Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 052: For the Love of FM Synthesis

Episode Date: December 5, 2016

Let's get technical! With this, the first of a series of Micro episodes focused on specific technologies and how they shape the games we love. We begin here with a podcast-appropriate aural treat: The iconic sound of FM synthesis. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, what's the frequency, Koshiro? So, I recently received a copy of another game soundtrack LP release for which I wrote the liner notes, Ship to Shores, newly minted, Lagrange Point OST. I doubt my contributing to game soundtracks will become a regular occurrence, which is probably just as well. This means I can't write a proper review of those discs. The concept of avoiding conflict of interest has been run roughshot of late, but I'm still a fan. The Grange Point in particular is a frankly incredible project to have been a part of,

because honestly it logically never should have happened. One, it's the American issue of a classic video game soundtrack, which itself is rarefied enough territory. Two, it's a game that was never released in the US and can only be played in English through a fan translation. And three, the game itself was completely improbable in its own right. La Grange Point showed up in 1991 for the Nintendo Famicom, and in the process it arguably represented the pinnacle of over-the-top game cartridges for the system. It came to us courtesy of Konami, of course, the kings of crazy expansion technology for Famicom, and LaGrange Point represented those kings' crowning achievement.

By this point, regular Retronauts listeners are well aware of Konami's propensity for beefing up their Famicom games with secondary processors to add capabilities that would have been impossible with the Famicom's base hardware. But not even the famous Japanese release of Castlevania 3 could compare to what they did with Lagrange Point. I could go into an elaborate technical explanation of what made LagrangePoint so remarkable, but to put it simply, the cartridge contained a synthesizer. Literally, they built into the cartridge the core of a stripped-down Yamaha music synthesizer,

similar in nature to the one included in the Sega Genesis hardware, which in turn was based on the chip that appeared in popular professional synthesizers that top 40 bands used with such enthusiasm throughout the 80s. Granted, the chip in Lagrange Point wouldn't have been capable enough to play the lead line for a Spandau ballet album, but it was by far a more powerful sound chip than the one in the Famicom itself. It literally tripled the number of audio channels available to LagrangePoint's composers and effects programmers, resulting in the richest, most impressive sounding soundtrack ever to appear on Nintendo's 8-bit hardware. Due to its Yamaha-based design, LagrangePoint's special audio chip didn't sound anything like the NES' built-in audio,

Where the console itself possessed limited sampling capabilities and could generate wavetable sound, your classic blips and bloops, the Grangepoint added nearly a dozen channels of FM synthesis. It's hard to describe the qualitative difference between pure wave tables and FM synthesis and words without getting technical, but basically, FM synthesis takes wave table sound like that of the NES's built-in chip and adds greater complexity to it. The result bears little resemblance to the original wave table source. Instead, it has more of a sharp, percussive quality to it. As someone who grew up in the 80s, FM synthesis to me represents the sound of a sci-fi future. It's less simplistic, less clean than wave table audio.

It's more complex and cold. FM synthesis is great for driving beats, but when it comes to generating atmosphere, it generally sounds ominous, even when it's probably not meant to. The FM in FM synthesis is exactly the same as the acronym FM in FM radio. It means frequency modulation. The technology was developed in the 60s and patented by Yamaha in the 70s, where it served as the basis for their professional synths. Yamaha wasn't the only company making synths for musicians in the 80s, but they had an exclusive lock on the digital interpretation of the FM synthesis format.

Some other synth makers, such as Moog and Synclavier, used analog adaptations of FM synthesis, which required far more fine-tuning and maintenance than Yamaha's digital rendition, and it tended to yield less consistent results. At the same time, you had something like Fairlight's CMI synthesizer, whose solution revolved around sampling, more of a digital evolution of the infamous. melitron than anything like fm synthesis. Digital FM synth rose to popularity through things like Yamaha's DX7 synthesizer, which gave bands a huge spectrum of faux instrument sounds to work with. The percussive sound of Yamaha's tech made their keyboards great for emulating the sound of plucked instruments like pianos, harpsichords, and claviers, as well as for loosely approximations the sounds of guitars and bass.

While no one was likely to mistake a keyboard line for, say, an actual Spanish guitar, the Yamaha could dish out a mean slap bass, which probably helps to account for the sudden popularity of slap bass in the 80s and 90s. 1984's Marble Madness is frequently cited as the first video game to incorporate FM synthesizer sound. And its memorable soundtrack blew away everything that had come before, to be sure. Plus, it should be little surprised that the first game by technology savant Mark Serney would have been the one to introduce such advanced audio capabilities into gaming. Marble Madness's audio chip sparked a revolution.

Within a couple of years, it became harder to find a world. worthwhile arcade release without FM synthesis than with. The tech would rule the arcades until memory formats grew sufficiently capacious to allow Redbook, fully sampled, or streaming music. To my knowledge, the first appearance of FM synthesis and home video game applications came in 1985, with the Mark 2 SR revision of NEC's PC801 home computer in Japan. At the time, this offered a massive improvement over the typical monaural tones and beeps common to home computers, putting the PC801 more in line with the Commodore 64.

and its incredible SID chip. In 1987, Sega brought FM synth to consoles with the baffling FM sound unit for its Mark 3 console. I say baffling because this $70 ad-on showed up for a console that hardly anyone in Japan owned, a year before the system's replacement arrived, and offered no added features beyond better music. The FM sound unit didn't show up in any territory outside Japan, despite the console having more traction in Europe and America.

Even more bizarrely, several games never released in Japan included sound unit enhancements, but the game's default to built-in sound chip audio when played in consoles from their actual regions. It wasn't thought through very well, is what I'm saying. But it did get Fantasy Star a badass score for Japanese fans. Most likely, the sound unit served as another incremental step in Sega's move toward the Genesis. The Genesis contained elements of the master system in its innards, and its sound chip was part of the same family to which the sound unit belonged. So basically what we had to hear was Sega working up the kinks, further cementing the master's system's status,

as a dry run for the Genesis. The Genesis would be by far the most popular and famous home device to feature FM synthesis audio. A few years after its debut, CD-ROM drives became affordable and ubiquitous, making audio generation obsolete except in handholds, which generally stuck with just simple, plain, wavetable synthesis. It should be noticed that while it was more complex than basic wave table audio, FM synthesis wasn't automatically superior. It really depended on the composer, the programmers, and most of all, the musical style.

For example, Capcom's Ghost and Goblins sounded a lot better in its FM-based arcade incarnation. Then it did in Micronix's poorly made NES version of the game. But then you had Bionic Commando from the same company, which sounded strident in arcades, but became melodic and atmospheric on NES. As synths grew in quality and composers grew in confidence, FM soundtracks could create remarkable soundscapes. To keep it in the Capcom family, consider the shifting movie-like score of the arcade version of Strider, or compare the rousing battle theme of 1943 the Battle of Midway, To the nervous digital hiccups of its predecessor in 1942's excuse for a score.

One of gaming's longest-running debates concerns the Sega Genesis versus the Super NES, and that extends to their sound technology. The former used the aforementioned Yamaha chip, while the Super NES relied on Sony's sample-based solution. It's not really an entirely fair comparison since Sega revised their audio chip in later models of the Genesis as a cost-cutting measure and that had a detrimental effect on the quality of many games musical scores. But all things being equal, it's not so much that the Super NES or Genesis were better

than the other, so much as that they were better at certain types of music than the other. There's no way the Super NES could have done justice to use Okashiro's Streets of Rage soundtrack, for example. Whereas the brooding low-tempo score to Super Metroid just lacks a certain essential something when rendered on the genesis sound chip. So it comes down to a matter of taste. Certainly Kosciro never lost his love for FM synth. He worked with the Super NES exactly one time, with Quintet's Act Razor, and promptly decided that he hated it. Even today, he prefers to work with tracking software that emulates the NECPC-901's FM audio.

He's even published Arrange albums for games like Etrient Odyssey, which go against the standard grain of video game arranged sound. soundtracks. Rather than polishing up his music to sound more like live instrumentation, these remixes instead present the scores as crisp, beautiful FM synthesis compositions. Which brings us back in a roundabout way to Lagrange Point. Ship to Shore's LP release, the game's soundtrack had only ever been issued as an enhanced arrange album. The new record, however, goes directly to the game's source audio and reproduces its unique mixture of NES waveforms and add-on FM synthesizer tones in their original form.

Konami went to the trouble of creating an all-new chip, for Lagrange Point. It made the cartridge twice the size of a normal Famicom cart, and it boosted the game's price by about 20 bucks, but it sounded amazing. After all, FM synthesis wasn't automatically superior to wave table sound, but FM synthesis in the hands of Konami's composers for the early 90s? Some of the finest game musicians of their day, or any day, really? The result was nothing less than sublime, virtuoso composers, putting virtuoso tech to work. For Retronauts, this is Jeremy Parrish. Check us out at Retronauts.com and on iTunes and support us through Patreon so we can keep talking about esoteric topics like this one.

Thanks. You know, I'm going to be able to be.