Advances in audio technology and the hardware to drive it powered the latest evolution of soundtracks early in the early years of the new millennium. High fidelity, CD-quality, studio-recorded, surround sound music became the norm and the line between gaming and cinema grew ever more blurred. But as we know, the old-school never really dies…
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Due to one thing or another there wasn’t enough time to write the article I had planned for this week. Rather than just wait a fortnight I’ve decided instead to take the opportunity for a bit of a link clearance. So here follows a grab-bag of interesting music-related stories, articles and titbits that have built up over the years.
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Early PC games were packed with great soundtracks and technological developments, but the real advances were still to come. With sound cards and CD-ROMs becoming more mainstream the technical and artistic horizons of composers broadened considerably. Soon full orchestral scores would be the norm, but before then, technology was still catching up. The 90s then, were a period of transition bridging the MIDI age with what we know today.
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The Spectrum may have been the formative computing experience of my early boyhood but I am, first and foremost, a child of the PC. So here we have part 3 of the series, the early years of the PC where the beeper still held sway. Competing with the might of the Amiga, the PC promised great things…
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After the Spectrum came the NES (or Nintendo Entertainment System for those who really enjoy syllables), a revolution that brought gaming out of arcades and into the living room. With it came a generational leap in audio quality, a series of truly iconic soundtracks and, for the first time, composers who would go on to become infamous.
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The first computer I ever really played with as a child was my dad’s Dragon 64, an amazing piece of technology where the only games were ones you wrote yourself, using either a knowledge of programming or by copying code from books and magazines. Over time, the latter drifted to the former. My first computer, and the first one I remember having music with its games, was a ZX Spectrum +3.
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Despite writing quite a lot about game music, and listening to an awful lot of it, it turns out I actually know sod all about it – the history, the technology, the composers. Every now and then I’ll come across an article that touches on it and find it all fascinating. Inquisitive blighter that I am, this is going to change.
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