The Music In Winter Levels Sounds Like Winter

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Have you ever noticed how every video game winter level sounds kinda the same? Not identical, obviously, but there's definitely a characteristic sound, to the point where you can often tell a piece was written for a winter level without ever actually seeing the level in question. But how does that work, and why?
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Опубликовано:

18 май 2023

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Комментарии : 295

@12tone Год назад

Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) Another way that subjectivity creeps into this is deciding which labels apply to which pieces in the first place. In the case of instrumentation, this isn't that hard, (although with synthesized instruments, there is some level of judgment involved) but, like, what counts as arpeggiated accompaniment? How heavy does the reverb have to be to qualify as "heavy reverb"? These are questions a human has to decide the answer to. 2) While I largely agree with the prominent tags the authors chose to ignore, I am somewhat unsure on their decision to exclude woodwinds, specifically flutes, from their analysis. These are also highly correlated with the other winter tags, and while it's true that they also show up in other settings, they do still feel wintery to me when used in winter themes, much like arpeggiated accompaniments do. It's possible their use of meta-tags, grouping all woodwinds under the "woodwind" banner obscured how prominent flutes, specifically, were in their dataset, but I dunno. 3) Speaking of arpeggiated accompaniment, another thing to note is that not only are they common in retro video game music, they're also common in orchestral pieces (due to the prevalence of single-note instruments in orchestral settings) which are a major influence on modern video game scores as well. 4) That harp part in Antidote was a huge pain to transcribe and it's very possible I got parts of it completely wrong. If so, whoops! 5) Technically, Winter Bliss has more of a dance drum kit, not a rock drum kit, but I mostly just meant that standard trap-set beats are still common, albeit less so than one might naively expect. 6) On that, I feel like I may not have made it clear that the main point here is that, outside of drum kits, there are basically no other non-metallic percussion instruments that show up regularly. No timpani, no congas, no orchestral snares… And, like 4/4, drum kits are so common across video game music that their presence here doesn't really signify much.

@donkeymccarrots8718 Год назад

Hi 12 tone! Since you made this winter video, I was wondering if you would be interested in making an analysis of the summer camp track from psychonauts? The one called : whispering rock psychic summer camp, I think it captures the scene of a hot summer day in a forest like no other game ever made... The whole game actually has amazing scores...

@Digitalhunny Год назад

Have you ever heard of the band TOOL? If so would you _please_ consider explaining to us their style of music to us untrained music lovers? I'm talking what the heck is their scale? Most importantly _how & why_ does it work? Any of these songs of their could use _some_ explanation, please? Songs: Schism, Stinkfist, Vicarious, Right in Two, The Pot or Prison Sex. Thank you for _all_ of the music education, explanation & fun doodles you've provided us over the years. *HUGS, from this Canadian gal. 💕💕🤗💕💕

@christiannorton9400 Год назад

See, when I think of flutes in themed music, I tend to think of nature as a whole rather than just winter. I definitely see a case in either direction, but my point is that both cases exist

@SteveN-dw1uy Год назад

Find it strange that they didn't include a corpus of non-winter (computer game) music so they could screen out the features common to both. As mentioned the 4-4 feature probably shows up in both, but the heavy reverb or metallic percussion should show up disproportionately more often in winter music rather as compared to the general corpus, and would also help answer your questions on arpeggios and woodwind instruments. It's one thing to know a feature is common in winter music, but more important to know it's *only* common in winter music. Also, you might find negative features, like say winter music includes jazz or syncopated rhythms far less frequently than other computer game music (as a hypothetical example). I don't think they can easily identify this type of feature with their methodology. Still an interesting piece of research I would never have thought about, thanks for sharing it!

@xKatjaxPurrsx Год назад

Suggestion: Playing God, but it's a 12tone video!

@wmxx2000 Год назад

I like this idea as a series. What makes a desert level? What makes a forest level? What makes a cave level? What makes a sky/flying level? There is a lot of options here.

@thebrokenpuppet2714 Год назад

Yeah there’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about that is adjacent to this.

@fantomflasch2289 Год назад

Since deserts are more regionally specific than "winter", it's a lot more simple, imo. Desert music contains stylistic elements borrowed from either: traditional Southwest Asian music (and globally nearby regions like North Africa and South Asia), or American Country Western, or Mexican and/or Spanish. I haven't personally heard anything else.

@sclom5676 Год назад

You could even add things like boss music, battle music or the like.

@allhailklisz Год назад

@@fantomflasch2289 That's what makes things particularly interesting to me for deserts - the fact that desert level music often borrows from the music of those regions is well-known, but I'd be fascinated to see if there are any signifiers *beyond* those.

@fantomflasch2289 Год назад

@@allhailklisz Yeah, 12tone's video mentions the frequent use of "cold" metallic instruments in winter music, I wonder if there is also instrumentation that is considered "dry."

@smalleranimals Год назад

yep. what you need for winter is 'sparkly and brittle' - crisp arpeggios, bright metallic instruments, lots of reflectivity (reverb / delay), and a lot of high frequencies. because that's the sound of a beautiful hard-frozen landscape - bits of ice tinkling onto frozen ground, bright flashes of sunlight catching in ice, hard echoes, and a bit of danger lurking (because you can freeze to death)

@aeroandspace Год назад

Also, snow dampens lower frequencies, so we hear the higher frequencies more starkly in real-world wintery environments

@RafaelSCalsaverini Год назад

As someone who does computational statistics for a living, one thing I missed is including in the dataset pieces that are definitely NOT winter themes. This way, instead of only looking at shows up frequently in winter themes the authors could have studied what distinguishes winter from non-winter themes. What are good predictors of "winterness"? One idea would me to randomly select other level themes from a pool of not-winter-related levels. Of course this would be a lot of additional work so, that's probably why it wasn't done. It doesn't invalidate the conclusions. It would only make them stronger. But it would help clean up blatant population effects like "being in 4/4" and add adequate weight to features that aren't as strong like "arpeggiated harmony ".

@Sibula Год назад

Oh, definitely. I feel like arpeggios are overall very common in video game music, probably because of the limitations of older hardware like he mentioned. But are they more common in winter levels? Probably?

@Lemanic89 Год назад

I think the western association of winter with the Alps and Russia can explain the arps and string instruments used here. They want associations to Mozart and Tchaikovsky with that. It’s that simple.

@eaglescout1984 Год назад

2 observations: First, I'm surprised you didn't mention Vivaldi, since he actually wrote music titled "winter". And although reverb and percussion weren't a thing in baroque music, the second movement employs plucked strings. So, that's been a theme in winter music for 4 centuries now. Also, Diddy Kong Racing has a winter song (Frosty Village) and you might as well call it "variations on winter wonderland". So, some video games do sample public domain Christmas/winter songs to evoke winter as well.

@astaphe9186 Год назад

I was also surprised. Reverb obviously didn't exist but the trilled strings and use of harmonic tones creates a similar effect--one that I think a lot of video game snow-level music also copies

@augiegirl1 Год назад

1:41 He draws Olaf from “Frozen”, but doesn't even mention the music from that movie! Also, “The Piano Guys“ do an INCREDIBLE mashup of Vivaldi’s “Winter” & “Let It Go”. Also, the only game that I play is “Frozen Freefall”, by JamCity; the game itself is very similar to Candy Crush.

@Kousaburo Год назад

Well if it ain't Baroque, don't fix it.

@RAFMnBgaming Год назад

Interesting that that happened with both that in DKR and with riffing off teddy bears' picnic for grunty's theme in Banjo Kazooie for a fairytale feel, despite DKR and BK being scored by different composers (David Wise and Grant Kirkhope respectively). Guess great minds thought alike, at Rare, in essentially the same development cycle window. Weird.

@mxspokes Год назад

There's often a Wind subtheme to winter levels, a lot of open things like hisses or breeze design but harsh and cold.

@DC_Prox Год назад

I don't know if this needs to be a series, but I notice that water levels and dessert levels also have their own sounds that would make for some good analysis. Also, less common but almost as iconic: tech levels.

@furiousfap3369 11 месяцев назад

Lava levels too. Magmoor Caverns in metroid prime especially comes to mind.

@Glasshouse828 29 дней назад

Dessert Levels? You mean like levels made out of candy and sweets?

@mr.bennett108 Год назад

I was told by a musician "video game and movie soundtracks are just what olden days opera music was." It's interesting you didn't mention the concept of cliches. Each level type is defined by a set of musical cliches.

@MatthewMe Год назад

I'll add my thoughts here, though I'm not a trained musician. Winter music is often about evoking environmental conditions though the music. And this showed up the study indirectly - metallic instruments evoke the sounds of ice cracking, sleet falling, and the hollow sound of movement when the environment is blanketed in snow or ice. This is often accomplished with bells and chimes. Reverb gives the impression of echoing cold winds. Great video! Thanks!

@teucer915 Год назад

Click Clock Woods from Banjo-Kazooie goes through all four seasons using variations on the same theme. It's fascinating as an example of this.

@chrishillery Год назад

A lot of these characteristics are common to the soundtracks of "winter" movies, especially Christmas movies. Which is hardly surprising - if there is a video game vocabulary for "winter" it almost certainly was derived in large part from movie soundtracks, which in turn probably got it in large part from Baroque and Classical music.

@aloysious1432 Год назад

I believe it may be more accurate to say that reverbing the high frequencies of a song gives it a winter-feel, as that gives a shimmering bell effect. That's what I notice across all those songs.

@timpunny Год назад

did you just write leitmotif backwards

@JustinLe Год назад

I think the video is played in reverse

@timpunny Год назад

@@JustinLe that would mean it was recorded with an eraser pen? unlikely

@andreasheld2362 Год назад

He's lefthanded - writing words that way prevents the ink from smudging.

@timpunny Год назад

@@andreasheld2362 makes sense. i just haven't watched a 12Tone video in a while, and it was just unexpected

@SwankemasterSupreme 9 месяцев назад

He sure did.

@SebiStr99 Год назад

If I had to describe winter-themes I'd say: bright; short notes/arpeggios; no/low mids; bells, chimes and other metallic "ding"-sounds; reverb on higher frequencies; (sounds like snow drowning out the mids and bass, ice sparkling and reflecting at the top end) Edit: usually similar to crystal-cave themes, probably due to crystal caves having an ice like aesthetic

@peccantis 3 месяца назад

For sure. The Great Crystal theme of FFXII even has an extremely wintery "chilly wind" glissando just where the track is about to loop.

@jafujiyoshi Год назад

Wonder if they could’ve subtracted from the tag population of randomly chosen tracks from the same games. Would take care of the 4/4 issue - I think 3/4 would actually be more relatively common. Also would bump up something like sleigh bells, if 25% of winter tracks had them and 2% of random tracks did. Maybe that also provides insight into the contribution of technology.

@EllisThings Год назад

"if I play you a different star wars clip..." HAHAHAHA sublime choice!

@isaac_lin Год назад

Interesting thoughts about reverb in winter--personally, freshly fallen (or falling) snow is the archetypal image in my mind for a wintery scene, and in the real world the sound is very hushed with a lack of echoes, as light, fluffy snow absorbs sound really well.

@peperoni_pepino Год назад

To me, your very first example actually didn't sound very 'winter' (but rather more like a cloud platformer) and I'm surprised this was limited to video games. I think that for instance the Swan Lake has had a lot of influence on winter games, with every game with some ice skating mechanic I have ever played trying to refer to it. I also suspect that if you correlate all the music within a single series (like all Zelda music, all Mario music, all Nier music) you will probably find that winter games are generally a bit more classical. EDIT: Actually, if you are doing a computational analysis anyways then why do a winter search separately at all? Isn't it easier to treat 'winter' like a tag, just like 'desert', and instead compute the (symmetric) correlation between any two tags? That would automatically filter things like the 4/4, as that will not correlate with winter even if it is common. There is a whole niche of using things like K-means clustering to find correlations, but that is already quite a mature field so that shouldn't be too bad? Or is there a reason correlations will not work and you have to use a system which uses absolute frequencies like the authors did?

@peccantis 3 месяца назад

Swan Lake? Not Nutcracker?

@Drakethatsme Год назад

I had the pleasure of hearing Prof. Lavengood present the paper at the AMS/SMT/SEM conference last year! Afterward, I actually brought up the winter as a place vs. winter as a season idea that you've brought up here!

@AuroraFirestorm Год назад

I'm surprised you didn't bring up high pitches. High pitched percussion especially sounds delicate, and snow and ice are also very delicate.

@timpunny Год назад

first 12tone notification i actually clicked on in a while. my prediction: jingle bells and high pass filters

@msr0ry7 Год назад

I love this so much. Winter themes in music, movies and video games are always my absolute favourites

@danielcorrigan8805 Год назад

I'd love to see the same analysis for underwater themes since that is another setting that has a very clear musical style, and invokes some of the same techniques like heavy reverbs.

@Kiaulen Год назад

I am a little surprised that bells didn't end up on the list, given their prolific use in religious and secular winter holiday music, and general rarity outside of that. I guess glockenspiel is a good stand in though.

@retstak Год назад

Well, he did mention sleigh bells, and bells fall into that metallic instrument category as well.

@carbonmonoxide5052 Год назад

A lot of these pieces focus on the high end instead of middle and low. It’s hard to define pitch ranges specifically for this but it’s definitely a correlation (which makes sense since glockenspiels and such are high end).

@tfdband Год назад

This is very cool! I do a composition exercise with my gaming-inclined students that involves writing a short theme based on a level, town, or character. It’s really fun to hear how different students interpret the same themes.

@andyduke6119 Год назад

This has been my favorite by far, and I'd love to see a series about video game music or a "why this music type has these traits".

@toblexson5020 Год назад

This has got me thinking about almost the opposite of compositional based work. How effectively can you evoke environments with a single instrument? Can a solo guitar evoke snow and cold? How about a drumset?

@MrArghylesteward Год назад

The thing I disliked the most about the re-released Original Trilogy was George Lucas’s decision to replace the Ewok celebration song at the end of RotJ. Thanks for that tiny piece of nostalgia!

@TheMister123 Год назад

It's the sound of wind blowing. And some other stuff. But mostly the sound of hollow wind and crackling of ... any number of things associated with winter.

@scottbubb2946 Год назад

I didn't see the title, but that music made me think of caves. And the threat of something menacing. Definitely an ominous connotation.

@porgy29 Год назад

One thing that is common among some of the tags (and in many of the clips) but wasn't mentioned specifically, and I felt was left out, was the tendency for prominent parts of the melody to be higher pitch. Something that glockenspiel, pizzicato violin, and sleigh bells have in common is that they all tend to be pretty high. Even the entire melody is not in the high end it sounds like many many have prominent high notes sprinkled in as accents. If you go through the examples used they all make use of a lot of high "bright" notes. FFX, Mega Man, Donkey Kong, Metroid, Pokemon, Undertale, Kingdom Hearts: all tend towards the top end of the scale.

@Leloup6760 Год назад

This is by far one of the most interesting videos I've seen from you. and I would love to see this idea of weather/environment themed musical theory explored in greater detail. with things like analyzing desert levels. or tropical levels, underwater levels' you get the idea.

@warbossworm Год назад

Lake Wintergrasp from World of Warcraft is a fantastic wintery piece. Segments of it consist entirely of sparsely-arranged, reverbed, metallic percussion.

@syruplease Год назад

that trumpet

@NanixsQuickieFoods Год назад

Eyyy Snowdin town shoutout! Nice! Really fun video - I appreciate your analysis of the study itself, really nuanced the conversation!

@everestjarvik5502 Год назад

Where I live, it doesn’t snow much- so one day in 2019 where it snowed like a foot and a half, I was inspired to make a snowy feeling song I subconsciously used pretty much all of these tropes, the only exception being missing drums (although one of the drum sounds I used was footsteps walking through the snow so)

@StormTheSquid Год назад

I'm currently trying to write some music for a winter themed campaign arc for my d&d game, and this is actually incredibly helpful! Thank you!

@feltcute_mightdelete Год назад

Thank you for citing Megan's paper. I saw her present it at SMT last year. I am a master's in music theory student and my thesis is on seasonal topic and affect in casual games. I've presented my paper on this in regards to Stardew Valley at a few conferences. There is surprisingly little research on seasonal music even though it has exist least since the Baroque era

@feltcute_mightdelete Год назад

One thing that I have found in my research on winter themes in SDV, is the lack of thirds or suppressed thirds that provide an empty feeling. In SDV, there are often clear chords being presented or arpeggiated but they lack the quality defining third.

@Verlisify Год назад

My favorite 12tone video

@crit-c4637 Год назад

I'd like to see a baseline study of all music done to set a constant. Then you could compare common things, like 4/4 time, and see if a certain genre or theme uses each element more or less. Also maybe a time period study so we could do the same comparison within each time peruod and see how things developed.

@elecboy5126 Год назад

The brightness of the mode mixture might be a good thing to measure

@B_Van_Glorious Год назад

Throwing shade out the gate! Spicy 12tone today!

@timothybell9348 Год назад

okay this video is both timely and relevant (I keep bouncing around the idea of writing a "soundtrack" to Dungeon Keeper Ami and weaving winter-type music into her songs like a leitmotif would work exceptionally well) so it's getting saved to my favorites.

@AustinOnSugar Год назад

As part of a recent video, I had to analyze what elements are common in, of all things, train levels! Studying what I'm now starting to call reverse-wordpainting (might just be "musical imagery" with extra steps) for trains was surprisingly interesting! Suffice to say, if you wanted to dive down the level-trope rabbit hole, there's no end to interesting trends and features to learn about.

@gilb_4 Год назад

Describing a winter sound is surely... Hard Times!

@TheThomNorth Год назад

Drawing Marge to signify the word "neat" is just fantastic.

@JovanDacic Год назад

And below that, drawing the brain teaser that looks simultaneously like a bunny rabbit head and a quacking duck head to illustrate "subjective"!

@ShadowDrakken Год назад

I feel like two additional things got completely missed: there's a floaty quality to winter music, though that may be the reverb. But more importantly, there's an up and down wave in the music rather than rapid changes in direction.

@cambabiak Год назад

This was a great video, You need to follow this series to the end.

@pedroscoponi4905 Год назад

ff10, huh? That's a choice I can respect! I get MMOs are not for everyone, but ff14 has a very special place in my heart :) (And has some of my favorite music in the entire franchise!) I've been wondering for some time if 12tone would cover some video game music! This is nice, I'd love to see more 👀

@beigeguest Год назад

No shade on FFX, but when I saw the premise for this video I immediately thought of FFXI Jeuno Christmas ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-C4m8w9xkelw.html MOAR SLEIGHBELL

@Sibula Год назад

It's more of a reaction plus talking about production thing, but Alex Moukala has done videos on a lot of FF music including FFXIV (plus a lot of other video game music). Definitely check him out if you haven't.

@bmac4 Год назад

One thing I'd be interested in is an analysis of how stuff like modes and tempo affect it all. I imagine major key and higher tempo winter stuff would be focused on the "warm" side of winter, like a holiday/Christmas-y or even just that vibe of "fireplace respite in a cold snowy area" while the more desolate, colder stuff would be minor key and at slower tempos with more minimal instrumentation. I also imagine a good chunk has to do with how VGM is a scene so heavily built off influence from predecessors. Nobuo Uematsu is among the most esteemed and influential composers of video game music, and he was inspired by an eclectic amount of sounds including Tchaikovsky, whose compositions in the Nutcracker Suite are practically a standard in terms of Christmas music in the musical zeitgeist.

@Merennulli Год назад

I always thought it was the reverb or similar light ambient sound filling (wind can take the place of reverb, for example) coupled with more open space in the music for the ambient sound to dominate in spite of being light and a range that carries well in cold air. I wasn't aware of all these other examples, and honestly didn't hear winter in Chill Penguin's stage as I was more focused on the metallic factory aspect. I don't play a lot of games, so I wasn't aware of a lot of these. The twinkling sound of snow comes from real world percussion of flakes by the thousands hitting against surfaces that can reverberate. The bells, though, are almost entirely from Christmas traditions drawing from northern Europe where the bells had more practical origins. They aren't natural and they carry well in cold temperatures. I am really curious to see the video on how melody can convey the same feeling. Thank you for including mention of that video as well as covering this topic.

@thealmightytigor5308 Год назад

Can you please do a video on some radio head songs and albums especially Kid A and Amnesiac. Those albums have so much meaning to them that could really use some attention.

@hectorvaldes3582 Год назад

Very informative!

@lawrencebates8172 Год назад

Coming at this as someone who does some computational biology, this was interesting. There are a few things that I would really like to see in order to get a better sense of how robust and powerful this approach is. The first is pretty much required: a control group. I realize it's a lot of work, but labelling up a comparable number of non-winter tracks, ideally from the same panel of games, would make the analysis way more interpretable. Is it reasonable to exclude 4/4 or use of the major key? Having a control group will make it easy to tell. While the use of sleigh bells is probably winter-specific, maybe the lack of a main drumkit is actually more common among video game music than we realize. Second, I'd love to see some cluster analysis. In the paper they look at how the different tags cluster and interconnect, but it would be really interesting to look at how the tracks themselves cluster; by performing dimensional reduction analysis, you can go from a big table with all of the tags down to a 2D plot with the tracks clustering closer together with other tracks that have similar tags and further from those that have different tags. Combined with the use of controls, this will first off give a very clear idea of whether winter tracks are a distinct catagory of videogame music, or if the tags used are too generic to pick out these details. It will also suggest if they are subclasses of winter tracks; fully orchestrated tracks should sit apart from 8-bit tracks. If this is the case, it's interesting to look at what features they still share, and they may be groupings that you might not have otherwise noticed. You will also likely be able to pull out some distinctions based on when the music was made, since the technical limitations mean that some tags are just impossible to find in earlier music. This brings up the third point: regression analysis. There's a lot of data about the context in which these tracks occur, from the date they were released and the hardware they used, to the tone of the scene and genre of the game. Looking at how the different tags are enriched or avoided against a panel of these context cues would be really neat. Again, a control group would be useful to see which of these trends are broadly applicable to videogame music and which are winter-specific. This relates to your point about the distinction between ice-themed areas vs seasonal (winter/christmas) tunes; those are pretty easy categories to analyse in this way.

@unofficialyartifcial9108 Год назад

I deadass just got into video game music production. You are a magicain

@victoriaj2129 Год назад

This is remarkably similar to analysis of how cells can be broken into different types by comparing their gene expression, even with the same kind of conflicts re weighing unusual vs common events when trying to find defining characteristics.

@robertellis6853 Год назад

While gathering all the winter level themes together into one isolated group is certainly one way to get an idea of what makes a song "winter," its prone to a lot of excess variables that muddy up the results. This is something you point out when talking about how the researchers had to toss some things like 4/4 rime signature because it was ubiquitous not just in winter themes, but all video game music, amd western music as a whole. I feel that a way to move the research forward would be to vastly increase the dataset, not with winter themes, but with a selection of non-einter themes from the same games. That way the model can demphasize characteristics common to video games, or even to that game/composer. Of course, this makes a much more complex model, and even more manual tagging, so I can understand why the researchers didn't go that route.

@SameAsAnyOtherStranger Год назад

Cool to learn reverb in eight bit game sound required use of one of (the only) three sound channels. I would have thought it was a scheme like faux MIDI reverb. Ever since I saw a video of a bluegrass type rock band playing in sort of shack where it was obvious it was as cold in there as it was in the cold winter weather outside, I have wondered about the aural effect of cold, denser air. I thought 12 Tone dude was going to mention it, but now that I think about it, there's probably not that much of identifiable difference.

@sarahrawlinson6271 4 месяца назад

Cold air is closer together, so when sound hits cold air, it travels farther and clearer than warm or hot air allows. Couple that with a coating of snow on the ground, and sounds change drastically when compared to a bare ground. If you live in a place where it snows, I’m sure you’ve noticed it but subconsciously.

@benjaminbaron3209 Год назад

I often heard "Oh, there's a ton of German words in English." but then when you ask for them, it's just Kindergarten and recently Zeitgeist. Now I have two more: Glockenspiel and Leitmotiv.

@peccantis 3 месяца назад

Schadenfreude.

@Desirsar Год назад

Seems like it comes down to a learned language. The Lake Macalania music makes me think of a cave, not necessarily even cold. The Chill Penguin theme makes me think of a generic fighting game level theme. Makes me wonder if people that played more of one genre of game will have common thoughts for a new piece of music, or if it's specific to the games and there won't be a pattern at all.

@AndyWitmyer 11 месяцев назад

Excellent video. I wish you would've looked at the various winter themes from the Rune Factory series, where seasonal music is important - and often beautiful. (The RF composer is ridiculously underrated imho)

@kedrak90 Год назад

I think the next step to do is to look at the reverse just to see how much it checks out. I mean it would be interesting to rank random themes on their winteryness and see if the computationally most wintery non-winter theme feels wintery to humans as well. I think something like the great fairy fountain fom Zelda OOT would fit great to a winter level in a different game. It fits pretty well with its reverb, plucked strings and arpeggios.

@beenaplumber8379 19 дней назад

Wow - I live in Minnesota, and I can tell you that when there's snow on the ground, especially fresh snow, especially when it's still falling (heavily), the ambient sound is anything but reverberant. Stepping outside into that can be like stepping into a dead recording studio. I wonder if this is another one of those artifacts of people working in Hollywood having to guess at what other people think winter sounds like rather than trying to match reality (kinda like they do with thunder) when they might not know themselves. Winter sucks the sound out of the air. When the snow is hard and crunchy, the crunchy sound you get from stepping on the snow is absolutely dead. I don't think ice is as reflective as concrete or other surfaces. It's not as hard as other common solids, unless it's extremely cold, like dry ice cold, in which case it's still pretty soft. (Not malleable soft, but easily disrupted with light pressure.) I think it absorbs more than it reflects. I wonder if composers are thinking more of glass, which is spectacularly vibrant when shattered?

@borandiUK Год назад

FFX best FF game? That's just calling out for many arguments

@Immopimmo Год назад

Best FF game. 👌

@Kiaulen Год назад

I have no dog in this fight (never finished a FF game), but my friends would definitely argue for 7 (the original, not the remake) or tactics.

@amrys_argent Год назад

Okay I haven't even watched the video yet, but I had to laugh when I saw the title because it was less than a week ago I was playing Stardew Valley and mentioned to my husband how weird it is there are just some musical elements that you hear and immediately think "winter."

@Glasshouse828 29 дней назад

A video about winter music released in late spring

@furiousfap3369 11 месяцев назад

YES I was hoping you'd mention metroid prime's phendrana drifts

@SarahMaeBea Год назад

I'm curious if wintery/snowy film scores use the same tropes. Are these widly accepted "snow sounds"? Or is this a video game specific motif that wouldn't communicate the same thing to people who didn't grow up playing video games?

@Beateau 11 месяцев назад

The more I watch these, the more I start to pick up on the little references in the drawings. If he doesn't publish a book with all his best drawing's, I think it would be neat to be able to buy individually framed pages.

@CaioLoureiro Год назад

Please do more videos about videogame music!!!

@themanyouwanttobe Год назад

Well now you've opened the box. We need to see a video about Yub Nub.

@goldenkurlz Год назад

Bless you for using the original (and therefore, to me, the best and only) celebration song from the end of return of the Jedi.

@jpisac Год назад

Long time subscriber - love for you to break down the Cure’s Picture of you. Thx

@jjknave Год назад

Is there a video or post somewhere that lists common drawings that 12tone uses for certain phrases? I've seen several of their videos over the years, but between the quick speed and small drawings, sometimes I don't know either what is being drawn or what it has to do with the sentences they are saying.

@IsaacMyers1 Год назад

I think the time signature can be extremely important. For example, even though I have no study to back up my claim, it feels like a significant amount of water themes are in 3/4.

@Orbengnor Год назад

Please this kind of thing a series: what does a desert/forrest/ocean/cave/village/city sound like (not just in video hames either)

@yuhsieh3106 Год назад

thanks for the videos. can we have a note book flip through

@hopelessnekromantik Год назад

The winter forest music from secret of mana (can't remember the name atm) is probably my favorite winter music in a game

@smrqunofficial Год назад

I think Kikuta outdid himself with the winter music in the next Mana game (Seiken Densetsu 3, now known as Trials of Mana), but the Secret of Mana one absolutely slaps

@pantheon777 Год назад

If I remember right, Carol of the Bells is in 6/8 and it is very wintry, moreso than a lot of other Christmas music which I think in addition to being wintry also evokes more cheerful and warm themes -like the warmth of a fire on a cold winter night, or some hot cocoa in a frosty clear morning

@BensBrickDesigns Год назад

If you have time, and haven't yet, play the Horizon series (Zero Dawn, Forbidden West and their DLCs). It has some of the best game music I've ever come across. Not maybe analysis worth, but I'd be interested in hearing your assessment.

@shlomophobe5582 4 месяца назад

The Ice Land music from Super Mario Bros. 3 always struck me as the perfect example of appropriate winter video game music

Год назад

To be honest, my assumption (ignoring the obvious guess based on the title of the video) for the first sample was "crystal caves". It didn't really sound very wintery to me.

@queens.dee.223 Год назад

I has a similar reaction, or maybe water.

@jrsviking215 Год назад

as someone who hasnt played final fantasy it did sound like winter stuff, didnt even read the title just saw there was a new 12tone video and clicked it

@wangledteb5671 Год назад

For the part at 13:18 about orchestration, I do think there might be some interest in looking at the sound design used and how it might reflect certain orchestration techniques even if the sound hardware/software being used can't replicate acoustic instruments (or if the composers simply chose not to) because like. That specific example there, I would call that a string-like square wave just because of the envelope being used, compared to something with a much faster (or instant) attack and delay which I'd consider more "plucky" :P

@aeroandspace Год назад

Did you know that the speed of sound isn't constant across all frequencies? As air gets thinner, more and more frequencies get attenuated, moving from higher to lower frequencies. So if you analyzed very hot, lava environments I'd expect it to emphasize deeper tones. Meanwhile, colder environments, even ones without snow, should have higher tones. Even when I play trumpet in winter, my trumpet sounds brighter because the metal is colder, so it's more stiff and amplifies higher frequencies. Also, when there's a lot of snow there's a very noticable deadening effect except for the absolutely highest, purest tones, which is why I think metallic instruments reign supreme

@PickPig Год назад

shoutout to splatoon 3's music for cryogenic hopetown that theme hits like a truck once you find out the lore behind alterna

@206brokenbones Год назад

Okay, good video as always. but why winter themes in the end of May? Not judging just the past week has been the warmest of the year haha.

@kamakazy13 Год назад

Literally this morning I was like "damn, winter levels sound so much like winter, very cool" then you release this vid. How How Howwwwwwww

@eli0damon Год назад

Looking at music that has been deliberately attached to winter imagery mainly tells you what musical features *composers* associate with winter. It doesn't tell you what musical features *listeners* associate with winter. For that, you would need to do a different kind of study, one where you would play music attached to winter imagery and other kinds of imagery, without context, and ask subjects what it reminds them of, and then see whether their impressions correlate with the hidden context. Also, you'd need another kind of study (I'm not sure what, but probably something cross-cultural, which would be hard because the same video games are played almost everywhere) to test whether the given musical features remind people of winter because of some natural connection or because they merely remind people of other music that they already associate with winter. That being said, the reverb thing makes a lot sense for the reason you gave, and the strings thing kind of makes sense (at least in combination with reverb) because the hard onset makes the reverb really obvious.

@qsquared8833 Год назад

It's the bells. "...but what is it?" It's the bells "so what sounds wintery?" it's the jingle bells!

@tulsatrash 9 месяцев назад

See when I heard that intro music I didn't think winter I thought "oh it's dark. We're underground or down low in a place with a lot of verticality. Like ab urban canyon on a hill, or tunnels that used to be street level before they got built over.

@jehmarxx Год назад

Have you ever done a collab with 8-Bit before?

@captainGrammar1 Год назад

Scanning the comments for this. It's basically required now.

@shadyguyinthecorner9256 Год назад

I would LOVE to see you break down some video game soundtracks/songs (specifically Undertale if any)

@PurpleBroadcast 7 месяцев назад

8:49 you got to the point, finally

@Mnnvint Год назад

It seems their dataset is very focused on console games, Japanese composers, and Nintendo console games in particular. Even some of the computer games they've included (Stardew Valley) are plainly console-inspired. There's a lot of excellent, original video game music which is not console or Nintendo-made, and they may be identifying the musical tropes of a fairly small group of mostly Japanese full-time composers. Now, there's a lot of good music there for sure. Great winter music too! I especially like the opening theme of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is a lovely winter theme by the chief Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, and the themes of Drawn to Life by David J. Franco. Drawn to Life is the sort of game which has a winter world, a forest world etc. so it's great for comparisons too. But western game composers, especially from 30 years ago or so, were very different from the Japanese ones. When the Japanese ones were typically classically educated, professionals in every sense, the western ones were younger, more into prog and electronic music, and much better at using the sound chips as instruments. Japanese composers usually had the luxury of composing on a piano or a synth, and having a separate engineer do his best to convert it to chip music. Western game composers usually had to program the chips themselves. So Japanese games have better melodies on average, and more sensible harmony - but less variability, and (with a few honorable exceptions) a lot more basic use of the synth chips. One western computer game which has great music and also a winter world, a water world, a fire world etc. is "Cool Coyote in Fire and Ice" by Graftgold. Jason Page made the music for that one, and it's a fantastic soundtrack that most people haven't heard (maybe due to the game itself not being very good apart from the art).

@Nixitur Год назад

I feel like the authors probably also should have considered things that definitely _isn't_ winter music in their computations, to weed out things that are common among all video game music. This would have gotten rid of common time, and probably some other common things as well. Because the question should really be "what is common among winter music that makes it _different_ from non-winter music".

@wesleyrussell8386 Год назад

I'm not caught up on your lore but your elephant characters remind me of the mammoth from The Way Things Work by David Macauly

@gordonstearns2232 Год назад

Looking at the thumbnail before I saw the title, I thought this was going to be a breakdown of I Am the Walrus. That would've been awesome.

@vincentkalman4572 Год назад

I've contemplated attempting such analysis on the soundtracks to Mechwarrior, Heavy Gear, and perhaps also Armored Core to isolate the essence of battlemech based music