Disquiet Junto video game music

My Junto piece this week took a bit of a leap from the instructions:

Disquiet Junto Project 0099: In the Key of X

This project investigates video game sound — not the sound of video games, but the sound of game consoles themselves. The newly released Xbox One has its own distinct startup melody of just three notes: first an E, then a G, then a D. The project this week is to imagine those notes being the core of an original piece of music: What if the theme of the Xbox One were a song, and a lo-fi one at that?

The project instruction is as follows: Record a piece of music with an 8-bit flavor. It should begin with a replication of that same three-note Xbox One pattern (E G D), repeated several times, and then veer off into whatever direction you desire. As the track goes along, feel free to add common video game sounds like explosions, karate chops, crowd noises, engines revving and so forth. Try to keep the whole thing under 90 seconds.

This morning I wasn't sure I'd get to the Junto. There's a CD I'm mastering and an article I'm trying to finish before an interview for another piece, as well as the catalogue mentioned last week. Anyway, when the opportunity presented itself to to work on a tune my instrument died. I'd planned to use my circuit bent omnichord but it seemed to short-circuit, which really sucks.

So I was kinda down and sulked for a bit before playing with the notes in Ableton Live. I picked a Phosphor preset that reminded me of what I'd heard of the X-Box. It didn't sound very 8-bit but I thought I'd use tape delay to reference the magnetic memory of the computer games of my youth.

Amon Tobin made a cool soundtrack for a video game and I was fascinated with how it manipulates the dynamics of the track to accomodate action (or the lack thereof) in a level setting. My track uses loops and automates the compression, channels, delay, EQ and tempo to create dynamics. It'd be cool if computers had delay artefacts in their noises I think.

Ended up enjoying myself and let the track run overtime. The tempo changes I imagined as processing problems in my hardware. Like how games would slow down when there was a lot of action onscreen.