This is a general catch-all thread for some extra thoughts and considerations that don't really lend itself well to exploration in terms of the individual songs, but express some higher-level thoughts about the how and why not just of the project but of even bothering to make a posting series about it.
Why tho
So, Adam Neely has made several videos about the nature of musical plagiarism; I particularly like this video about copyrighting all potential melodies and this one about the legacy of rhythm-a-ning by Monk. Neely's overall thesis, if I were to try to sum up some of these videos in only a couple sentences, is that musical copyright tends to be built around corporate structures that ignore things like expressive context and flatten it out into some kind of property. This isn't adequate for art, and stifles expression and the freedom to create openly derivate works. He advocates for more a more open system, similar to academia, where derivative works are cited as influences for a given piece. After all, some guy and maybe a couple hours of python have already created every melody in existence -- if context doesn't matter for how ideas are used, then the copyright issue is settled thanks to that.
It's also directly tied to what this post is saying in regards to sampling vs outright piracy. Sampling and piracy are not distinguishable concepts in capitalist society, because of the economic incentive for rent-seeking. However, unless you believe there is no metric upon which art can be judged (which is a sentiment I see regularly and find profoundly troubling; criticism is just as, if not more, crucial an act of creativity as any other), then you should be able to judge that there are some works that contextualize their ideas better than others, and by that standard some works justify their use of existing material better than others. (That reminds me, did anyone see that horror movie based on Winnie-the-Pooh?) Hip-hop doesn't just sample because things sound cool, but also because many of the samples come from an important context of a continuum of Black history! It's the OwnVoices of music. Even beyond the use of samples for facilitating creative expression on top of it, one of the most important purposes of sampling has been grounding music in historical context.
Grounding things in context is the main purpose of the blog series: asking where my ideas came from, how original they are, and what other information might be out there to help tie this project together.
Recontextualizing others' work as a means to experiment with new musical ideas is something of a signature for the band. You're probably most familiar with their cover of Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light, which heavily edited and recombined the original song from his Asbury Park album into something with a more clear verse - chorus - bridge style pop format. Most people know the single, but, of course, the album version is superior. After tat, you're probably familiar with the incredible cover of Father of Night by Dylan off the Solar Fire album. Both covers, and both radical reinterpretations of the source material. Royalties are what they are, and so I'm sure both artists were quite happy to have the covers be done (Dylan always held Mann's interpretations in high regard), but they bear almost no resemblance to the source material beyond lyrics.
I sometimes joke about Mann being "your favorite musician's favorite musician" because his work, especially with the Earth Band, is also regularly sampled. Got a copy of Invaders Must Die? Stand Up has its source in an old Manfred Mann Chapter Three song that was revisited by the Earth Band. For all of this talk of plagiarism, though, Massive Attack's Black Milk had to settle out of court for their sampling of Tribute.
I mean I will openly admit that I have taken a lot of licks from Masque verbatim, or close enough to it that it would count as plagiarism. But the context here is significant. I'm trying to repurpose these songs in order to fit suites of three existing songs, in ways that won't feel stylistically jarring. I'm trying to recreate them using instrumentation that is exceptionally limited -- 8 channel, 8-bit sampled synth with ~64KB to work with -- and I'm trying to make decisions that connect the music to both older (Sonic 1) and newer (Chaotix) work. Could all this have been done by an algorithm? Maybe at some point...but who would think to try?
This blog series is maybe not essential to appreciating the music, I feel obligated to post it as a way to explain how I create and how I engage with music.
Challenges
Most of the challenges came from writing the blog posts. Because a lot of the ideas in the source material fit so well together, actually doing work on the project was fairly easy. Sometimes I tweaked ideas as I went on, but by and large there wasn't a massive process of revision to get the music into a state I was satisfied with.
The challenge is that actually trying to express the process of making it is that I have to do writing, and thus explain myself in a linear process, when the actual tendency of the work was to not be that. Experimenting with basic ways of adapting Billie's Bounce suddenly starts sounding like Walkin' from Chaotix. That's good, that's a coherent direction for the song. Let's keep doing stuff like that. Oh wow, if I copy the bassline from Geronimo's Cadillac almost verbatim it sounds like what the bass is doing in Stardust Speedway bad future, let's not change that so much. This melody I've put down is just a few notes removed from the original one in Start, but I could take ideas from the synth line in the extended version of Collision Chaos. Huh, when I hum Green Hill's melody like this I realize it and the Joybringer section of Jupiter sound a lot alike. Heh, the tressillo in the Joybringer bridge fits well in the sort of Escovedo-inspired Latin jazz sound of Palmtree Panic, doesn't it? Ooops I just the Sega CD revision II BIOS right there. Stuff that comes together just while playing around with the musical ideas as a collection of musical ideas. At best I can only make sense of their fitting together by introducing them in the order they appear in the song, or by looking at the contributions of idea source tracks in sequence. This suggests the songs were made in a much more linear process than they actually were.
And then the challenge becomes, well, how do I express that to an audience of potentially anyone who could read it? People with a light musical background may bounce completely off the explanation, as any attempt to fully avoid musical jargon will just come off like condescension and not actually provide any useful meaning to draw. People with a more extensive musical background probably don't need to be told too much about what to look for; they understand ways of reharmonizing passages and certainly recognize common instruments and when a melodic line is the same. No, I'm clearly trying to speak to the middle of the crowd -- but how much musical literacy should I assume then?
I stayed away from trying to post screenshots of staves. Cohost isn't well-suited to posting inline images, and it's also just more work than me trying to point out the passages and harmonic structures that I want you to listen to. If I need to compare notes directly, I'll just write them out. Otherwise, numeric chord progression notation is likely to be the order of the day; easy to write out, relatively easy to understand, and removed from the context of a key signature it becomes (hopefully) easier to see shared structures between the songs.
And of course, anyone who wants to dig around more closely into the music can just download the MPTM files off gamebanana; link's in the previous post.
It was always a balance that I had some struggle with, between the tech of the platform, the expecations I had of my audience, and the things I wanted to communicate. A big part of why posts, long-term, found themselves spread out over increasing periods of time. I'm once again deeply thankful to everyone who stuck around, because the irregular schedule definitely didn't make that easy!
Japan
One thing I found while messing around with these tracks and setting up a copy of the Sonic CD soundtrack on my home server is that most of the songs fit pretty well with the original Japanese soundtrack -- certainly better than the Japanese past songs fit with the US soundtrack. This isn't terribly surprising, given that the Japanese tracks were all heavily influenced by ideas from Sonic 1 (Sonic CD certainly shows a lot of signs of being built originally as an enhanced/revised version of Sonic 1, in much the same way the original Mario vs. Donkey Kong openly began as that for the 1994 Game Boy Donkey Kong game), so there are going to be shared motifs or at least attempts to reinterpret them in similar ways.
Palmtree Panic, Collision Chaos, and Tidal Tempest all end up fitting pretty well. Quartz Quadrant does a decent job. Stardust Speedway is a little weird but the last sections help tie it in a bit. Wacky Workbench and Metallic Madness are the odd ones out due to significantly different tone between US and Japan.
I'm not sure that there's a lot to expound upon here that isn't just reiterating stuff I said in the original posts. I'd still pair the Japanese redbook tracks with the Japanese past tracks. My first experience with the full Japanese soundtrack was the Sonic Screensaver packaged with American copies of Sonic & Knuckles collection (sold separately in Japan). Suddenly, I understood why the past tracks sounded so out-of-place. I would do almost the opposite of this project when I was much younger, by creating a copy of the Sonic CD PC iso file using the Japanese soundtrack wav files as music tracks.
R2
The infamous lost level of Sonic CD was also a significant influence on the project. I realize pointing to something that has almost no concrete information, especially for all of the 90s and 2000s, is an odd thing to do for a creative work, but this missing level inspired large amount of speculation and reverse-engineering work, and along with the missing Hidden Palace Zone from Sonic 2 is a pretty significant inspiration for the Sonic internet fan culture. And if, like me, you had the PC version and poked around the files of the game, it was plain as day; Sonic CD's folder structure for its individual rounds skips right from R1 to R3, as if a folder were missing.
Lots of attempts to try to fit a structure to the lack of info -- a true successor to Marble Zone is possibly the one thing that Sonic CD seems to lack, and it was long speculated that the level was probably based off it. Newer evidence provided by dev team staff (in particular Masato "Majin" Nishimura) has led to the conclusion it was similar to Labyrinth Zone, it probably had a lot of wind-based gimmicks, and the music used for the "D.A. Garden" in the Japanese soundtrack would have been its main theme. Rainbow water flowing was a theme in the concept art. (Come to think of it, we just got a windy ruin level in the most recent game in the series. Hmm!)
Of course that information has led to new theorycrafting, about whether or not Botanic Base in Chaotix took any ideas from it, whether deleted sequences in the ending animation referenced the level, how much was actually constructed of the level, and if any of the segments heard in Sonic the Hedgehog - Remix that aren't based on game music were the good or bad future arrangements for the level. Some of this could be real, plenty probably isn't, but that's the nature of making stuff up, isn't it?
It's in that spirit that I developed the backstory for this supposedly lost soundtrack that was not only intended to be part of the US release, but went on to inspire Chaotix, the game made for a platform that existed with intent to placate mainly US customers as the Saturn was nearing release, the idea being that American Sonic fans might have recognized this music, and it was sent to Japan in the first place with hopes of the development staff there, with their extra knowledge of the game and the hardware, working it into the game. This attempt to tease structure out of partial historical records is always compelling to me, and I quite enjoy coming up with fake-but-plausible histories for things as a result.
So given our knowledge of R2 and the remaining tracks on Masque, if I were to try to pick one to represent a template for its HMR past track, I'm still not entirely convinced between We're Going Wrong, yes, a cover of the Cream song, and Hymn from Jupiter, a cover of Holst's Thaxted theme.
The former I like because its minor key and repeating bassline fit a little better with the DA Garden tune (called "Little Planet" on the soundtrack releases) and the melody of the verses is closer to the SCD track's synth lead. Hymn, however, splits the difference between a melody that, while in a major key, more closely matches that of Labyrinth while using instrumentation in line with that of Little Planet in its intro.
Funnily enough, there's a bit of similarity to Masque there, in that a very blatant late change meant that the track order at time of manufacture of the record sleeves was not the track order that was actually pressed on the vinyl. The record sleeve's track list was hastily covered up by a sticker, and two new tracks were included. The first was Rivers Run Dry, a song that had been a non-charting single for a solo Mick Rogers (titled simply Rivers on that single). The second was Neptune (Icebringer), a track clearly titled as if inspired by the Holst piece, but bearing only a passing resemblance to the choral section near the end of the movement, otherwise mostly based on whole-tone scales for that dreamlike, etherial feeling. Another track, Planets Schmanets was just part of an instrumental ending from What You Give Is What You Get that was edited out and placed on a different part of the album.
It's only relatively recently that some of this material was restored to the public, with the original cuts of Joybringer, What You Give Is What You Get/Planets Schmanets, and Geronimo's Cadillac being released as part of the 40th anniversary complete MMEB discography box set (Summer in the City was available in the 'Odds and Sods' box set and now also in the 'Mannthology' 50th anniversary mostly-singles compilation). Unfortunately, the transfer of these songs from tape was awful, with egregious levels of wow and flutter, and the tracks not even being played back at the proper pitch! I'd wonder exactly why such poor-quality transfers were used, but I think I have some idea of the story already, one that oddly has some connections to the Japanese Eurobeat phenomenon. That'll be a story for another time, a blog post I've had in my back pocket for, well, let's just say a while.
