Video Games: More Than Just Games

Most of the music we listen to had been intended to be listened to by itself, as its own individual art form. However, this is not to say that all music is independent of another media. In fact, today I will talk about video games, a place where most of us don't think to go to for good music. But just because video game soundtracks are usually made to supplement the gameplay of a video game, by no means should video game soundtracks be discounted as mere background noise.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Nintendo-3DS-AquaOpen.png

Most video games (unfortunately excepting some of the most popular video games of today) are designed to provide the most immersive narrative that modern technology can provide. To do this games combine relatable characters, well-written storylines, captivating visuals, fun and dynamic gameplay, and of course, powerful music. In a video game masterpiece, all of these elements are incredible and work together to create a virtual experience the player could never forget. It follows then that if even one small part of a video game is just not all there, the whole game could suffer. If a video game's soundtrack is inappropriate, unprofessional, or just plain bad the entire game could be ruined.

We know that music is implemented in many other media forms, like television and movies, where occasionally a song will be playing in the background to help set moods of suspense, excitement, joy, grief, or any other mixture of emotions. However in movies and television, music only plays once in a while to create a desired effect. In video games, the music does not stop. If the player were invited to venture around a world in complete silence, it would be extremely easy to become tired, bored, and possibly even lonely. Thus, a song needs to be playing at almost every moment throughout the entire game (of course silence can be used to achieve certain effects at times, but this is rare).

But if the same dull music were playing the whole game that would clearly not do much either. Thus it is extremely important for a developer to come up with a video game soundtrack that is appropriate to the theme of the video game, new and original, and above all enjoyable. An upbeat and fun video game should reflect its tone with lively music, a sad video game should have pieces to tug at the heartstrings, and a dark game should have music edgy enough to put the player in the mood.  So if music is so important to the game, it should follow that a good video game soundtrack would be enjoyable even on its own.

One of my favorite video games of all time is Professor Layton and The Diabolical Box. The premise of this game is the existence of a mysterious box that is rumored to kill anyone with the courage to open it. Professor Layton and his trusty apprentice, Luke, must go to the ends of the world to find the box and learn its secrets. Such a dark and mysterious premise as a box that kills people who so much as sneak a glance would certainly warrant a dark and mysterious soundtrack as well. Below is the game's overall theme, opening with a chilling piano melody and a cello that invokes cold fear into the curious player. The song later transitions to an accordion and brings the spirit of adventure into the player, exciting them for the game they are about to immerse themselves in.

Video game's require great soundtracks to be great. Games achieve this in a variety of ways, and listening to a game's soundtrack can be as enjoyable as any other type of music.

A Journey to the Ports of France

As college continues to plow on, seemingly without a single moment to take a breath, it's often easy to get caught up in the hundreds of tasks we must accomplish on a daily basis. As soon as one huge assignment is submitted, several more come flooding back in. As college students, all of us have a variety of ways to destress. My favorite way to get away from the stress of school is, by far, music.

In the past, whenever I have brought up easy listening, people have replied by saying that they wouldn't be able to get into it because it is too sleepy, repetitive, or just straight up boring. While I can understand that easy listening would certainly not be the best music to play at a party, or to add to your running playlist, it should not be dismissed as wholly unlistenable.

Easy listening can take a variety of forms, but at large it is intended to relax the listener. It's great to listen to while trying to plow through homework, trying to fall asleep at night, or even to take a breather between classes. I believe that listening to this kind of music can make any medial task more enjoyable, and any stressful time more breathable.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Owlcity.png

My favorite easy listening music artist is Port Blue by far. Many of you may know Owl City, the musical genius behind Fireflies. The man behind Owl City also has many other projects he works on, one being Port Blue. The song below is entitled "Over Atlantic City".

I understand that Atlantic City is very close, in New Jersey, but when I listen to this song I always imagine myself on a cruise liner right outside the ports of France. The song starts off with a man calmly speaking in French (perhaps this is why I imagine myself in France), with subtle hints of birds chirping in the background, his voice muffled and faint, as if he were speaking over the sea water winds. The pianoesque synth also reminds me of the calm of floating right above the calm waters at port. At 0:20 the beat is introduced, with a variety of different sounds, some low pitched drums and some higher pitched rattles. This beat may remind the listener of the slow, steady rocking of the ship, with the big bass boom, and then the rattling (perhaps of chairs or other furniture on the deck) almost as a reaction.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Toulon_Rade_and_Arsenal.jpg

Characteristic of easy listening music at large, the song dwells on the same elements for a while (usually around twenty or thirty seconds), before subtly introducing a new element to the ones from before. The song starts out with a high pitch, relaxing piano synth at 0:20, and at 0:36 a more mellow, lower pitch piano is added to the existing. By slowly adding various new parts to compliment the old, the song remains peaceful, without becoming too repetitive or boring. A few ornamentations are introduced at 0:56, and the full melody is revealed at 1:03. Once all the elements combine together, the listener can feel like they have truly been taken to a new place, breathing in the fresh air, relaxing in the sun, swaying with the soft waves, enjoying a hot cup of tea, and all stress magically fades away. And the rest of the song continues to build on these central themes.

While we may not be able to take ourselves away from the everyday stress of school literally, this genre can often do a great job of at least taking our minds away from it for a time, letting us come back refreshed and ready to tackle our responsibilities head on.

Alternative Hip Hop: The Gateway Genre

In our generation, seemingly the most popular genre of music around has always been rap. Even since Kindergarten I remember kids on the school bus passing around their iPods, sharing the newest hip hop or rap album craze. We have seen absolutely huge rap artists come along, like Kanye West, Drake, Eminem, and many others. Although just about every person around me has been all over the genre, somehow I was never able to get into it.

Now you're probably wondering why a kid who has absolutely no knowledge in rap whatsoever has the gall to write a post about the entire genre. Just about two weeks ago I got into this one duo named "twenty one pilots". Due to how popular this group is right now, you may just know a few of their songs. I did a bit of research into their musical style and they classify as alternative hip hop. So I'll talk to the differences between alternative hip hop and just regular hip hop, and how twenty one pilots is a clear example of this difference.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Twenty_One_Pilots_logo.jpg

Alternative Hip Hop stays true to many of the conventions of hip hop and rap music, without staying between strict boundaries, but incorporating different themes from all kinds of other genres. So an artist that identifies as alternative hip hop would probably have a lot of rap lines, but also incorporate different melodies, electronic synths, guitars, or all kinds of other things (depending on where the artist wants to go with their music). In this way alternative hip hop can often be a great way for a person who doesn't like the big hits of the rap genre to get involved, and maybe even eventually become a big fan of the hip hop genre at large.

Twenty one pilots is a great example of alternative hip hop, as they clearly align with the style of rap in many ways, but it is obvious that they have many influences in many other genres. "Tear In My Heart" takes on themes of rock, with its prominent electric guitar, electric bass, and full drum set. "The Judge" sounds alternative, with its strumming acoustic guitar chords and soaring vocals. "Doubt" reminds the listener of the electronic genre with its deep bass, high pitched synthesized harmonies, and clearly autotuned melodies. "Hometown" starts itself off with vocals that sound like they belong in an opera house. "Ride" is even officially classified as reggae. And all of these songs are straight off of one album, Blurryface. So it is obvious that twenty one pilots like a lot of music.

Harder than to find the differences between all of their songs would be to try to find their similarities. In all of twenty one pilots' songs (as in much of alternative hip hop), the artist places special emphasis on the unique rhythms in each of their lyric lines. Rap is much about the rhythm of the lines, as well as where the emphasis is placed in each line. Twenty one pilots can definitely be characterized by these rap lines.

Lane Boy starts off with sounds representative of a lot of electronic music, but at around 0:25, the singer gradually moves more and more towards rap. Once we reach 0:50, our lead vocalist is almost indistinguishable from rap. This style is present throughout the rest of the song, juxtaposing the quick paced, fun rap lines with electronic effects (especially at around 2:45), and a very catchy chorus. By mixing the rap with many other elements, it is a lot easier like a non-hip hop fan (like myself) to get into the music, and maybe one day even get into the real genre.

Musicals: Out of Nowhere, He Just Starts... Singing?

With Legally Blonde being performed this very weekend by our very own, very talented Penn State Thespians, I thought there would be nothing more appropriate than to cover musicals in this weeks blog post!

I had never been a big musical fan at all, until I became part of the action myself. Being in the top orchestra group for three years of high school, each year I had the opportunity to be in the pit orchestra for our school's musical productions. We played Oklahoma!, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Into the Woods. To be honest, the first musical I played in was a requirement, and I was absolutely not looking forward to it. The work was rigorous, we had just about 4-5 hours of after school rehearsals every weekday and nearly a full 12 hour rehearsal every Saturday. As a sophomore in high school, I considered this much work to be sacrilegious. Yet, I loved it so much, I've been a huge fan of musicals ever since.

While musicals are definitely an experience, with music, visuals, acting, story, and many other things, the music alone can certainly be enjoyed. I have seen quite a few musicals on Broadway, all great, yet oddly I will share a song from one that I have not even seen. I had come really close to seeing Something Rotten with one of my best friends, and even had a ticket to my name, but the timing just did not work out.

View image | gettyimages.com

Something Rotten is just about the newest musical to appear on Broadway, premiering just this summer. If you had been in NYC at all this summer, you would have seen its advertisement on just about every taxi cab, billboard, and bus stop. The song I chose is literally titled "A Musical", which pokes fun at all of the stereotypical elements present in a popular musical. Unfortunately, as it is so new, I could not find the full song isolated into one YouTube video, so below you can here a sample of it from 3:49 to 5:00. The full song is available on every major music streaming service if you wish to pursue the whole 7 minute number. All of the lyrics are also available.

Even in just the minute available in the video, quite a few great characteristics of musicals are portrayed in hilarious ways. "With song and dance/And sweet romance/And happy endings happening by happenstance" captures the style of the musical putting emphasis on singing and dancing numbers, themes of romance, and happy endings. Musicals for the most part are meant to entertain, not be emotionally taxing. This, of course, has a few exceptions like Into The Woods where just about every single cast member dies by the end, but holds true in many musicals. As they later sing, musicals are all about having fun with friends, without having to think too much. And there are so many musicals that are so much fun.

Musicals can become highly addicting once you get into them. I would encourage everyone to try to see Legally Blonde as I hear that our thespians are incredible from many upper-classmen. Even if you can't make it out to a musical anytime soon, they are certainly a lot of fun just to listen to.

Heavy Metal: Not As Scary As You Think

With Halloween rapidly approaching us in just two weeks, there are many fun scary things to partake in. Movies, haunted houses, skeletons and zombies are just a few of all the frights in store. Yet, most of us don't typically indulge in everything our society might consider scary. When most people are asked why they have never tried to listen to metal music, they might say that it is far too scary, intimidating, or even evil! Of course this may be true for some of the genre, but there is plenty of heavy metal that is not scary or evil, but inspiring.

The past two blog posts have been alternative and then rock music, and now metal. These three genres can be thought of as a spectrum of the rock genre, where alternative is the most catchy and popish, while metal is much more on the intense side than anything else. Metal was ushered in in the late 1960s with Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and many other popular bands. Then and now metal has just been defined as rock with a bit more intensity. Back then that meant some heavier guitar riffs, more aggressive vocals and crazy costumes. Today the genre has taken an entirely different form with very heavy, irregular guitar riffs, insane drumming, and many times even screaming.

It is perhaps the screaming that gives the genre the perception that many people have of it: that it is so innately scary. While screaming is certainly much more intense than lyrical singing, depending on the reasons that an artist chooses to yell instead of sing, this style of vocals can achieve a wide variety of emotions ranging from distress to anger to happiness.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Of_Mice_%26_Mice_Live_2014.png

My absolute favorite band of all time is called Of Mice & Men, named after John Steinbeck's novel. They are a metal quintet from California that, while being heavy metal and featuring a substantial amount of screaming, has very positive messages of self-esteem, purpose, happiness, and other great messages. The song below is one of my favorites, Second & Sebring. It is also worth looking at the lyrics as it can be hard to understand.

While it's hard for any person not already a fan of the genre to enjoy an artist yelling, it is easy to see how the song does not fit society's main perceptions of the genre. Instead of screaming to make their music more edgy, or to get a scary, intimidating vibe, Of Mice & Men use it to express all of the emotion needed by their song. The song itself is a tribute to the main singers mother, recently passed. As such a sensitive topic as it is, the singer screams to let out all of the fresh emotion from losing a loved one. Combined with the poetic lyrics he writes, the song is inspiring because it does not hold back, all of the emotion is expressed freely and naturally through grief, but also as celebration of all of the experiences his mother has shaped.

Many people will ask me how I can enjoy listening to something like this, and I always answer the same. Many other genres of music offer vocals without pitch, such as hip hop and rap. I see screaming as just a more intense, emotional version of rap. It is rhythmic, it is dynamic, and it is powerful. Of course not all heavy metal is just screaming with guitars and a drum set, a lot mixes in a lot of singing in a powerful way. Second & Sebring ends with a very melodic melody that ties the whole song together while offering a very different style. The melody at the end ties together all of the emotion from the whole song in one pretty bow, ending with a bittersweet celebration of the great life that his mother was known to have.

The metal genre is very diverse, and while some of it is designed to be scary or intimidating, there is also a ton of other themes present as well. It can be hard to get into the genre, but once you do it can be one of releasing experiences you've ever had with music.

Rock: Out of This World

When I first started this blog, I started off with a genre that seems to be on the decline: classical. However, through the post I hoped to give a great example of classical from within the past year, to prove that the genre is still very much alive. In today's post I hope to do the same thing, but with rock music.

Because rock music was absolutely huge in the mid-late 20th century (as compared to its fanbase today), it is often too easy to forget that the genre is even still around. Of course, the rock of today is very different from what it was when The Beatles had the stage, but it still has enough similarities to be classified as the same genre. Rock music, like almost every other large genre, is very vague, and many different styles have emerged since the 1940s. However, the strongest definition we can give it is any music with a strong emphasis on electric guitars, electric bass, drums, and a lead vocalist. This definition could obviously work for a lot of bands, so we will talk about an interesting one.

Courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Starset_Band_Photo.jpg

Starset is a very new rock band, whose first album, Transmissions, came out in the summer of 2014. Starset is like many other rock bands of the time, but with a science fiction twist. Starset claims to be a part of a bigger mission, called The Starset Society. For this, instead of concerts, they call their live events "demonstrations". I have attempted several times to figure out just what the point of this society is for, with very little success. Even when in interviews, the band does not ever give a clear answer as to what their "cause" really is. Perhaps I just don't understand it, but due to the vagueness of their "cause", it is easy to assume that more than anything else, The Starset Society is a gimmick to give their music a fun sci-fi flair, and it does just that.

In the song "Down With the Fallen", the bands intention to create a science fiction feel is evident. From the beginning of the song to just about 18 seconds, we hear steady beeping noises, static sound waves, and what seems to be the clicking of different buttons. Through these subtle affects, the listener imagines waking up in a rocket ship in outer space, slowly getting a sense of their surroundings. At just around 0:18, the song rapidly escalates in intensity by adding the electric guitar and drum set, not only clarifying the genre as rock, but allowing the listener to paint the picture of finally being fully awake and aware of their new surroundings.

From 3:52 to the end, the music has stopped, but a narrator delivers random facts about our universe in a voice that implies being played with a weak signal, as if we were still in space. While this choice seems to be random, the band puts it there to end the song with the same outer space feelings that we experienced at the start. This provides the song with a nice frame to show the beginning and end.

Courtesy of https://static.pexels.com/photos/2150/sky-space-dark-galaxy.jpg

While the band is definitely classified as rock, it also has influences in electronic music, in order to fit the outer space theme. While it is not so present in this song, other songs on the album have a variety of different synths incorporated that help to, not only add variety to the music, but to help illustrate various malfunctions in the space ship, or at ground control.

Starset is just one example of many new rock bands contributing to the genre in new and exciting ways. While it is no where as big as it once was, rock music artists are definitely finding new and unique ways to be different, and stay afloat in the vast world of music.

Alternative: Pretty. Odd.

Last week we briefly talked about a very popular genre of music: Electronic. As electronic is such a massive genre it was impossible to pick just one song that can represent even a large part of the genre. This week we shall run into a very similar problem as I will talk about another huge genre: alternative. It is very difficult to define alternative music because of how diverse and large the genre has grown to be. However, some characteristics can generally be applied to the genre. Today, alternative seems to be a unique blend of rock and pop, where it consists of traditional band instruments (guitar, bass, drums, etc...), yet incorporates a lot of other unique elements and is ultimately much more "catchy". For such a popular genre, some of the songs can be, well, pretty odd.

It is almost ironic how popular alternative music is today considering how it began. Alternative started out as a branch of rock music intended to be, literally, an alternative to the mainstream rock music in the 1980s. Most of the music was independent, meaning that it was not produced by large record companies, and thus continued to remain under the radar. Today, however, alternative music can be produced under huge record companies. Some big bands today might include Coldplay, twenty one pilots, Lorde, Imagine Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. All of these bands take "rockish" music, but have their own very unique spin. I will talk about a band that you might know, Panic! at the Disco.

(Panic! at the Disco has recently come out with a new, very popular song entitled "Victorious", that I don't happen to like very much, plus the goal of this blog is to show the songs that go unnoticed, so instead I shall talk about "Nearly Witches", a song that even for alternative, is very unusual...)

The song starts off with a music teacher instructing her kids to follow her time when they sing, and the children come in singing to the beat of her snaps. The first 37 seconds of the song is just the sound of the teacher's voice, and then the choir singing in French. This is hardly the traditional way to start of a song, even for a genre as diverse as alternative. At around the 38th second, the song completely transforms. It starts off with a soft, mysterious harmony that quickly turns to a hard electric guitar. Finally when the artist starts singing at 0:55, we realize that this was not quite the song we were expecting to hear when we started off with a small French choir. From 0:55 to right before the main melody at 1:48, many different weird effects play including creaking floor boards, random shouts, noise makers, trumpets, and other fun instruments. These cool effects play throughout the harmonies of the song, a strong contrast to the straightforward melody that goes to the tune of the original French choir part of the song. The song ends with mixing the French choir with the main artist's voice, and then a sliding pitch downward, as if the song falls off.

"Nearly Witches", by Panic! at the Disco, is a very unique song indeed, but is representative of alternative music in a few ways. It has a very distinct rock vibe, is very catchy, and most of all, is not afraid to try different things throughout the song.

Image Credits, from top to bottom:
     http://img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/109972539.png
     https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Panic!_at_the_Disco_2013.jpg