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forest-spirit on 10 March 2014
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Zod95 said:
forest-spirit said:

I'm opposed to the idea that "more evolved" music requires more effort and is more complex by default. Therefore I'm opposed to the idea that you can rank different types of music and thus I won't do that. Rock evolved from Blues, Jazz and a few other genres, and rock eventually evolved into metal music. Does that mean that Metal is more complex and requires more effort than Rock? Does Rock require more effort and is it more complex than Blues? Are all of them more complex and do they all require more effort than classical music? No, it doesn't work that way. Now, they could require more effort but it could also be the other way around. It all depends on the composition. You can make very complex music using only a piano. You can also make very basic music on a piano. Likewise you can make complex or basic music using a singer, a drummer and a guitarist. But there's no rule saying that one is more complex than the other by nature, and if such a rule exists I'd like someone to present it to me.

I think you are going too far. I had never presented such a logic. I only acknowledge that vocal music (with instruments, of course) demands a higher minimum effort than instrumental-only.

 

forest-spirit said:

With this in mind I fail to see how one could claim that the music in Mario would be less evolved than the music used Sonic due to the use of vocals in Sonic's soundtrack. You could provide evidence showing that instrumental music is older (something you have failed to do) but even if you did it wouldn't have much meaning when you take the history of music in consideration. Likewise I also fail to see how one could claim that one or the other required more effort merely because of the inclusion of vocal music in Sonic's soundtrack. For that you'd have to find out how much money and time was spent on creating the music, and even then you'd have to ignore than some musicians can create more with less effort, and you'd also have to ignore the possibility that the use of instrumental-only or a mix between instrumental and vocal music simply was a design choice. In fact, that possibility makes the whole argument rather pointless in my honest opinion.

Music is Mario 64 is simpler, it has definitely less instruments than in Sonic Adventure, less music tracks and no vocals. Is it enough for you? It's not merely because of vocal music (this is only an indicator).

If some musicians create more with less effort, then they are most probably more expensive so it all comes down to the same thing (I have been saying for quite some time): effort / time / money.

Design choices are not valid arguments. If, by design choice, I decide to create a very simple game that is extremely easy and quick to develop, I'm not as commited as other dev that puts millions of euros and man-hours work on another game.


But how could you possibly present that as some kind of rule, that vocal music always require more effort than instrumental-only? How much knowledge do you actually have about music theory, composing etc? So far you've completely ignored the part of music making where you actually make music. You only look at the number of instruments and if there's any vocals or not, and ignore the rest. You might as well claim that the effort behing a piece of music can be calculated by the length, the number of notes, the amount of accords, tempo shifts etc. Because if two composers write music for piano and one uses 54 notes and the other 67, the one who used the most notes clearly put in the most work, right?

 

And no, that's not enough to say that the music in Sonic required more than the Mario soundtrack. How can you know that the composers spent equal amount of time on their songs? What if one composer spends as much time on a single track that it takes the other to make ten tracks? Not saying that it is so but the possibility can't be ignored. Musicians also works in different ways. Some make more songs than they need and scrap the ones they don't want, while others work on exactly the amount of tracks they're supposed to make. And again, just because there's vocals doesn't mean that the effort is greater. I could sit down by the piano and write a song in 30 minutes if I wanted. The result probably wouldn't be the most groundbreaking work ever created but it would be a piece of vocal music done in 30 minutes.

 

I really don't understand how you can write off design choices like that. We are talking video games here, aren't we? The composer(s) make the music needed by the game designers, and the amount/type of tracks varies from game to game. Going back to Sonic and Mario, Sega wanted Sonic to have that "cool factor", and the games and music were made with that in mind. It was a design choice. The pop music used in later Sega games were design choices, they choose music that fit with Sonic's image.

As for you last paragraph, the part about spending millions of euros on a game is plain silly. How many one man teams out there do you think have millions of euros at their disposal, and have the luxury to spend tons of man-hours on their games? You're taking a piss at a lot of indie developers with that one, as many of them have to settle for more simple graphics, gameplay, story etc. because they don't have the resources to spend on a grand project. You got to pay your bills somehow.

Choosing a small project doesn't automatically mean that you're not commited, unless you choose to be lazy. If you make a basic game and put all your efforts behind it you're just as commited to it as someone putting all their efforts into a bigger project. Your commitment isn't measured by the size of the project but by how much of yourself you invest into it.