Musical challenges and a new mini-album

This is a personal musing on music. If you want to get right to the point, here is the link to Challenges on YouTube.

• My motivation to make music
• Chiptune
• Tracks
• Final Words
• Footnotes

My motivation to make music

After realizing last summer that I hadn’t made nearly enough music lately¹, I challenged myself to post five chiptune pieces as one of my bingo tiles². I picked chiptune in particular because I have ambitions³ of one day making a Game Boy game.

I decided to motivate and challenge myself by asking others for sequences of notes which I would have to use all in a row in the melody. One of the reasons for this is that I find working with constraints to be really useful for stoking the creative flames, which is also one of the reasons I picked chiptune in particular.

The other point of using notes someone else provided was to explore musical scales outside of my comfort zone. The notes tended to strongly suggest a key⁴. I can easily play a beautiful piece in A minor, which is all white keys on a keyboard, and had done just that so many times with such fervor that I cracked the A keys on my keyboard on multiple occasions. But could I play in E minor, another relatively easy key? What about A sharp minor?⁵

The truth is that I could, I just needed to give myself room to explore and make mistakes. Woven into this journey to write five chiptune pieces was also the occasional impromptu piano improvisation session over voice chat, which I did on a Discord server where I felt comfortable expressing myself creatively⁶. This began when I streamed working on a piece and then decided to play piano afterwards, and my friends present enjoyed it so much that the piano became the main point of @ing everyone.

Chiptune

The pieces I made are the first complete pieces I composed in Furnace tracker⁷. Working with a tracker is very different from working with a score. If the score is for conveying the composer’s intent, and it’s up to the instrument player(s) to interpret that intent every time they perform the piece, then trackers are closer to programming the player, who is a computer, than they are to writing down the score.

Chiptune is also more like low-resolution pixel art than like painting, in that, often, you have no choice but to suggest detail in lieu of actually including the relevant details. With Game Boy in particular, which can play at most three tones at once⁸ (plus noise), sometimes it’s necessary to use illusions to convey what you want⁹.

Tracks

The album is appropriately named Challenges and contains five tracks, which I ordered by when I made them.

Dance for me, puppet! was the first of the bunch and is the shortest, iterating three times on a melody and then ending (or looping if you like). I was to use the notes A G# A E Eb D A in it. I played with a different melody before settling on this one, but it ended up sounding close to Megalovania and I wanted to see if I could figure out one that didn’t sound like Megalovania at all. I do believe I succeeded; A friend told me it sounds like it belongs in a Wario game. The span of time from receiving the notes to finishing the piece was about 18 days.

A Night For Ghosts is the second track, a tango, and is designed to loop. You can hear it go through the main melodies twice before fading out in the version I uploaded. This one had perhaps the most challenging notes, C D D# F# A A# B. This highly chromatic sequence greatly limited the places where it could sound natural and fit in. A friend told me it evoked ghosts dancing with roses held between their teeth, which is how it got its name. Its creation spanned about 15 days.

where our bodies meet the sea is an immediately in-your-face metal piece tinged with melancholy. Either it or the final track is the one I’m proudest of. I was given the notes F F C F E F Bb, which are very easy to work with and suggest a major key. I did not go with a major key. As a joke, I was separately given the notes F F F F F F, so, as a joke, I included them as well. There are around five distinct sections with about three different feels to them. I almost cut the second section due to being so very different from the others, but now I can’t imagine the song without it. This one took me significantly shorter than the others to finish, 4 days, which was because I was very motivated and worked on it for hours per day.

Before All Hope Is Lost was conceptualized as the music for a final boss’s second phase. It incorporates the same organ voice as Dance for me, puppet! and uses it very differently. The notes to include were F Bb F D F G# A, which are a little tucked away compared to the others so far but still appear in the melody. The consensus was that the organ-centered section, the “second verse” so to speak, is the most interesting part. This one took me the longest due to numerous troubles and a couple false starts, spanning 23 days.

The Power to Change is another metal piece, even more ambitious in some ways than where our bodies meet the sea, and by far the longest at a little over four minutes. It doesn’t merely have sections, it also conceptually has two parts, which are divided by silence but very much linked. This one has lyrics! However, I threw them out so that listeners could decide what they are for themselves. This song’s creation spanned 17 days.

Oh, did I forget to mention the required notes? They were E E D D C. (Those are the notes of “E-I-E-I-O”.) They were fairly difficult to include in the piece, because I made the decision to write the majority of it in A# minor, a scale that includes only one of those notes. Regardless, I managed to fit them in twice, in two different figures, in a way that I think makes sense.

Final Words

I feel like I learned something new with each piece, and they were all fun to make :) I even loop them when I shower, either all in sequence or individual ones. I think it definitely says that I made music I liked!

I’m looking forward to making even more music I like soon. Actually, I’m thinking of learning to play with the expanded capabilities that the Game Boy Advance sound chip offers over the Game Boy. It has the same channels plus two sample channels¹⁰, which might not sound like much but greatly expands the possibility space. I’ll be challenging myself further to take full advantage of this :)

Well, that’s about all the words I’ve got for now¹¹! Now go, enjoy the album!

Footnotes