How Melody Expresses Harmony in Cave Story
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2018
- Something I've been thinking about recently is the way that melodies imply harmony, even when there are no chords being played underneath. In this video I take a look at different ways that this can happen using music from Cave Story.
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Okay, hold on, just for the record advising viewers to not ask for advice when writing music was supposed to be a joke.
Please don't actually take that advice
Wait, so get advice to not take advice so don't take that advice, but then actually don't take that advice? Got it, cool
There is a kernel of truth in that advice. Sometimes, doing something just requires trying and failing until you make it, and not waiting for someone else to make a tutorial first. So... nothing wrong with asking for help, but to achieve greatness you also have to know when to brave a problem yourself.
There are times to ask for advice, and times to soldier through and uncover your own style. Sometimes you're just stuck, or something isn't working the way you want it to; you know how it should sound in your head, but you need someone else to give you that kick of theory analysis. Most times, though, you already have all the tools to make something great - just look at how great something really simple can be - and running prematurely for help could be quashing your own musical character. The hard part is knowing how to tell the difference.
Going by ear is the way to go mayn
But anyway, you should check out the sonic unleashed night soundtrack, I love the night boss battle
I literally have no understanding about what you talk about, but for some reason I really enjoy hearing you talk about it.
Same
same
Same
The more you watch the more you’ll pick up on. Everything is foreign until you can pick up more and more pieces. Composing isn’t theoretical physics, but the way you learn new things is always the same process.
Same
He didn't know ANYTHING ABOUT MUSIC!? How did he compose such a good soundtrack??? He really is a genius. Great video!!
You don't need to know anything about music to make good music though. There's quite a few videogame composers that really didn't know much, if anything about making music when they started doing it. If you have a vision and put in a lot of effort, you can make music that fits it. I'm not saying it isn't impressive, it very much is since this soundtrack is still amazing even today.
@@thenonexistinghero man as a musician.. I don't know. You can create stuff and simple catchy and working melodies Over few chords. Or messing around with guitar shapes and find sus chords and stuff. But creating implicit complex harmony like this with a keyboard and a midi... I don't know how is it possible
@@Gramasz Some folks just have the kind talent that allows them to do things like that. I'm not a musician but even I sometimes make up great songs in my head. And not just with simple melodies. I imagine there's quite a few people who can do that. And if someone has the ability to recreate that, they can create something amazing even if they don't have much, if any experience making music before.
@@Gramasz Tee Lopes. Never learned any instruments or music theory. Went on to create amazing covers, and eventually went on to make several musical tracks for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
He did makes a few games with songs before, I don't think he knew NOTHING
I spent a couple of years making SNES remixes of this soundtrack in my free time, so all of this is blowing my mind rn. This is just the kind of stuff I was subconsciously thinking about and worrying if I was getting right
oh man, I remember your stuff from years back! nice. :p
I also make NES music (granted 80% of it is remixes).
When I do original stuff, I’m subconsciously aware of this music theory stuff, even without realizing.
So glad you've seen this :)
mushroomdude123 which program do you use for composing NES/SNES music?
Famitracker
While its true that Pixel could have made a version of Cave Story himself, and your point stands as it relates to the music composition, no game gets made in a vacuum. In interviews Amaya cites how a friend from school taught him to program games, how other coders helped him during development and how he playtested the game with friends. Because of their feedback the beta version of the game, which took 2 years to make, was scrapped entirely and he started over almost from scratch.
Great video and analysis as always, I just think these "lone genius" narratives can be really harmful and self-defeating sometimes.
I agree, it puts people off from making their own things because they think "I'm not a genius, I can't do this." When in reality no one does it alone and there was constant struggling and frustration in the process.
nutrition facts lmao ok man, you're definitely the emotionally stable one in this thread, we all can't handle our inferiority complexes, but you, clearly, are a master of self
Good point! He clearly had above-average ambition and work ethic, but it's a little too simplistic to just label him a genius and leave it at that
I actually am a genius and I still can't do anything
Can't is the wrong word. Especially with the internet, you can do anything you try to. It's easy to be discouraged, but you only have one life. Do something with it
Pixel's a HUGE inspiration to me, so I was very excited when this came in my feed. It blows my mind that Pixel composed the entirety of Cave Story's soundtrack without having much formal music training; intuition can be amazing sometimes. Thank you for making this video, was a very compelling watch!
Oh of course you're here. Love the Fusion Collabs.
Of course indeed! :)
I am a simple person. I see Cave Story music, I click.
Also, those classic impressions are top notch.
Always entertaining 8-bit Music Theory!
I literally just saw you as the top comment on a Siiva video and now the top comment here and got more confused than I should have been
Yeah, there's a pretty big overlap :)
Fitter. Happier. More productive.
I was about to say that you started your comment the exact same way under the Paper Mario TTYD video.. but hen the confusion of that other commenter confused me 😂 (i think the TTYDone was also top comment? lolz)
@@DarkFart420 A pig. In a cage. On antibiotics.
3:45 that is quite a bold claim. To me, the "path of least resistance" *was* A minor before you played the C chord. I guess the implied harmony is not that obvious when taken out of context.
Yeah, I don't really hear CM either. I think the implied harmony is obvious, but it is Am. You have the root and third of the Am chord, whereas you don't have the third of the CM. Also, it's much more common to start a phrase Do Re Me than La Ti Do.
I wonder if how a lot of popular music chooses to start their melodies off on the tonic note of whatever key they're in influences how we perceive the A-B-C motion as implying Am rather than CM. The semitone between B-C is why we could hear a CM chord instead of Am - the harmonic strength of moving from scale degree 6-7-8 that would be implied with CM is much stronger than going from 1-2-b3 (flattened third in relation to the A major scale). Until I heard the B-C, my brain said "the key of A minor, A minor chord", but that B-C made the C feel resolved and made that feel like the tonic chord.
@@vladimirmlotschek3265 I'm really glad that you replied two years after my initial comment because listening back to that A-B-C motion, I heard the implied CM instead of Am.
The way I might explain that difference is that, as you said, the music I listened to the most back then (rock, pop, zimmeresque film soundtracks...) tend to forego functional harmony in favor of more static 4 chord structures. I was already listening to a lot of different genres but my exposure to jazz has undeniably been stronger those past 2 years, which is why I instantly heard a ii-V-I today.
8-bit Music Theory has obviously learn theory a gr8 bit (see what I did there?), probably classical, and that explains why he often resorts to functional harmony and numbering degrees relative to the major scale (which I am not always on board with as sometimes the pieces analysed sound like an other mode to me, and I would rather place the tonic according to that), but it also explains how he hears that 7-1 resolution and I didn't.
So basically I would say that cultural conditioning has a huge impact on how that motion is perceived (as with almost every aspect of music, frankly), just like you suggested in your first sentence.
What harmony is implied is very related to one’s own culture and background, so the “path of least resistance” depends on who you are
the fact he did this following his ears proves more than just that he's a genius. It proves the fundamental principle of music theory.
Music theory just happens, its not something that is designed to gatekeep music, its just a way of pointing out patterns that naturally occur within compositions. You don't need to know music theory to follow it, and that's why it works
And that’s why it’s Theory with a capital T rather than a lowercase: it may not be _empirically_ provable, but it’s still a rigorous explanation for how the human mind _perceives_ sound. It’s not that good music must adhere to Music Theory, it’s that music Theory must describe what makes music good, so almost any good song will be describable by this theory just the same as cosmology can be explained with General Relativity: it has edge cases where it fails, but that’s not proof of uselessness, simply incompleteness
What's rad about re watching these videos is I've been actually learning music and bits of music theory so slowly these videos make more and more sense.
"Don't ask anyone how to do things."
"Oh, and by the way, come to our Discord and ask for tips."
The cave story title theme is still one of my favourite themes from anything ever.
Herr 8-bit music theory, how do you make very cool videos all the time, can you give me some advice
So this is either a not-so-subtle reference to the advice given at the 11:55 mark, or a genuine question from someone who's not even watched that far and wouldn't get the message if they did.
Hm. Tough call. But since this is TH-cam, I guess it must be the latter alright.
I don't mind advice, but I was going more for the joke
The fact that he didn't know music theory makes me more confident in my music production. I always wonder whether my chord progressions are good or not because i write them solely by ear too. So good to know that that can still work out really well!
As a percussionist, I have no idea what any of this means, but I love it.
Are you sure Mozart didn't just say "leck mich im Arsch"?
just spit rice on my keyboard
Actually, it's "Leck mich _am_ Arsch"
This comment deserves a ton more likes.
@@kennedysvr Actually, you're wrong. "Leck mich am Arsch" is the right way to say it in German, but Mozart composed a piece which was called "Leck mich im Arsch".
"Didn't ask anyone how to do it".
Except that he actually did. Here's two quotations from an interview with him on Kotaku:
“I had always enjoyed drawing and making music, and I loved video games”
“In 1996 I was studying at a computer technical school and living in a dormitory - my neighbour was a guy named Nao; he taught me how to program video games.”
So, he's been making music way before he made the game, and he learned how to program video games from someone else.
Org Maker, his music-making program, was released _four years_ before Cave Story. While it's possible to make music without a lot of theory knowledge, it's much less likely anyone would be able to write a music-making program without it, so he must've had that knowledge at least four years prior to the game's release. At the very least he would've needed to understand acoustics in order to write the program, since he wrote the code that generates the sound waves.
I like how he avoided the 12 equal temperament. Definitely one of the advantages of not asking someone else.
He *didn't* avoid 12-TET though. Where the hell did you even got that idea from? I mean, OrgMaker literally has a piano-roll in it.
I didn't really need to test it since I already knew what the result would be, but I did so anyway, I downloaded the program, looked at the frequencies of the notes in a tuner and, lo and behold, middle C registered as ~261.6 Hz and A4 was 440 Hz. Precisely what you would expect from an instrument tuned with 12-TET.
The thing about 12-TET is that it is virtually impossible to avoid it _unless you know what is,_ which isn't really possible without, y'know, learning about it from someone. I mean, it is technically possible to avoid it without knowing you're doing so if the only instrument you have access to is tuned with just intonation or a different system. The moment you start making music on a computer, however, you will use 12-TET without realizing it, and you'll probably not even notice any difference.
And besides, equal temperament (be it 12-TET or 19-TET or whatever) is such a useful tool there is almost no good reason why you should actively avoid it to begin with.
Funny how you guys a e talking about this - i just recently read an interview in which Aphex Twin talks about how he specifically tries to AVOID that when he writes music
@@mvnkycheez Could you link link to it so I could take a look?
Actually, I don't see how you would actually need much music theory to make a tracker. If you know what a piano normally sounds and looks like and can do the minimal research to learn what frequencies each note plays at on whatever people consider standard tuning, that's really most of what you need. Everything else would be the programming itself and pulling basic inspiration from other trackers. No learning of keys, scales, etc actually all that necessary.
Great video ( nice job on the editing ! ) but the 'gameplay' from 1:40 to 2:12 was so frustrating I had to rewatch this part 3 times to pay attention to what you were saying haha
Although since that section was about tension and release, maybe the continued failing and exploration was demonstrating tension in gameplay? Or maybe 8bit only played a couple of hours for gameplay footage, and so is still rusty and had to use whatever he got.
I thought it would fit since I was talking about aimless, meandering melodies
8-bit Music Theory yeah I thought that might be it, cool attention to detail
i literally thought the same thing!!!! I was so distracted by it haha but more so at 5:29 to 6:10
haha right, some of the gameplay was pretty arduous to watch, it made me want to go back and play myself as a reassurance that it doesn't have to be that bad
Thank you for bringing us out of the dark cave of ignorance so we can see the light of knowledge
Cave story is a real classic, lovely game
4:08 I can just hear your annoyance at having to say Cb.
Mister Apple Ok, I'll play... B#.
:P
underrated comment^^
Amazing as always. I couldn't be happier that you are here sharing your passion with us :)
Wow, the updates to the editing style in this one are amazing. Very seamless!
That last bit about not knowing what he was doing was really encouraging. I write my own music as well and don't know much more than basic scales. Gives me hope for my music writing future :)
...Gosh dang it, Mimiga Town always givin' me the sad feels. So much beautiful music in Cave Story. ;_;
I gasped when I saw this episode in my sub feed! Cave Story’s music is so good!
Welcome back! Also I'm very happy that you started to input a lot more of your own excerpts, they sound extremely good in the sound you use and clear up a lot about the melody being played a lot simpler in terms of how much is going on (especially clear in the Castlevania video where the OST is often busy but your examples really clear and calm).
Been waiting for this vid ever since I found your channel!
This is the best birthday present I could have ever gotten, thank you and keep up the amazing work !
Always clear and to the point! Great teaching!
Very Interesting stuff. I love how little information the ear (or I guess, the brain) needs to actually fill out the blanks. Superb video!
I always like your videos before I've even watched them. It just saves myself the trouble later cuz I know it's gonna be a slam dunk every time
"It's tough to keep a melody interesting if it doesn't convey any sense of harmonic movement on its own"
I have Steve Reich calling on line three
Tough is not impossible.
Does Steve Reich really use 'melodies', though? More like interesting textures.
Or maybe I haven't listened to the right Reich
So you think it's easy to write like Steve Reich?
Not at all, I think I just got the tone of your statement wrong. It sounded to me like you were just writing off minimalism as a whole.
It's pretty obvious he's talking in a broad sense. Steve Reich and minimalist composers use other aspects of music to keep it interesting. Reich in particular had a period of time where he was fascinated with phasing, the subtle changes of several musical lines as they line up differently with each other. So, Steve Reich does use harmonic movement somewhat, but tends to focus on arrangement, timbre, and rhythm to maintain interest.
Saying, "It's tough," is fairly accurate, because it takes a skilled composer, i.e. somehow who has mastery and control of many aspects over music, to deliberately downplay one facet of music and still make it interesting. Purposefully limiting oneself and creating great art is hardly easy.
Cave Story and 8-bit Music Theory make a great combo.
Is Cave Story even 8-bit? I don't think it is...
blue ant Are the new mario carts 8-bit? He's made a video about those too.
The new Mario Cart games aren't mistaken for 8-bit nearly as much.
Every day with a new 8-bit video is a happy day
Yes, I’m certainly processing all of this.
Wow, I was not expecting such an in-depth analysis. Thank you for making this
I love your work !!! Their is so much to learn from your analysis, plus they are the most fun of all music analysis on the internet
Spot-on impressions as always.
What a fantastic game, gotta replay it when I get some spare time to do so.
Great video, keep up the good work!
I know you’ve done a lot on TLoZ, but I would love to hear you analyze something from the 25th or 30th Anniversary Symphony Orchestras. :) amazing video as always!
I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to see you make a Cave Story video. It’s one of my favorite games, and has many hours into, countless speed run attempts, and just... huff. I love this game. Thank you, 8Bit!
This video was TRULY excellent. Bravo!
Great episode, absolutely love this game
I was hoping you'd break down the amazingly chaotic bops like Running Hell, Last Cave, or Running Back, but an excellent video nonetheless!
I love that you kept the music playing at the end until it resolved back to 1. I greatly appreciate that😂
Another amazing episode, this time about my favorite game soundtrack. Thanks!
dude, your channel is a well of knowledge!
Great video! It made me decide to try the game out, and now I'm super glad I did it
Subbed. This is vital information that I need as a musician, Thanks!
This was a great video! I'm always down to listen to anyone talk about Cave Story's music, because it's just so fantastic and well-implemented..
I’m so glad I found this channel:)
During the section with the romance cadences, my eyes were opened and I could suddenly hear in my head how many different songs I know that use that. This is why I love this channel
There's a reason you can recall every song from memory alone.
This game is one of my favorite games of all time! Thank you so much for this video!
Love it bro, keep it up!
That introduction gave me life
I NEEDED THIS VIDEO THANK YOU
Thank you for enlightening me on the most romantic of the cadences. I gained a great deal of knowledge from this clip. Thank you 8-bit Music Theory.
Huge fan of Cave Story and Mimiga Town is my favorite track in it. Thanks for the lovely breakdown!
I have no idea about what I'm doing when it comes to chords, but my songs always seem to have something missing. After looking at a lot of your videos, I can now understand what my songs may have been missing. It's just remembering what chords belong to what key at what time that's going to take effort.
Cave Story is probably one my favorite games, like, ever. Thank you for going over some of the music that Pixel features.
This was a really powerful video for me since I just decided to follow the career of video game composer and I've been playing on the piano for over a decade now, with little academic training in my past. I want to promise myself to not get lost in rules and suggestions, and keep my creativity and voice that I love so much. Of course I'll get input and get my degree, lol. Thank you again for your channel, if you don't hear it enough.
No Eyes of Flame? Final Battle? Disappointed...
I used to be OBSESSED with cave story back when i was in primary school but haven't replayed it since, and this video brought back some major nostalgia, I absolutely love the music in this game
Every time you upload, I feel glee.
I absolutely love this channel
yes! this is easily my favorite aspect of music theory, thank you sir.
Amazing Video. Only thing I would have liked is if after analyzing each section, you'd play footage of the song for 10-15 sections over gameplay. Thanks for making these!!! I love them
I've been waiting for this one
I completely appreciate how long these videos must take to produce, but please pick up the pace haha.
You are my only "must-click" subscription I have now
I have close no idea what you're talking about but it made me fucking melt. Thank you.
I was whistling Balrogs theme when this popped up in my recommended. It was destiny!
Found this in my recommended videos. Wow music is way more complex than I thought
Hey there, your videos are amazing. I feel like I’ve learned so much more about music, even though I thought I knew a lot already.
Anyways, I had a video idea:
So, in Desert theme music, to me it feels like there are similarities to evoke that desert-y sound/vibe, but I just don’t really know how. Maybe there’s a little bit of Phrygian mode in there, but I’m not sure what other ingredients are added to make that nice desert vibe in desert theme music. I guess check out Gritzy desert’s (Mario and Luigi superstar saga) theme, or the dusty dune galaxy (Mario Galaxy) theme just to name a few that I was thinking of.
Keep the vids coming-I’ve watched all of them and I’ll definitely continue to. You’re awesome, and thank you for all the great vids!
I absolutely love your channel! I think an episode for the Doom games (all of them, except maybe Doom 3) would make great videos
What i like the most of this video is that you just describe what you feel about harmony and not sterile calculations of what should be used in that context
I'd love to see a part 2 where you look at other lesser known cave story music such as Labyrinth Fight, Moonsong, or On To Grasstown
Thanks for making music theory fun :)
I know nothing of chord progression or music theory in general. Even so, I still really appreciated it. It was really enjoyable to watch. Thank you. :)
3:23 "Walking up from A to B to C clearly implies a C major tonality." ...Clearly? I mean, I admit I'm a damned greenhorn, but I really don't get where that conclusion comes from. Can you elucidate?
A to B to C sounds like the key of C major, or A minor, or G major, or E minor. Since you're playing an A and a C, and not an E or a G, you're going to hear the A or C as the root. Whether you hear one or the other as the root depends on whether you're expecting a minor sound or a major sound. Most people expect a major sound, outside of any additional context, even though in the key of C this is an inverted Cmaj13, which is a bit wonky. The B is a passing note, though, and if you ignore it then C6 or Cdim7 are less weird. If you've been listening to music in a minor key a lot, it does make a lot of sense to hear the A as the root, though, both because that's the first note in the sequence and because Am is possibly the most common minor chord there is. So no, not clearly, not to me, but hearing the C as the root is reasonable, and it's what a lot of people will do just because they're used to music in a major tonality and expect it.
I know your comment is years old, but I felt like having this information in the comments somewhere would make the video easier to parse, so I dropped this in.
@@michaelleue2576 Good comment, thanks!
Amazing Video!
One of my favourite games with the best sound tracks!
hoo boy my favourite youtuber making a video about my favourite game? siiiiick
I like this video on cave story you just did. I'm hoping that you do more of cave story analysing the boss theme and the doctor's theme
i always knew cave story music was impossibly brilliant but this really brought it home. Thank you.
Do you guys think cave story plus is worth it? This amazing music caught my eye immediately 🤣
The original certainly was worth playing. Buying Cave Story Plus will support the creator, so why not?
But cave story is free!
Cave Story Plus is unfortunately under a predatory publisher. I would recommend instead playing the original Cave Story and purchasing Kero Blaster if you would like to support Pixel.
Predatory? Nicalis has remade the game from the ground up and help publish and port it to many systems. I'm not sure what you mean by predatory.
info on why nicalis is horrible here: www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/8igln1/crystal_crisis_announced_for_the_nintendo_switch/dyrnt5e/
Even though I can barely understand the terminology used here I find it really interesting. Music is one thing I'm interested to learn but too lazy to really get invested into... But never-the-less I like how you explain things here and earned a subscription!
I've been trying to make new songs that sound Pixel-esque for months, as I'm working on a spiritual successor to Cave Story. I can't even read sheet music and your explanations make sense, so you must be doing something right!
Please consider analysing some Touhou songs
that would be great!
Finally it has happened.
I'd say the fact that he made this by just playing what sounded good just goes to show how good music theory is at categorizing things. He played something random, and then when he went into the recesses of his mind to continue it, he played things that are categorized similarly (for example: triadic harmony, simple modal stuff, even pulse time signatures) and connected in a way that makes sense in the theory it's drawing from (plagal and perfect cadences for the functional triadic harmony, change to a related key for the modal stuff).
Music theory is just a way of describing and categorizing "pop" ideas
1:53 thank you for providing proper credit for my composition
I'm so glad to finally see a video on _Cave Story_'s music. These game has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, and I've cried many times to "Mimiga Town" and "On To Grasstown" many times. As the tracks go on, l feel like different melodies begin singing together and it's beautiful.
Music isn't my art of choice or ability, but holy fuck, in even my limited grasp this channel is absolutely enlightening. Thank you for the hard work!
im learning how to do understand this concept and thanks to this video, i understand it Thanks so much
Sounds pretty awesome....I wish I had the ability to understand any of the technical stuff you say.
Really interesting!
I actually fist pumped when I saw you made a video on Cave Story XD
Does anyone else think of "Hooked on a Feeling" when listening to Mimiga Town?
Lev Zurcher weirdly I do.