Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 56: An audio-sampling sampler

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

Retronauts Micro returns on a biweekly schedule! Jeremy kicks things off with a follow-up to last year's look at FM synthesis in games by exploring a flip side: A brief (and at all comprehensive) history of audio sampling vis-a-vis video games.

This week in Retronauts will be played back at a low sample rate, you know, for that warm, fuzzy sensation. Now that Retronauts micro has returned, I'd like to follow. up on one of my previous microtopics, specifically that survey of FM synthesis in games. Go check that out if you haven't listened already. Perhaps not surprisingly, that episode sparked a bit of the time-honored and perhaps inevitable Super NES versus Genesis debate, since those consoles sound capabilities helped in large part to define them. Gameed consoles tend to work alike on a lot of fundamental levels, which is especially true

these days. The Genesis and Super NES, however, existed in contrast to one another in a great many ways, and few ways more so than their respective audio technologies. The Genesis, without question, represents gaming's purest pipeline of FM synth audio directly to players' brains. The Genesis, without question, the Genesis' S's distinct soundscape, while sometimes harsh or poorly implemented by audio programmers, played an especially significant role in helping the console to feel like an emissary from the future when it debuted here in 1989.

The metallic sharpness of its sound also created a meaningful, perceptual contrast to the Super NES' audio. As I mentioned, Genesis' audio tended to have a crisp, percussive sensation that perfectly complimented the more intense action-oriented experiences at which the console excelled. sports games, shooters, racers, and so forth. The Super NES worked better when it dealt with softer, warmer sounds like orchestration, which, in turn, fit both the slower-paced games that the console specialized in, as well as the softer, more muted color palettes that tend to show up in its game's visuals.

Where the Genesis implemented FM synthesis, generating audio based on predefined algorithms and wavelengths, the Super NES took a different approach. Rather than simply generating tones the way other consoles did, it instead relied on sampling technology as its key underpinning. So let's talk about sampling and how it relates to video games. The basic idea of sampling audio, that is, using and manipulating pre-recorded audio, is easy enough to understand, but its application and definition, as relates to video games, can be a little tricksy. Video games have and continue to use live audio recordings, but not all live audio playback is sampling. After a certain point, audio playback ceases to count a sampling and just becomes straight-up streaming.

For example, you can look back at S&K's crazy. the arcade game Psycho Soldier, which contained an entire pre-recorded song and Tina's name is magic mystery is what you see. And while in some respects the psycho-soldier theme has an era of sampled audio to it, thinks largely

to an extremely low data rate that led to a fuzzy fidelity, it ultimately constitutes streamed audio. After all, the game doesn't really do anything with the song besides play it back. Fire! Fire! Psycho Soldier! While the mechanism behind the Psycho Soldier theme is different than, say, the looping tape cassette Ballet Midway used in its Journey arcade game, the end result works out to be the same. It can be a little confusing, because of instances where you had something like Reka Summer of Carnival 92 for Famicom using the system's sampling channels for full audio loops that more or less amounted to full streams. As a concept, sampling actually dates back to the 1940s and 50s, where experimental musicians working in esoteric genres like music concrete,

would use snippets of non-musical sound with which to create audio collages that sometimes resemble traditional music and sometimes did. Anyway, music concrete represented the first real use of electronic technology for the creation of music, rather than simply its documentation and distribution. Prior to these pioneering works, music had been something performed, the electronic devices, simply serving as recording devices to enable people to play back or broadcast performances at their leisure. The works of pioneers like Pierre Schaffer and Halim El Dab brought electronics into the creative process,

using recording and processing mechanisms to transform pre-recorded music into something new. The advent of audio tape technology in the 50s lent these processes a newfound element of granularity, allowing music not only to be transformed, but actually assembled from discrete components of sound. That, in a nutshell, describes sampling in its most rudimentary form.

So it seems only fitting that a concept based so critically in technology would find one of its greatest expressions in the most technologically advanced form of media entertainment, video games. Obviously, sampling didn't simply leap from experimental tape collages to earthbound. Throughout the 60s and 70s, a number of popular musical acts experimented with sampling and related technologies to create dense studio works that simply wouldn't have been possible in a live setting.

The Beach Boys Pet Sounds is often cited as the inflection point at which the concept of studio composition became its own creature. The album incorporated any number of non-traditional audio sources, like Coke cans and dog barks, to create unconventional music that nevertheless sat comfortably alongside crowd-pleasing standards like, wouldn't it be nice? The use of audio snippets taped in advance outside the studio became a fixture of later Beatles albums, and arguably reached its zenith with the longest charting album of all time, Pink Floyd's, The Dark Side of the Moon. Around this time, a British company called Bradmatic took one of the most significant steps toward making sampling into a mainstream concern by creating an instrument based entirely around the concept.

Their Melotron was essentially a keyboard synthesizer before the digital technology to make that a realistic possibility existed. Rather than playing back computerized audio samples, the Melotron instead used pre-recorded loops of magnetic tape. Depressing a key would cause a corresponding loop of tape to make contact with a playback head, quote unquote, playing a note. Imagine the interior of a piano with a metal hammers replaced by long loops of audio tape. And instead of generating sound, the tapes simply played back whatever had been recorded onto that particular loop. Meletrons tended to be most commonly used by small ensemble rock bands to create a Beatles-esque wall of sound live on stage. The most common melaton tape selections involved strings, brass or live voices, created by musicians recording their performances one note at a time, a note per tape loop, which could then be played back to create.

synthetic melodies and chords out of these patchwork recordings. The Melatron became part of the soundscape of 70s rock, appearing in major hits like David Bowie's Space Oddity. And once Space Oddity keyboardist Rick Wakeman joined yet, his Melatron experience helped that band achieve its symphonic rock ambitions. Other progressive rock bands made extensive use of the Melatron as well, beginning with King Crimson's breakthrough album in the Court of the Crimson. King. And legend has it that one of the Melatrons used for that album, ended up with the band

Genesis and its keyboardist Tony Ben. who gave the instrument what would be perhaps its greatest moment in the spotlight with his Melotron's solo introduction to the song Watcher of the Skies, which kicked off the album Fox truck. It wouldn't be until the mid to late 70s that sampling in video games would begin to converge. Initially, the convergence came on the music side of things. British Prague rock band Gentle Giant is believed to have been one of the first artists to use video game sounds in their work, kicking off 1975's Time to Kill with the raw beeps of Atari's pawn.

Presumably to reinforce the tune's themes about killing time and being a drifter, bouncing back and forth aimlessly. It would be the Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra that would take the first meaningful approach to using video games and their music a few years later. YMO, whom I spoke about in one of the earliest episodes of Retronauts Micro, focused heavily on synthesizer-based production. Given the largely electronic nature of their music, it should be no surprise that it often skirted around and flirted with the sounds of games. And quite overtly, as with their popular track computer game theme from the Invaders, which samples and echoes the sounds of Space Invaders. Hi, it's Jamie. Progressive number one, number two employee. Leave a message at the...

Hey, Jamie, it's me, Jamie. This is your daily pep talk? I know it's been rough going ever since people found out about your a cappella group, Matt Harmony, but you will bounce back. I mean, you're the guy always helping people find coverage options with the name your price tool.

It should be you giving me the pep talk. Now get out there, hit that high note, and take mad harmony all the way to nationals this year. Sorry, it's pitchy. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law. YMO made heavy use of an instrument called the Fairlight CMI, one of the first synthesizers to feature extensive sampling capabilities. The CMI was an analog synthesizer and was quite popular throughout the early 80s. But the art of Pilford Sound would truly go big once Roland released its digital D50 keyboard, the first digital synth to focus on sampling and accessible customization.

on the user app. Meanwhile, while the music industry was marching toward better and more pervasive sampling, video game creators were making their own inroads. The Roland D50 launched in 1987, but Namco was exploring the art of digital sampling way back in 1980. Rally X, the Pac-Man-like Mays Chase Racing. amazing game, included in its arcade hardware a digital-de-analog converter. This device made use of audio sampling, though not in the sense you think of it. He used sampling in reverse,

taking samples of digitally generated sound and altering them on the fly. That same year, the company also released King and Balloon, a clumsy take on the Space Invader genre, especially compared to the company's own Galaxian, but the game did have one thing going for it. When the king you struggled to defend was abducted by enemies, he'd shout in a sampled voice, help, and then bye bye-bye. It wasn't long before the concept of sampling made its way into home game hardware. The Commodore 64, which debuted in 1982, didn't actually have sampling capabilities built into its impressive sound interface device chip, but before too long, programmers discovered a flaw in the SID chip

that they could exploit to make use of audio samples, which gave us things like the exclamation of Ghostbusters on that game's title screen. Ghostbusters! Then Nintendo's Family Computer, released the following year, included an entire channel dedicated to playing back samples. This was a rather primitive feature, but in the right hands, it could work wonders. In the early days, the sampling channel was used for things like simple sound effects and voice clips,

such as a wild gunman in a serrape telling you to fire. But in time, game composers began to explore the potential in the feature. For example, Tecmo's Kiji Yamagishi created a sort of trademark sound by using the sampling channel to create his own custom drum sounds, which gave works like Ninja Gaiden and Captain Subasa their own distinct feel. The system's sampling capabilities would be further expanded on the Japanese side of things with the Famicom Disc System, which added a second sampling audio channel to the hardware, and specialty third-party mapper chips, which expanded the console's capabilities even further with the tech contained inside the game cartridges.

The disc system probably reached its sampling zenith with Utaki, which I covered in a micro episode last year. That entire game, a musical shooter, was based around firing notes of different sampled instruments and enemies. A console didn't necessarily have to have dedicated sampling hardware in order to pull off some form of sampling though. In 1983, Atari's quadrun for the decidedly limited Atari 2,600, brought the first use of voice sampling to that system. This feature didn't require special hardware. It simply burned through a ton of cartridge memory. Memory limits were ultimately the issue with 80s systems and with many game platforms well into the 90s. Decent quality sampling playback required a huge amount of data space and many

arcade game manufacturers came up with alternate solutions. Perhaps the most extravagant was Journey, the game I mentioned earlier, which was based on the band by the same name. While it did contain some primitive chip-tune renditions of popular journey songs, the game also contained tape loops of real recordings, evidently a more economical solution than producing a board with enough capacity to compress a full song into a sample. Evidently, those costs had come down by 1986, then, because that's when S&K went bonkers and released Psycho Soldier. Of course, these applications somewhat stretched the notion of sampling. As I mentioned before, at some point it ceases to be sampling and becomes simply streaming.

Sampling, at its heart, involves the modification of the source audio, and merely playing back a recording doesn't really count. And that brings us back to the Genesis versus Super IneS debate. It wouldn't be until Nintendo's Super NES launched in 1990, in Japan, as the Super Famicom, that sampling became an integral feature of a game console. The Super NES contain a Sony sound chip designed by future PlayStation godfather Kin Kuduragi, and it remains unique in the history of the industry. Rather than working with standard wave tables or FM synthesis, the Super NES sound chip revolved largely around sampled sound sources, which gave its audio a warm, slightly muted sound quality.

Both music and sound effects alike were sampled and played back, and game creators could introduce their own sound sample library to a game to create custom audio. Not surprisingly, Yuzokoshiro's score for Act Razor set an early standard for other composers, inspiring the likes of Nobuo Uematsu to up their game. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be.

Weimuths shining work with a supernese sound chip, though, that came with 1984's Final Fantasy 6th, Its single most memorable moment came with the famous opera scene. It's a little laughable now with its gargling singers, but it was unexpected and innovative at the time. Wimatsu created a scene whose audio worked a bit like a video game Melatron, and it was actually pretty incredible. However, the Super NES' greatest feat of sampling, and maybe the best for gaming in general, came the following year with Nintendo's Earthbound. Composer

Hipptonaka and especially Keichi Suzuki brought the first truly modern use of sampling the games, integrating all kinds of loops and distorted clips into the game's surreal soundscape. This has supposedly created a bit of legal entanglement for the game, since those samples include a Beatles song, but that's never actually been confirmed. In any case, it does offer another example of Earth, found's fascinating sophistication, a game that looks so dated and unassuming, while silently

innovating and subverting expectations at every turn. As the artist sampling caught on in music's mainstream, and legal precedent was established to define the boundaries and limitations of the act, it's become as woven into the fabric of video games as it has anywhere. The nature of game sampling has simply changed, where in the early days it was used sparingly in order to conserve storage space, now high-capacity disks and cartridges allow game creators to be more lax, and certainly we'll never see any game system as comprehensively built around the concept of sampling as the super NES was.

But throughout the history of games, sampling has played a crucial part in enhancing game audio and music and shaping the game experience. This episode has really only offered a cursory glance of sampling in games, to be honest, and even then it's wobbled at the tricky line between true sampling and primitive streaming. But I suppose that kind of gets to the point. Games matured as the concept of sampling did, and their histories have been interwoven to the point that it's difficult to draw rigid boundaries. Nibulous history is always the most interesting history, don't you think? For a sweet, sweet soul, breather. For Retronauts, this has once again been Jeremy Parrish.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for supporting Retronauts and bringing back Retronauts micro with your support. As always, we continue to be funded through Patreon. patreon.com slash retronauts, which makes episodes like this possible. You can continue to find us on iTunes, and you can read more at retronauts.com, which is soon to become a real website. Expect your regular full weekly episode in a few days and another micro in a couple of weeks. Thanks again. Let's say you just bought a house.

Bad news is you're one step closer to becoming your parents. You'll proudly mow the lawn. Ask if anybody noticed you mowed the lawn. Tell people to stay off the lawn. Compare it to your neighbor's lawn. And complain about having to mow the lawn again. Good news is it's easy to bundle home and auto through progressive and save on your car insurance, which, of course, will go right into the lawn.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Discount not available in all stages situations. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving

of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed

as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.