MarkN

No worries. I'm pretty sure both of our hearts are in the right place, since we both care enough about the subject matter to talk about it, and hearing about other points that are worth making or expressing more precisely is very useful feedback. That's a very interesting piece... I don't have the game or the soundtrack handy so I'm having to make do with listening to samples from walkthroughs on youtube. I can see how the intervals would qualify as C Locrian, but I'm wondering how you make the distinction between classifying it as C Locrian, or seeing it in the key of B flat minor, to my ear it seems to resolve more easily to a B flat. But again, not having any good locrian examples makes it tricky to know what to compare to. That is a good point, and it's tricky to find a way to discuss these things while providing the right amount of background, my main goal was to provide examples to show how they can sound significantly different and hope people would pick up on it from there, for a more detailed explanation of the theory I might just have to point them to Wikipedia, I'm hoping people would understand the major/minor distinction before reading the rest. Very cool, another game I may have to pick up. And thanks a lot for your thoughts as well.

One thing that's tricky there is that I'd like to make the associations in so far as they do resemble one of the church modes, while still making it clear they're not strictly the same. Hmmmmm. Hmmm, maybe we could stand to clarify our terms here then, I'm thinking of Aeolian in terms of employing the Aeolian scale. Yep, aside from the seven characters in Mother 3 who are named after the seven modes (Ionia, Doria, Phrygia, Lydia, Mixolydia, Aeolia, Locria), it's hard to find any examples of it being put to use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_limited_transposition Very interesting, it seems to be different than most of the standard modes since it apparently lacks a tonic, I'd have to see it in use. Thanks for the feedback there as well! So basically you're saying that you'd consider a "motif" to be a recognizable musical theme, where as a leitmotif is a musical theme that occurs and shows up in a number of pieces? In other words, mixing a motif into several tracks to show the presence of a character would be different than simply playing a track to mark the presence of a character? Am I reading you right there? Trying to think of a video game soundtrack where motifs are used across pieces, the Chrono Trigger soundtrack makes a lot of use of Chrono's basic theme in a few tracks, including the boss battles. Well, I was trying to talk about pieces in terms of employing the different scales of the modes, if there's a more proper way to talk about that connection while still showing the relationships to the modes, that'd be good to know.

Hey guys, I've recently been lucky enough to have a piece published on video game music, and used it as a chance to talk about the interesting distinctives of game music that set it apart—it's written to accompany an activity rather than meant to be listened to passively, it is often required to loop and extend indefinitely, and it has the potential to be adaptive and respond to player feedback. The article is here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20081201/1newheiser-a.shtml Obviously OCRemix was worth mentioning in there (not that me tossing you a link is going to do anything to affect your traffic), and you guys have been a great place to explore some of the potential game music has. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts and any feedback you might have to offer. (and one last note for the musicians and anyone with an interest in music theory, I've written more casually about the modes in relation to game music. In addition to the major and minor keys there are five other modes commonly used to set up a scale, and I discuss them a bit and gave example of each in game music: http://newheiser.blogspot.com/2008/02/modes-and-video-games-music.html I'd be interested to hear your thoughts there as well and if you know of any more useful examples)