devs seem to realise that fake music is really bad if you don't get it right. So music tends to be whatever's charting at the moment, if the studio is big enough, or old enough to be royalty free.

On the live-action side, the scoring tends to be very subtle, and occasionally reacted to by the characters.


Unrelated to anything, I got to see a sneak peek of the next short, and I am SO HYPE. I don't think it even has anything to do with either of my pups, but I am there for it.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

So, the soundtrack for Digimon Adventure is an -- interesting one. The first movie and 01 are both made on a miniscule shoestring budget, so the movie only has a single public domain song in it (Bolero, by Maurice Ravel), while 01 is composed about twenty-five percent of original songs, twenty-five percent of classical music, and fifty percent reused tracks from Sailor Moon.

(This even carries over to the dub, where a large amount of the tracks are repurposed from Saban's failed Masked Rider series.)

In spite of this, Yamato gets not one but two original songs just for him: Yamato Sad Song, a mix of modern Blues instruments with traditional Japanese instruments, and Run With The Wind, a harmonica piece that functions as both a non-diegetic theme for him and a diegetic piece of music that he plays frequently.

So it's safe to say that the backing music of Yamato's life is Blues and Jazz, and he absolutely does hear that soundtrack, because he almost always has some kind of Blues and Jazz song playing in the back of his mind.

By the time of Tri, the show actually has the budget for original soundtracks -- and uses it largely to make sweeping, orchestral reimaginings of 01's soundtrack, so it's still largely Sailor Moon tracks, or at least Sailor Moon adjacent.

Yamato does get an updated version of Run With The Wind, though, this time with a mix of harmonica and acoustic guitar -- fittingly, because between 01 and Tri he's also become a competent guitarist on top of playing the harmonica.

EDIT: Also, while I remember, special shoutout goes to whoever devised the soundtrack for Hurricane Touchdown, a Digimon Adventure horror movie soundtracked entirely with Sinister Banjo Music.

[inlovewithwords]

Short answer, because I'm tired and not thinking enough to answer this for anyone but Anakin and R2:

R2 would take the soundtrack into account in his calculations and analyses and probably started screaming bloody murder about Palpatine pretty early, let's be real.

Anakin would probably think the Imperial March is cool and not pick up on the part where it's also incredibly ominous, and potentially get pissy if Obi-wan could hear the soundtrack and expressed concerns. And I bet Vader hears the Force base theme very seldom after the Fall and it gets louder around Luke because also Skywalker-related lietmotifs. But also, okay, so I'm almost assuming it's a Force ability. If *Padme* and Shmi could hear it, too, they might actually be able to warn Anakin about it sooner and maybe he'd even listen. So like, possibly crisis would be averted?

Look if people just listened to John Williams' music and took the cues from it as to what was happening in the plot, a) maybe they'd be less derpy and b) hey they'd be able to hear what is easily in the running for best movie scores of all time.

FITE ME, okay, Star Wars best music all the way, just go dive into YouTube and have a listen if you really don't know what I mean.

[takethatnature]

The music was one of the first things that made me fall in love with Don't Starve, tbh. It sounds like this! It tends towards the whimsical, much like the art style. There's the menu music, some miscellaneous tracks mostly used in trailers, the single ragtime track that plays on loop eternally at the Nightmare Throne, and a working, fighting, and boss fight track for each season plus the caves (which only have one song) and ruins (a full set, though the boss track is really just the Ancient Guardian's theme music). Don't Starve Together adds unique fight music for the new or significantly reworked bosses. And for the seasonal events, although there's like... one and a half tracks for the Forge and the Gorge just has normal + time-running-out music.

The music responds to what the player's doing rather than firing automatically - working music when you craft or harvest stuff, fighting music when you attack something or it attacks you - so nine times out of ten it doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know. The tenth time is "WHY IS THE BOSS MUSIC PLAYING." (The answer is either that I've come close enough to the Dragonfly's lair to aggro her and now I need to forget everything else and run for my life, or there's a boss hiding behind some scenery while I'm having an unrelated fight, like a treeguard lurking around while I have a scrap with spiders in its forest.) I feel like Wilson might not appreciate how jaunty the musical accompaniment is when he's getting attacked by killer frogs in the spring, but it wouldn't be a game-changer. Even in the case of the sudden unexplained boss music I figure that could be easily swapped out for diegetic cues that wouldn't be obvious to the player, like suspicious air currents or smells or somesuch.

In Don't Starve Together the music is also personalised to the player; you don't hear the fight music when your friend is fighting off, say, a swarm of killer bees, unless you join in. So I can't imagine the characters would be able to hear each other's music either.

[cottoncandypink]

I've always assumed that the music is part of Maxell's doing. Your character is aware of so much else about the world that it's pretty logical to assume that they also hear the music.

Half the time, my character knows about hounds or boss events before I even hear them. So many times in DST, I've been playing with my husband and one of our characters will say "That sounded big" and we both shout "FUCK!" and run toward the emergency second camp so all our stuff doesn't get smashed.

[archmagetrust]

The music in World of Warcraft is one of its best features (and regularly used as background music for Critical Role). They have a full orchestra with a choir? Vocal component as well. Some of my favorite music is what they created for the various taverns throughout the game (one of the Pandaria ones uses kazoo and just makes me grin). Khadgar has his own theme, created during the Warlords expansion, but it's the bit after 1:15 that comes back again and again in scenes featuring him in both Warlords and Legion, and even as his theme in Hearthstone the card game. That part of it feels like determination and hope to me, but I'm probably biased because I played through that music and what was going on during those scenes.

As for how he would react to hearing it, well, it'd probably be a running theme for him, just part of his background sound, unless music is rarer and only swells when something Important is happening. In that case Khadgar probably perks up and starts paying close attention (though I'm certain other characters are probably more like 'oh shit, not again').

[fairy_fixit]

The soundtrack for Runescape is all over the place, because it is part of a very old mmo that thematically is all over the place and was originally run on technology that could be handled on a web browser. As the technical specs of home computers and web browsers improved so did the capability of the sound and graphics engines, and then, the game developers finally got fed up with Java and moved away from web browsers and built their own game client. They recently tried updating their soundtrack, but it is still all over the place thematically, just like the game itself. It's just that now the audio department isn't limited to a small selection of midi "instruments".

Anyhow, Zanaris, Fairy Fixit's part of the game, is comparitively small so it does have a soundtrack theme, and piano and bells seem to be part of it, as Crystal Cave and Faerie illustrate. That part of the game is pretty old so there is still a lot of midi instrumentation going on, like that synth choir in Crystal Cave. As battle music, have some Root Canal. Fairy Fixit would just think the music is nice.

Kharidian desert content ranges from very old to very recent, so you get a lot of variation in Amascut's part of the game. There is the old Al-Kharid soundtrack and the recent and lovely Money-Go-Round soundtrack. (and nope, it's nothing like The Moneygoround by the Kinks. At least not on the surface.) So, Middle-Eastern themed, of course. Amascut's own themes tend to be frantic, like Amascut the Devourer which played during a battle with one of the biggest of Amascut's devourer beasts.

Amascut would be annoyed by theme music.

[fairy_fixit]

And then there's the time when the game makers hired James Hannigan to come up with orchestral versions of the oldest songs and then got the Slovak National Orchestra, Abbey Road Philharmonia, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play them. Now they are pressing the sountrack onto vinyl records, lol.

Born to Do This II is supposedly one of the more technically challenging of the Hannigan tracks.

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka, I think, would take the musical cues in stride, assuming they were a manifestation of the Force. She’d grow to appreciate them, as they’d be good clues for “hey, now is the time to pay attention”. I’m on the fence as to whether she’d think the Imperial March was creepy or just a power martial score. She would be confused as to why it kept showing up with the Chancellor though.

I think she’d like her themes. Here’s a neat edit with all her themes from both the Clone Wars movie and all six seasons of the TV show.

Or heck, how about everything from Clone Wars to Rebels in a glorious 11 minute suite?

And oh man, you wanna talk emotional cues? How about score from Vader and Ahsoka's battle in Twilight of the Apprentice?

Or for awesome uplifting, how about Ahsoka vs the Inquisitors? So many echoes of Duel of Fates here.

Sabine would love it, and already pretty much makes her own soundtrack, playing music in her helmet. Again, i think she'd use it to strategic advantage. (OMG don't go listen to Sabine Suite from Trials of the Darksaber. Don't do it...sigh...you did it.)

Danny has some pretty good music and I think he'd enjoy most of it, though be confused by it. Especially since he wouldn't know if it meant important things were happening or if a fight was about to happen. My favorite track from the first season is I Am the Weapon.

Jessica hasn't had a lot of music. The opening to Agent of Sword is pretty somber, which fits her canon at that point, but I don't remember a whole lot otherwise. There is this catchy and cheesy pop song they made for the same series, Watch Your Step, which I think Jess would like.

Regardless, it beats her theme from the 1979 cartoon.

Ultimately I think Jess would at first think she was just hearing music someone else was playing (super hearing) but ultimately use it to her advantage.

And with that I am getting back to work. Might have more later, but let me leave you with a Mariachi cover of the Avengers Main Theme.

[bjornwilde]

How about some more Mariachi? The Throne Room

[fairy_fixit]

A Spider-Woman cartoon? Awesome, those years were really productive for Marvel Animation. Though I do see it only lasted a single season. Man, the 80s and 90s were so full of cartoons.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Overwatch uses music in the usual fashion for the cinematics, and I'm not enough of a musical person to pick out characters or factions' leitmotifs. The music does a bunch of the emotional lifting in The Last Bastion, what with the absence of intelligible dialogue. It cuts out completely and goes to 100% diegetic sound the first time they go into combat mode, and the second time there's just this understated scary robot music. In-game, the main uses of music are to get the players hyped to start a match or to encourage them to hurry up at a critical moment, which is about what you'd expect but the sound design team does a good job of it. There's a couple of dancey emotes that have music, and it's part of Lúcio's kit to have music playing at all times whenever he's on the map and alive. He's even got unique tracks for his Jazzy skin.

Homestuck has its own soundtrack, which mostly sees use in the animations and flash games. There's a bunch of repeated melodies that get shared between just enough contexts to get the fandom arguing about whether Megalovania was originally Aradia's song or Vriska's. (I always thought of it as more of an Aradia song.) The size of the soundtrack dwarfs the number of canon occasions for music, so the prominent characters generally get multiple songs to themselves and Aradia's no exception, it's just that they rarely actually show up on-screen. Hiveswap has a soundtrack unto itself, as does the Friendsim, with each befriendable character getting a theme song. Cirava's is a vaguely vaporwave-sounding track that was originally going to be titled "MOIST" in fullwidth Unicode letters, but they got corrupted so the name of their theme song is canonically just a bunch of boxes.

Fallen London manages to have a canon soundtrack despite being an almost entirely text-based browser game. This is because it once had a mobile app with a full soundtrack before Failbetter Games decided the app was a bad idea (too expensive, didn't work very well) and scrapped it, then put the soundtrack up on Bandcamp. I've barely listened to it except the Forgotten Quarter track because for some reason that's where I was always hanging out in the app version, but it's by the same people who did the Sunless Sea soundtrack, which I loved.