- Read Part 1 of the Q&A.
Ryuji Iuchi's Q&A translation continues from here.
Q: Over the 20 years that have passed since Shenmue, what changes have there been in the way music is written?
RI: One thing that has certainly changed is going from chip sounds to streaming.
At the time I was working on Shenmue, being freelance I was also working at the same time on game music for the PlayStation, and the music I wrote for it was chip-based. There were some cases where the music would be recorded and played back on the PlayStation as a CDDA [CD digital audio] file, but in general it was chip music. I think the PlayStation supported about 24 or 26 simultaneous sounds or thereabouts, and the music was written using internal sounds.
It was a similar situation with Shenmue. I'd make a song on a synthesizer, and if it got the green light, it would be moved to the Dreamcast - only the MIDI data could be kept, while the instruments all had to be remade. The sound of each individual instrument used by a song had to be sampled one at a time in order to recreate the instrument inside the Dreamcast, which made more efficient use of memory. For example, you might record a single drum loop and import that into the Dreamcast to save memory.
However later on, it became possible for music composed on a synthesizer to be recorded and played back exactly as it had been written. Shenmue may have been right on that boundary of the change from chip music to streaming.
So I think that the move to streaming is probably the biggest change that has affected the way game music is created since Shenmue. Since anything is possible with streaming, I have a feeling it won't change much further now.
Even earlier on, writing game music required a certain amount of programming knowledge, whether for arcade games or home consoles. It wasn't a case of simply playing music on a keyboard and having it play back inside a game. Back then, notes were entered as individual numbers: for example, those amazing FM-synthesized music pieces that Yuzo Koshiro wrote for the Super Famicom [SNES]. There were even times when you might have to create your own sound driver.
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