lazygecko

Just the physical part of replicating vibrations in your eardrums is merely a part of what constitutes your actual hearing. After that it's all up to the brain to turn this sensory input into something you can understand. And this is the part of you that is very malleable. We are really constantly subjected to a lot more sounds than what we actually percieve, because our brains get wired to filter out a whole bunch of information we don't deem relevant to needing our active attention. Training ourselves to overcome this is what mostly constitutes "good ears", rather than what the range of our frequency spectrum covers.

And I don't even think the Sonic soundtracks make particularly effective use of the hardware, even if they sound good as they are. Last week I did a cover of Spring Yard precisely for this reason My videos showcase each individual channel so you can kind of see what's going on. But I also made the Deflemask project public so you can download Deflemask and open it there to take a closer look at what I did differently from the original. http://www.deflemask.com/forum/show-off-your-work/sonic-1-spring-yard-zone-(genesis)/

I wouldn't really be worrying that much. People have a tendency to overestimate how much your "natural" loss of hearing affects your abilitiy to analyze and pick up fine detail in music. These skills sort of belong in a different sphere where it's more something you psychoacoustically train yourself to become better at.

This is what I find kind of backwards about the whole thing. Why should the burden of manually compensating for volume fall on music that hasn't been compressed? In the end, I view this as a technological oversight in the sense that proper standards were not developed to account for the fact that our perceived loudness as listeners does not correspond to how recorded/digital audio measures loudness by the peaks. This kind of stuff was simply not a real concern back then when the loudness war was not in effect. But now we do have technology and standards being gradually implemented across different outlets and services which does pre-adjust gain based on what the calculated average loudness is in order to solve this. It's just a matter of how OCR chooses to stand in relation to that.

I stopped viewing these things in terms of "realness" long ago. Rather, what a lot of peope would label as "real" or "human" or "expressive" I just view as additional musical components that I like and want to incorporate into my own work, and that just happens to be via sequencing/programming cause that's what I'm comfortable with. Whether something is played or sequenced is completely beside the point for me, as long as it sounds good. I enjoy listening to stuff like Joe Satriani, but the performance/virtuoso aspect is pretty much a complete non-factor for me. Speaking of funk, the quality of the original Toejam & Earl soundtrack probably has a lot to do with how it was recorded live via MIDI input with little to no quantization after the fact. Them not being beholden to programming via a completely rigid step interface as was the case with typical video game music just makes it that much funkier.

The ratios/multipliers follow the overtone series, which is a great point of reference. So if 1 is the base tone, then 2 is an octave, and on 3 you add a fifth, at 4 it's an octave again, etc. And then the intervals just gradually get smaller as the values get higher. Modulator/carrier ratios corresponding to octaves, fifths, or fourths are going to have a neutral and clear character to the timbre, because we call those intervals perfect for a reason. If you have ratios that are much smaller, like 8:9 or something, then the sound will have a more dissonant character to it.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc... The term chiptune has been malleable since its inception. IIRC, the term itself was coined when describing sample-based Amiga modules attempting to mimic the sound of SID and other sound chips. So approximitations like that was enough to qualify it as such. But then today you have some purists who would go so far as to say that anything that isn't coming from an authentic chip in real time is not an actual chiptune, which would technically disqualify that which the name was actually initially describing. I don't really like chiptune or chipmusic as a genre name for reasons like those. But then, genres in general are messy fluid things that seldom ever make sense. The early Russian examples use a different method of producing the sounds, but in the end the characteristics and sequencing techniques are much the same. It's a neat example of a kind of inevitable musical convergence derived from technical constraints.

Chiptunes were invented in 1930s Soviet Russia.

We have to go deeper. 1-Bit single channel chiptunes.

It's how the project started out. Then some bigwigs at the company thought "hey, let's slap a different name on this and market it as a mainline sequel!" Not really an uncommon industry tactic either. EA did the same thing with Command & Conquer 4 (initially a spinoff F2P online game), and probably Dragon Age 2 as well from what I've heard. It's an excellent way of eroding consumer trust in your brands.

Sonic 4 was a mobile game masquerading as a sequel.

Reboot Base it much more heavily on the classic horror movie homage the original Castlevania was founded on. Maybe give it an old film style presentation and feel, which they've already played around with like the faux film reel effect in Castlevania 3, and sort of like what The House of the Dead games do. 3D action is fine, but it should be designed in a way that makes it slow and very methodical in its pacing like the original, as opposed to typical modern character action games like God of War or Bayonetta. I think slowing games down on purpose has a value that is getting more and more underappreciated. Progression-wise, I'd be fine with something inbetween Dark Souls and the Metroidvanias. Maybe even take some cues directly from classic survival horror. Soundtrack should be Mellotron-infused Italian schlock horror rock in the vein of Goblin. Anima Morte is a good modern example, and doesn't really stray too far from established Castlevania music either.

Seeing as composers didn't have a choice in the matter when originally composing for the hardware, it's pretty safe to say that the interpolation is part of the artistic intent. I think with module-based music from Amiga and PC games the interpolation condundrum becomes more up in the air. Players from that era usually lacked any sort of filtering, but it's a standard feature today. Thus modern recordings of soundtracks (Like official OST releases or YouTube uploads) in those formats often end up with some form of interpolation active, which in many cases filters off the rough edges to a serious degree. I find this kind of aggravating since it often feels apparent to me that the aliasing is an intended part of the sound and not just a byproduct. One of the biggest examples I can think of is Isotoxin from Unreal. Here is a video of it with interpolation enabled: And here is a recording I made from the original module without any interpolation: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/isotoxin.mp3 You can clearly hear just how excessively subdued the main distorted synth line becomes once you start filtering it. The aliasing adds so much brightness to it that it simply feels evident to me that this is how it was meant to sound in the mix, since you can at times barely even hear it in the full mix if all that aliasing is cut off.