LogFAQs > #963571063

45nd
Game: Jumpstart 3rd Grade Adventures
Title: Molecular Awe (WGM)
Composer: HaleSong Music Productions, Randy Hale, Big Fish Audio
Nominator: @Zyxyz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP6OxERlMGM

90s Edutainment VGM OST representative!!! thank you!! (of course it's from you hahaha) i'm a big fan of this soundtrack actually

i had a fascination with this song when younger. generally how weird it was, but also it was a permanent tie-in to me. the idea of being shrunk down to microscopic in size to the point computer generated 3d spheres (molecules) were bigger than you...it's a weird idea! It's a totally, impossible thing to experience with current human technology, so naturally the music follows what that feeling is. in general---in life, i've always had fun imagining places i go about in real life being places they're not (it's funner to go to science class when you imagine that the classroom is inside of a volcano! or whatever), and since i was exposed to this game "in 3rd grade", i was able to have it ingrained pretty early on that one "option" for imagining as an environment was microscopic molecule simulation world, or at least things that felt vaguely like that. This song would start playing when i go to the McDonalds that is inside of a giant DNA strand or whatever

interestingly, the metadata in the midi file for this game, indicates that this track was originally called "Gaseous", and level 2 and 3 being called "Fluidity" and "SolidMan". but knowing that this track was supposed to indicate GAS specifically, that really explains why it avoids having anything to stand on. the music is really cool to me in that symbolic sense, without knowing exactly the context i'd definitely have assumed it was something at the very least "spacey", not solid. so it does a great job at what it's clearly intending to represent

it's not necessarily easy to find very "sound-design"-focused midis, this isn't necesarily limit pushing at all, but midi tends to incentivize "composition-focus" by its very nature. MIDI is all about storing notes, not sounds, composers know it won't even sound the same between sound systems that play back midis with entirely different sounds. So often sound design takes a backseat...but not here! You've got cool delay echoes, cool pitch bends, interesting uncommon use of the specific midi patches it's using. This actually clearly is going out of it's way to sorta turn the sounds it uses into use cases where it won't really matter what you play it back on---it will still sound cool!

here's my cchannel visualizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeY3bWpMnYg

as u can see from the fact that these tones are held down for very long portions of the songs, and the crazy panning/pitch/vibrato/etc control changes visible on the left. so many layers don't even have any "new notes", but they have so much done to them while held down, vibrato and pitch bends. slowly fading in volume, all that stuff. It means that the function of these sounds is more akin to raw waveforms of like a gb or nes, like they're /not/ that, but they feel more like that, because the exact timbre playing these notes back doesn't matter so much, because the sound gets manipulated through layering and all those sorts of effects anyways. I wish i saw more examples of stuff like this! One game soundtrack I know is full of this kinda thing is "Obsidian", a myst-clone i really love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySfWqqbpKQU

given that i just said i think Molecular Awe would sound good on alternate soundsets, and standard MSGS is far from my favorite MIDI soundset, here's a few examples of this track played back on other things i've just recorded!

Creative Sound Blaster Live!'s 8mbgmsfx:
- this is likely how i first heard it as a kid, I definitely did not hear the MSGS version you nommed first, because i didn't experience that until i got windows XP in 2002, which was definitely notably after i'd originally played this. but i did havve a computer that would make the song sound like THIS (probably, it actually had multiple modes for how it could sound but this was one of them)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0lpQQxtZe4

OPL3 (the fat man 2op set):
- although, it's also likely i had just heard it on this originally, which was my first MIDI experience on my Win3.1 machine (only recently 'upgraded' to windows 95 at the time). the balance in this thing i've uploaded is a bit off with certain instruments loud-leaning---this is not how this always sounds on opl3, just the particular emulator i recorded from here, but it was better than some other emulators i found with other artifacts. i'm using an opl3 emulator here but i still have that computer from 1995, i could try recording this from it but it'd be a bit of effort (and would likely result in lower quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyw80bWHJ30

i guess neither of those examples turned out amazingly (and i've tested the midi on plenty of other things and it sounds nicer than these examplse) BUT i picked them becauUSE that they are the first two ways i heard it (not sure which of the two came first). I was definitely playing this game pre-2002 and the two soundsets i had on the computers in my house at that time were these two (then i'd have heard the version you nommed when i replayed this sometime post-2002 on the xp computer probably).