| lestatdark said: I think that they indeed used voices, since in one of the post Black Mages concerts interviews with Uematsu, he said that during the SNES era they had intended to use voiced songs already, yet via the compression and loss that the MIDI format had in that time, they had to sample the voices below the song itself. |
I think they did very well with what they had, but it's pretty clear that there are only about two short voice samples in there, maybe even just one. (short as in less than a second each). The rest is done using the onboard reverb.
Again (it's pretty OT, I know); MIDI doesn't store sound at all. Simplified, it only controls a syntheziser. You can open a .mid in a text editor and edit it there (although I wouldn't want to do it).
Sound requires a lot of memory, so trying to store a long vocal piece like that on the SNES would have been ridicoulusly expensive. Even if they had done it in 8-bit mono sound, it would have required perhaps a MB. I also don't think the processor could handle the decoding (the sound chip is a sampler/syntheziser, so it wouldn't be able to do it)
