Top 3 Favorite MIDI tunes: Legend of Zelda, Betrayal at Krondor, The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge

The real benefits of the “oldskool” MIDI format are, or maybe were, two:

1 – Speed of iteration is ultra high. The number of knobs to tweak is very low and you can evaluate the value of a piece of work after a short amount of time working on it. To make decent use of the bandwidth in mp3 you need to spend a lot of time refining the details. To use another description: modern composing use less prototyping.

2 – The average quality was real low. This had the benefit of giving the composer an easy target to shoot at for writing something which will be good enough for the expecations of the audience. When the average quality of the competition increase the composer will be more hesitant to write something with a lot of personality, because personality will most likely be considered as a flaw by those who invest in the project. Modern game composers are therefore likely to be more conservative.

A good composer can tweak a MIDI rig to where its impossible to hear the MIDIness of it. It takes a while but know that almost all modern pop music is fundamentally based on MIDI arrangements. A modern studio runs a bunch of MIDI tracks through a bunch of techy things, some of those things are recordings of analog things like human voices or whatever. MIDI is just a toolkit, often part of the chain which create the mp3.

So here I’ll get a bit crazy:

A smart music engine could basically emulate the modern pop studio, then you would be able to do real adaptive music with a tinywiny footprint. A small enough footprint to be sent in realtime across the internet.

A good composer would be able to develop music which morph between metal, orchestral, electronic, jazz and so on without needing more data than the soundfonts and effect settings. However doing that today still demands a lot of computational power from the average PC, but its now quite doable with standard software like qbase, fruityloops or similar.

Im sure you could include qbase from 2000 as music engine in almost any game without noticing much performance loss. Nor would you notice any MIDIness as loss of quality.

It’s known as MIDI because the files that produce the music contain MIDI information about playback.

I know. All I was saying people who talk about MIDI usually miss that first part. Old MIDI music doesn’t sound better than some MP3s because it was somehow a more advanced format. It sounded better because professional musicians could use it.

Similarly, MP3 isn’t music, but a specification on how to compress music in a lossy manner without degrading the experience for most people. (My tin ears are happy listening to 128k bitrate.) Saying “MP3 music” is just as valid as saying “MIDI music”.

Comparing MIDI and MP3 as purely encoding formats is a bit misleading, because MP3s always decode back into the same waveform, while MIDI decoding quality is intimately tied into the quality of the MIDI synth used.

Coincidentally, the Final Fantasy VII discussed above also included a software MIDI synth that generally sounded better than the MIDI synths on old cards (but worse than what a Wavetable-using then-modern sound card could produce).

It’s known as MIDI because the files that produce the music contain MIDI information about playback. Similarly, MP3 isn’t music, but a specification on how to compress music in a lossy manner without degrading the experience for most people. (My tin ears are happy listening to 128k bitrate.) Saying “MP3 music” is just as valid as saying “MIDI music”.

In other words, old MIDI-using games do actually sound better now than before.

Unfortunately, not for most people. With the decline in MIDI playback, most computers don’t have high-quality MIDI playback tables, particularly on systems with on-board sound devices. When I upgraded my computer a few years ago and went from a sound card to on-board sound, the MIDI music in Meridian 59 was significantly worse sounding.

But, if you’re willing to have good (and pay for) MIDI playback, it can sound really awesome. Some of the original M59 MIDI files were run through a very high-quality playback and recorded as redbook audio on the original M59 CD. It sounds really awesome, nearly orchestral. But, most people these days don’t care because of MP3s.

Even the maligned Final Fantasy VII used MIDI music. If you had a crappy sound card with a bad MIDI synthesizer you’d get muted bleeping that’s as far from Uematsu’s more recent productions as the theme tune of Commando was from Halo. However.. if you had a more modern sound card, you’d get those leitmotifs because the sound card used properly modeled samples for each of the MIDI instruments. In other words, old MIDI-using games do actually sound better now than before.

Synth chips in consoles and home computers were a completely different matter. These ones didn’t even try to emulate real instruments. You just had a bunch of programmable oscillators that produced a base sound wave that you could modify. People who made music with those were programmers first and musicians second. A lot of the music made with these chips was awful, and mercifully has been long forgotten. But those few that had expertise in both programming and music-writing were rightfully revered.

The really memorable MIDI stuff was excellent because of this. Secret of Mana, Earthbound, Legend of Zelda songs, the Actraiser tunes… there are handful upon handfuls of SNES games with really well-done music, the sort of stuff you can hum to.

There are modern-day exceptions, the first coming to mind being the excellent Jets and Guns soundtrack by Machinae Supremacy, or the generated sounds from some Lumines levels, or some of the Metroid Prime tunes, but for every example of them there are dozens of games where the ‘music’ tends toward elevator muzak that thankfully leaves the head quickly or boring instrumentals with latin chanting, more like something from yet another movie than anything intended for a video game. Great tunes that stick in your head three days after playing were common back then; today it’s quite the rare game to have some equivalent to the Sound Stone music. I know people who remember the tune to lower Norfair better than they do the game itself.

Or maybe I’ve just been exposed to the Oblivion’s exploration creshendo or FFVII’s leitmotif abuse so much that the older stuff just looks better by comparison.