kuraine

a pixelated entity

  • she/her

idk some girl or cat or panda that does music


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kylelabriola
@kylelabriola asked:

When a soundtrack is "well-made" but "boring" (maybe Final Fantasy 16 is an example of this? I'm not sure, but I'm sure there's other examples), what is it about the pieces specifically that make them ineffective? Is it something you're able to pinpoint as like "this is why this isn't working for me"?

oh boy this is a fun one

a lot of blockbuster film scores & music for western AAA games falls into this camp for me. and it's less about them being ineffective, because they technically are, but it's not about how effective they are, but the ways in which they are inventive in their effectiveness.

there's a subtlety there, and a history: the way in which modern composers score to picture is one in which composers borrow emotional resonance from the most effective orchestrations & motifs throughout western music history. a lot of it came from the best film composers being very well-studied on the lineage of emotional symphonic writing. they took those ideas and re-contextualized them into scores to accompany scenes in a film. they were already field-tested hundreds of years ago, and that's why they persevered to this day. it's the reason they're still performed by orchestras and fancy to-do's. they're the common reflection point of emotional resonance. and so now modern scores look to classic scores for those touchstones, and it becomes this continual recycling of the same sorts of ideas.

but the problem is that we know all of that. we've heard it. we expect it.

if you're not expecting music to challenge you, it's easy to hear something inspired by the greats & be like yes, this was really really well done! and sure, by its craft it is. but does it excite me? does it inspire me to go out and try new things? no absolutely not! at best, it's a boring score. at worst, it's manipulating you to feel things when the object of its scoring has not earned it.

and that's another big opinion of mine: the best scores enrich the medium they're scoring, but they cannot define it. by giving an uninspiring scene a jaw-dropping reference that the audience can immediately relate to (because they've heard many things like it & connect via association), it's using that emotional manipulation to imbue feeling where there wasn't any. there's a reason why a lot of indie games running kickstarter campaigns reach out to famous jrpg composers who do commissions: through the magic of association, it gives a sense of prestige to a project that may have not had much to define it in the first place.

so many people upholding the virtues of media scoring will do the little magic trick where they remove the score from a scene and go look, see just how less exciting this scene is without the music. but i think that's a problem! if you remove music from a scene and you don't feel anything, then it's failed as a scene. a score won't magically band-aid the problem away. and yet it DOES, for a lot of people!

but it becomes the glue, for many things. western AAA games use so many common scoring tricks like dynamic risers, little programmed grooves, tension hits (a cluster of notes played on strings or brass to be like UH OH WATCH OUT) all to give the easiest possible way to relate to the action or mood. you hear a certain type of bgm and you know exactly what's going on. it's obvious! but it's fucking boring! i am the biggest proponent of cool dynamic music, but if all you're using it for is telegraphing every moment of gameplay & telling me how to feel without developing any sort of melodic interest, then why is there even anything playing at all?

i'll stop now though before this balloons out into any longer of an essay. thanks for the question ^^

(and for the record i think the ff16 is an example of the opposite: a lot of the music is exciting, but poorly made. i think if it was given the production it deserved, so many more of the tracks would have hit for me. some of the best music in the game is very well composed, but not given the budget it needed to be as exciting as it should have been. i am always an advocate for letting sample libraries have the light of day BUT: for something like a big-budget final fantasy, a sample library programmed to a T will never beat the energy of a live orchestra.)


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