It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

mp3 download, ipod format download

There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

Starflight came on two 360 kB floppy disks. That’s kilobytes, not megabytes. I have one-page Word documents bigger than that. And yet, the game world comprised hundreds of explorable planets, generated randomly by fractal algorithms. This was a revolutionary move, an early gesture toward the open-ended gameplay you see in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Starflight also had a compelling underlying narrative. Most of the time I don’t care about the story behind a game. The games I tend to prefer have no narrative at all, like Tetris, or a very nominal story that isn’t central to the gameplay, like Plants vs Zombies. But Starflight told a terrific story, revealed throughout the gameplay in intriguing fragments.

The storyline begins in the future on an Earthlike planet called Arth. An archeological dig deep underneath the planet has uncovered artifacts from an elder race, including a faster-than-light starship powered by a crystal-like fuel called endurium. In the game, you captain one of these ships, based in a space station orbiting Arth.

Your mission, at first, is straightforward Star Trek boilerplate. You fly around looking for endurium and habitable planets. You also occasionally encounter various alien races, some friendly, some not.

As you do your exploring and interacting, you encounter clues to the real plot: something called the Crystal Planet is moving slowly but relentlessly across the galaxy, causing every star it passes to go supernova. You ultimately need to find the Crystal Planet and destroy it before your home sun blows up. There are some nice twists to this story. The Crystal Planet turns out to be made of endurium, the same substance that powers your ship. It further turns out that the endurium crystals themselves are living, sentient beings, which are being destroyed by human spaceships. So what you’re doing is heading off a desperate act of self-defense by the helpless creatures you burn in your engine. It feels uncomfortably like being in the Bush Administration. Complicated.

In order to discover how to destroy the Crystal Planet, you have to do a little detective work on the Galactic Empire’s history, and in so doing, you discover the ‘mythical’ planet Earth. It’s Earth in the far distant future, with the familiar continents and climates, but devoid of human presence. Aside from a few ruined buildings, there’s no sign of our ever having been there. The post-apocalyptic setting wasn’t the sci-fi cliche it is now, and at the height of the Cold War it was alarmingly plausible. When you discover the deserted Earth, it’s a poignant moment. Poignancy is not a quality you find in too many computer games.

Technology has gotten a lot better in the video game world, but the writing hasn’t. I’d trade all the 3D graphics in the world for more game settings like Starflight.

Here’s a list of all Halo’s sources, the ones I can think of anyway.

Every war movie

You play a space marine. You get dropped off in what’s basically a helicopter. You drive jeeps and throw grenades. There’s a particularly entertaining sequence where you’re driving around in what looks like an M1 Abrams tank.

Star Wars

Which is itself a mashup of many World War II movies. George Lucas spliced together a mixtape of dogfight scenes and then had Industrial Light & Magic recreate them shot-for-shot. One mixtape inspired another. The very first level of the game is lifted from the opening scene from Star Wars almost exactly. You fight your way off a spacecraft that’s been boarded and overrun by armored dudes shooting lasers. You make your way to an escape pod and launch it to the planet below. The only thing that’s missing is C-3P0.

Star Trek

In Halo’s universe the United Nations Space Command maps neatly onto Starfleet.

Alien and Aliens

The moody, cramped hallways with flickering lights. The helmet-mounted video cameras. The frequent sense of claustrophobic dread. The horror of humans being parasitized by aliens. One of the Covenant species looks kind of like the aliens in Aliens.

Ringworld

It’s set on a ringworld.

The Bible

Your foes are called the Covenant and the Flood. The game and the world it’s set on are called Halo.

The Song of Roland

Your holographic assistant Cortana is named after a sword.

All this borrowing and sampling is what makes Halo great. If it was “original” it would be tedious. You don’t need a ton of exposition and backstory if you’ve seen the movies or read the books that Halo is based on.

Any influences, references or outright thefts I missed? I know I must have. Hit me up in the comments.

Every Thanksgiving, or every other, the whole mishpokeh gathers at my mom and stepdad’s place in Vermont. We have a good time eating and hanging out, watching football on TV and taking walks on the dirt roads. In the past couple of years we’ve started reintroduced video games into the mix. Katamari Damachy was a hit with some of my younger cousins. But Dance Dance Revolution turned out to be the really big smash. It was my sister’s then-boyfriend, now-fiance who had the idea, and he deserves mad props for thinking of it. The whole clan got involved, from the toddlers up to the seniors.

Serious competition in DDR takes coordination and some athleticism, but if you just want to play for fun, just about anybody can give it a spin and enjoy doing it.

It bums me out that there are so many families like mine who deprive themselves of the essential social vitamins of group singing and dancing. If DDR can get us out of our shells, I say bring on the DDR.

Let’s say you’d never heard of the Beatles, and I played you “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” “Within You Without You,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” You wouldn’t have any reason to think they were written and recorded by the same people. They weren’t. The three songs are effectively solo John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney tunes, respectively. It’s wonderful to imagine that a single group of humans working together could have produced such wildly disparate sounds, and it was a royal bummer for me to find out that during long stretches of the Sgt Pepper’s sessions, the Beatles weren’t even talking to each other.

I think the late Beatles are still so relevant because they remind people my age and younger of our divorced parents. Their albums are extremely well-made art produced by a group of people in a failed and dysfunctional relationship. Yet the product bears a collective name, creating the illusion of a unified creative team. For legal reasons, the songwriting credits are mostly Lennon/McCartney, even after the two stopped writing and recording in the same room. It’s like how my mom retains my dad’s last name decades after their divorce and remarriage to other people. The mental process of trying to resolve the jagged stylistic contradictions in Sgt Pepper is familiar to me, it’s like squaring the conflicting values and loyalties of my parents and stepparents. Late Beatles albums are more like mixtapes than albums by a band.

I was always was more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy. Like me, the Beatles didn’t remotely hate their parents. Not the way rock stars usually do; not the way the Stones did. The Beatles revered their parents. They wrote songs for and about them. It’s mostly McCartney doing these songs, but my favorite John Lennon song ever is about his mother Julia. The Beatles were kid-friendly, too. Could you imagine the Stones writing “Yellow Submarine” or “Octopus’ Garden”?

Most rock musicians turn their angst into hedonistic defiance or anger. The Beatles turned most of their angst into wistfulness. Even when their music pushed boundaries, it mostly did so in a relatively polite, restrained way. Maybe the band kept so much composure in their later years because instead of playing in rowdy bars, they were performing for George Martin and the BBC engineers in their coats and ties. These straightlaced British civil servants were the only listeners present for most of the band’s live music-making after 1965, along with Yoko Ono. The Beatles’ poker face is uptight by rock standards, but it makes perfect sense for professionals in a high-tech work setting.

The advances in recording technology that gave the late Beatles albums so much of their imaginative sweep also contributed to their feeling of alienation. In the early years, the band recorded by getting together in a room and playing live to single-track tape. By the end, Paul McCartney could use multitracking to play every instrument on “Back In The USSR” and “Birthday”, as if he was Prince recording “When Doves Cry.” The tape collage stuff like “Revolution 9″ and the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is more like Aphex Twin than Chuck Berry. And the instrumentation moved steadily into synth and sampler territory. The flutes at the beginning of “Strawberry Fields” aren’t real, they’re tape samples in a Mellotron. Here’s a video about this early sampling keyboard – thanks, Nick Seaver.

The famous medley that ends Abbey Road is a sixteen-minute DJ mix of leftovers from the White Album and Let It Be. It was carefully edited into a seamless suite by McCartney and George Martin. The medley can’t exist outside of the recording medium. The Beatles never played it live, and to my knowledge no one else has either. How would you even approach it? I learned the first chunk on the guitar and it was a whole music education unto itself, but my rendition is not going to make you forget the original.

Given how electronic their sound was, it’s a shame that the Beatles have never allowed anyone to sample them. If they had been born twenty years later, they might well have tried their hand at loops and breakbeats. Their early songs are collages of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly. The later, more ambitious songs feel more “original” only because the source material for the collaged is more diverse. Wikipedia says:

According to Lennon, “Because” was inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven‘s “Moonlight Sonata“. “Yoko was playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano … I said, ‘Can you play those chords backwards?’, and wrote ‘Because’ around them.

Another Beatles classical remix is “Blackbird.” It includes a fragment of Bach‘s Bourrée in E minor. It’s the ascending G major part, a loop that runs through the song. These guys are a narural fit for sample culture.

Not like people are waiting for permission to sample the Beatles. The white half of Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse, made his first big splash by combining Jay-Z‘s Black Album with the White Album into his breathtakingly copyright-infringing Grey Album. While no one is officially allowed to sample the Fab Four, some people have been allowed to use pieces of cover versions.

Common’s song “Forever Begins”, produced by Kanye West, samples a cover of “She’s Leaving Home” by Syreeta. The line “Father snores as his wife gets into…” loops under the verses. The sample cuts off “her dressing gown.” It’s a strange thing to rap over, but it works. (The track also uses another perfect sample, Steve Gadd’s snare drum intro to “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon.)

Here’s a screen shot of Beatles Rock Band – click through to see the fascinating vocal notation more clearly. It’s a combination of MIDI and standard music notation.

So what do you say, Beatles copyright holders? How about loosening up the restrictions a little? People are remixing the tunes anyway. Why not get in front of the situation and put the stems on iTunes or Amazon? Nothing can ever replace those albums, but why should the story end there? “Forever Begins” doesn’t take anything away from “She’s Leaving Home” any more than “Because” takes away from the Moonlight Sonata. We the fans have been remixing the songs in our heads for years anyway. Why not let us do it with computers too?

Here’s a remix/cover/mashup of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” combined with “Galang” by M.I.A. and “Slide” by Missy Elliot. Vocals by Babsy Singer, production and game controller synth by me.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.

The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.

Hear the game controller in action on the synth in this track:

Take The 2-3 Train by ethanhein

The software maps the buttons and knobs on the controller to different MIDI values. I can play one octave of each of a few different scales (blues, major, harmonic and melodic minor, diminished) in all twelve keys. I can scroll through the circle of fifths with the controller’s D-pad. It’s set so that my left index and middle fingers control the root and third of the scale, my right index and middle control the fourth and fifth, and my right thumb reaches the rest of the scale tones. With the thumb sticks I can control pitch bend, modulation and other parameters, depending on which software instrument is dialed up.

The controller plays anything that any other MIDI instrument can play, not just synthesizers. I can map any batch of recorded sounds to the buttons. It’s fun loading bells or speech samples or bird calls onto it and playing them through heavy delay over a beat.

The controller interface software was written by Ben Lacker in Max/MSP. It works with any USB video game controller, but it was specifically designed for the one in the screenshot, a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.

I mostly played guitar in my bands through my twenties, using lots of digital delay and other high-tech effects. As my sound got more electronic I started using a keyboard hooked up to my laptop. For a while I was carrying around a Korg 49, which has a bunch of cool drum pads and control knobs in addition to a half-piano’s worth of keybs. It was way more controller than I needed. I felt kind of like a chump carrying such a big instrument around just to play one note while twiddling a knob for the entire song. Part of the motivation to set up the game controller was to be able to have the same control scheme on a device I could more easily carry around on the subway.

The Korg 49′s keys and drum pads are pressure-sensitive. The game controller isn’t. Its buttons have only has two settings, on and off. It offers no control of dynamics at all. This limitation has turned out to be mostly a good thing for live situations, and even for home sequencing. For samples especially, it sounds better to mix everything to a nice balance and then be forced to keep it that way. It moves my complete focus to rhythm. I can pitch bend or filter with the thumbsticks for expressiveness when I need it.

I’ve tried a few other game controllers with the MIDI interface program. Some of them show potential. The most intriguing one is the Dance Dance Revolution pad. It would be perfect if it didn’t map itself to strange MIDI parameters by default. Out of the box, half the buttons don’t do anything useful, and I don’t have the programming mojo to fix it. Maybe in the future I’ll get it ironed out. It could be like a customizable, more ergonomic version of the giant ground piano in Big, as seen in this extremely bootleg Youtube video.

The Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers have potential too, but they don’t have as many buttons or parameters as the Logitech pad. Same with the Taiko Drum Master controller. This is nothing against any of these controllers in their original contexts, where they work great. I haven’t gotten to try DJ Hero but I expect it’ll be a similar deal. The Nintendo Wii controller is becoming the game controller of choice for futuristic computer musicians. I haven’t used one for anything except games yet, but there are some cool-looking things on my list. Specifically, I’m looking forward to experimenting with Wii Loop Machine and Wii Drum High. There are also some groovy-looking things for the Game Boy DS, like Korg DS-10 and Nitrotracker. For all of the above plus iPhone there’s a thing called Osculator that looks fun.

The title of this post comes from Cartman’s reaction when Stan’s dad pulls out his real guitar and plays “Carry On My Wayward Son.”

I’m a big fan of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I play the actual guitar, and have done it in several real bands. The video game experience isn’t exactly the same as playing real guitar, but it conveys a lot of the flavor. Music games are first and foremost about close listening, and so is playing music on instruments. The stuff you’re doing from the wrists down is automatic. Learning how to listen to other people while you play is the hardest and most important part of mastery of any instrument. Even if you’re performing solo, you need to learn to listen to yourself.

If you really want to listen intently, it helps to be on your feet dancing. If you can’t dance on your feet, you can still do it in your imagination. Guitar Hero and Rock Band aren’t as dance-oriented as some of the other music games, but getting your boogie on is still their basic point. Most of the fun of music is what’s happening in the room around it. Chords and scales are interesting, deeply interesting if you like math, but they’re just a means to an end, helping people have a good time.

I haven’t played it yet, but I imagine that Beatles Rock Band is like being in a very tight Beatles tribute band.

I’ve never been in a Beatles tribute band, but I try to get every band I play in to do some Beatles song. Playing their music is like a well thought-out series of challenging puzzles. The songs have beautiful internal logic, and they feel good under the fingers and in the voice. They’re more technically demanding than most rock songs, but they’re still accessible if you’re willing to put in the practice time. They promote flow.

The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Beatles Rock Band by Daniel Radosh called “While My Guitar Gently Beeps.” The designers of Beatles Rock Band are very concerned about the authenticity of the experience:

Between songs, players will hear the group warming up and bantering in the studio. Martin combed through hundreds of hours of tape to find these clips, but the chatter, recorded directly into microphones, lacked the subtle echo and ambient noise you would have heard if you were actually in the studio at the time. So after laying down a sound bed of background noise, Martin played the original clips through a set of speakers on the studio floor and rerecorded them through his mikes, this time with all the ringing acoustics of the room. Through the control-room window, Martin stared into the empty studio as if his mind’s eye could put physical form to the disembodied sounds. Across the decades a guitar was tuned, a snare drum rattled and John Lennon warmed up his voice for a new song called “Come Together:” He got teenage lyrics, he got hot rod baldy.

The concern is admirable, but also kind of goofy. How authentic can it be? It’s a video game. The whole point of a simulation is that it’s fake. And the game designers know that all the authenticity lies within certain prescribed limits. You don’t enter into virtual bickering during the recording of the last few albums. You don’t get to play drums as Paul on the songs from the White Album recorded while Ringo had temporarily quit the band.

Authentic or not, the game is doing the music world a big service. Beatles music rewards all of the attention you give it many times over. I’m glad that so-called non-musicians have an incentive to geek out over it. Daniel Radosh is right:

Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition. When you need to move your body in synchrony with the music in specific ways, it connects you with the music in a deeper way than when you are just listening to it.

Paul McCartney says he’s on board with the game enthusiastically: “You want people to get engaged.”

McCartney sees the game as “a natural, modern extension” of what the Beatles did in the 60s, only now people can feel as if “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.”

Yeah. You know what really makes me feel like I possess a song? If you let me remix it. But so, until then, this game is a good step.

Not everybody likes music-based video games. South Park’s parody of Guitar Hero gives voice to the widespread hostility that the rock world has towards anything virtual or electronic seeming. There’s the idea that because it’s not “real” music, Guitar Hero takes away from actual musical skill.

Gamers in turn are baffled by the criticism of what is, after all, “just a game.” People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don’t pick up a real gun or race real cars. You rarely hear that Monopoly is a waste of time because it doesn’t actually teach anything about buying hotels.

The Beatles are natural candidates for virtual treatment. From Revolver onwards, they were purely a studio band. Most of those later songs are difficult to play live, and some of them are impossible. In the later years there are the futuristic experiments with analog synths and sampling and tape editing. The Beatles at times resembled an electronica band more than a rock band. Paul McCartney even produced some experimental ambient techno with Delia Derbyshire, back when that meant vacuum-tube oscillators and reel-to-reel tape. He recognizes that the tools are less important than the art behind it.

The teacup clattered quietly on its saucer, and McCartney thought about the changes he’d seen in the music world. “There were no cassette recorders” when he and Lennon first started writing songs, he noted. “We just had to remember it. Then suddenly there were cassettes, then we were working on four track instead of two track, then you got off tape, then you’ve got stereo — which we thought just made it twice as loud. We thought that was a really brilliant move.” After the Beatles came CDs, digital downloads and now video games. “I don’t really think there’s any difference. At the base of it all, there’s the song. At the base of it, there’s the music.”

So if this is all about people enjoying music, why is there so much resistance from musicians? Why are real guitarists so threatened? I get the sense that videogame “rock drag” is offensive to people who don’t like any kind of drag. This is a tension that goes way back before video games. From Little Richard to Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, a lot of popular music is made by people who challenge our gender signifiers. Rock is a hypermasculine, ultraheterosexual form, but a lot of those dudes sing and dress and dance like chicks, and vice versa. Rock stars have a lot of leeway with gender roles that sports stars and politicians don’t. Rock is also pretty anxious about all of the crossdressing, an anxiety usually comes out disguised as a concern about authenticity.

The anxiety about music games also reminds me of rock’s ambivalence about synthesizers, especially among hard rock fans. Hard rock is supposed to be raw and authentic. Synthesizers are not considered by the hard rock audience to be raw or authentic. Metal fans never forgave Van Halen for the synth intro in “Jump.” They love to chuckle at the video of the band flailing to play along with the digital tape at the wrong speed and pitch. But even if they don’t like the idea of synths, rock fans find it hard to resist the sound. Rock is a sonically sophisticated art form, and if you really want to push the envelope, fattening up your guitar sounds with epically huge synthesizer waveforms can sound awesome. Warrant used to tour with a keyboard player who played from offstage and who they never mentioned.

I’ve made a commitment to let go of authenticity. I’ve had a lot more fun both listening to and playing music since I made that decision. Digital fakery feels more real to me than playing acoustic instruments half the time anyway. What matters to me is that everybody’s having a good time. Beatles drag has reliably been fun in other media, I see no reason why it won’t make a great video game.

Update: I finally did get to play Beatles Rock Band and it’s every bit as awesome as advertised. Also, here’s a good quote from a blog post by Jeff Vogel arguing that Rock Band is really a tool to facilitate deep listening:

I don’t want to make music. There are not enough hours in the day. I need a new creative outlet sucking up my time like I need a hole in my head. But I absolutely love to listen to music. And, when I play Rock Band, I play the songs I want to listen to, and I noodle along with them in a rhythmic, physical way that adds to my enjoyment of the song.

I still think this is pretty close to the experience of playing in a cover band, that it’s more a matter of studying existing music more closely than it is about expressing yourself. Playing is mostly about listening.

A harmonic oscillator produces sine waves, or their mathematical cousins sawtooth and square waves. For most of technological history, our oscillators were mechanical systems of skins or reeds or metal. For the past hundred-ish years we’ve also been using electronic oscillators connected to speaker cones. Making a steady mechanical oscillator is expensive and challenging. Even making a reliable tuning fork or pendulum takes some crafty engineering. A side benefit of the computer revolution is that we’ve figured out how to mass-produce very cheap electronic oscillators out of quartz crystals and microchips, so now we’re surrounded by them in our cell phones and computers.

Sine wave oscillations are thermodynamically unlikely and hard to produce. Noise is everywhere and easy to produce. In mechanical systems the big challenge is to limit it. In electronic systems, pure sine waves are easy to make and sustain. Now that we’ve had a chance to listen to them, we’ve come to appreciate the musical value of noise better. Pure sine waves sound unearthly and fake. Part of what gives a cello its distinctive tone is the noise of the bow scraping against the strings. Percussion is mostly shaped noise.

Once you have your blend of sine waves and noise, you want to be able to control when they start and stop, how loud they are, and what pitch they’re at. Ideally you also want to be able to shape the overtones to give nuance to your tone. In mechanical instruments the control surface is the whole object. In electronic systems, the control surface and the sound generation system can be totally separate devices. Using computers it’s possible to produce any recorded or synthesized sound at all from a keyboard or even video game controllers and cell phones.

Finally, you probably need to boost your signal to make a loud enough sound that people can hear it. For that, you need a resonator, something that vibrates sympathetically with your signal. For electronic instruments the resonator is an electronic amplifier hooked to speakers, headphones or the business end of a recording device.

Here are some widely-used music tools in terms of the basic four components.

Your voice

• Oscillator: vocal folds
• Noise: plosives and fricatives
• Modulation: shape of mouth, position of tongue, lips and teeth
• Resonator: chest, sinus cavities

Beer bottle

• Oscillator: air at bottle mouth
• Noise: overblowing
• Modulation: blowing angle and intensity, amount of water inside
• Resonator: bottle interior

Clarinet

• Oscillator: reed
• Noise: overblowing
• Modulation: keys, embouchure
• Resonator: body

Piano

• Oscillator: strings
• Noise: none, unless you put ball bearings or something on the strings
• Modulation: timing and intensity of key presses and releases, sustain pedal
• Resonator: body

Acoustic guitar

• Oscillator: strings
• Noise: pick scraping, strings buzzing against fretboard
• Modulation: fingers on fretboard, pick angle and attack
• Resonator: body

Electric guitar

• Oscillator: strings, amp speaker driver
• Noise: pick scraping, string buzzing, amp distortion, electrical interference
• Modulation: fingers on fretboard, pick angle and attack, whammy bar, tone switches and knobs, effects units and expression pedals, amp settings…
• Resonator: amp speaker cone

Snare drum

• Oscillator: drum head
• Noise: snares
• Modulation: angle, location and intensity of whacking, makeup of striking implement (wood or rattan sticks, brushes, mallets, bare hands, etc)
• Resonator: body

Record player

• Oscillator: needle in the groove. The groove is shaped by the electromagnetic oscillations captured on the master tape, which follows the electrical signal from the microphones and mixing console in the original recording, and so on.
• Noise: dust on the needle and in the groove, electrical interference
• Modulation: speed knob, DJ scratching and crossfading
• Resonator: speaker cone

Drum machine

• Oscillator: Electromagnetic oscillators and crystal clocks
• Noise: Electromagnetic noisemakers
• Modulation: Buttons and knobs
• Resonator: speaker cone

Nintendo Entertainment System

• Oscillator: Electromagnetic oscillators and crystal clocks
• Noise: Electromagnetic noisemakers
• Modulation: Software on the game cartridge controlling voltages on the oscillators and noisemakers, as specified by the assembly language translation of Kōji Kondō’s score
• Resonator: TV speaker cones

The opening titles set the tone:

Here’s a representative sample of the gameplay itself.

From the box copy:

Play is controlled with the analog sticks only. No buttons to press. No combos to cause distress. Featuring ball-rolling and object-collecting gameplay mechanics of mesmerizing fluidity, reduced to Pac-Man simplicity, through pure absurdity.

Dimensions change drastically as your clump grows from a fraction of an inch to a monstrous freak of nature. Go from rolling along a tabletop to ravaging through city streets, picking up momentum and skyscrapers along the way.

Enjoy quirky, infectious humor throughout — from the insanely cosmic animations, to the wacky and wonderful musical stylings, to the royally contagious storyline that’s undoubtedly like no other.

Undoubtedly!

The word “katamari” means clump or wad, and “damacy” is an idiosyncratic transliteration of a Japanese word meaning spirit, not in the supernatural sense, more like the team spirit or school spirit sense.

There’s a back story which makes no sense and isn’t necessary to enjoy the game. The idea is that you’re a tiny antlike being rolling a sticky ball through various environments, trying to gather stuff up. The more stuff you gather, the bigger the sticky ball gets, and the larger the objects you’re able to pick up. For the most part, the game aspect is about beating the clock. You have a certain amount of time to make a ball of stuff of a certain diameter or composition.

The cool thing is that the game is mostly taking place in ordinary human environments, populated by ordinary human artifacts. In the house levels, you’re trying to roll up erasers, bottles, socks, chairs, remote controls. In the supermarket you’re rolling up shopping carts, melons, cans, rolls of toilet paper. There’s no functionless ‘wallpaper’ the way there is in most 3D games. Every object you encounter can be interacted with or picked up: the highway guardrails, clouds in the sky, trees and bushes, islands in the ocean – if you’re big enough, you can glom any object into your katamari.

I always enjoy banal settings and objects in a video game. Katamari would be way less surreal if it took place in a scifi or fantasy environment. It shares some of the uncanny pleasure of SimCity, the fun of seeing abstracted computer representations of familiar things.

Designers of mainstream computer game graphics are currently locked in an escalating race to produce ever more highly detailed and “realistic” game environments. The best designers, like Shigeru Miyamoto, long ago recognized that a cartoony look plays better to computer animation’s strengths as a medium than realism. Even in “realistic” games, designers have to do a lot of stylizing and streamlining to make their jobs manageable. The cartoony guys wisely recognize that limitation up front and turn it into an advantage.

Like the Mario and Zelda games, every object you encounter in Katamari is made of a few simple flat-colored polygons. That leaves plenty of computer horsepower to render a lot of such objects on the screen moving around in full fluid 3D. Part of the fun of Katamari is discovering the vast array of objects populating the game, and seeing how the designers have translated each one into their vocabulary of basic 3D solids: people, dogs, cats, bicycles, spatulas, batteries, baseball stadiums, shrubs, juice boxes, pencils, gas stations, carrots, balloons, endless varieties of seafood, video games (!), traffic cones, pillows, oil tankers, giant squid, giant robots.

For me, the best fantasies are largely grounded in reality, with just a few key variables changed. Katamari combines a largely realistic setting with fantastic changes in the player’s size. In the eighth level, you start out at the size of a thumbtack, and if you’re successful, by the end you’re picking up cars and shipping containers. In one swoop, you pass from rodent size through familiar human scale and out past whale or brontosaurus (both of which you pick up in the final level.) It’s especially strange that the scale change is gradual and continuous. At first a bike or table is a major feature of the landscape; later it’s an obstacle; still later it’s an object you can pick up.

Blogger Florian Eckhardt makes an intriguing suggestion:

I’ve only played a bit of the first Katamari. Do any of the levels allow you to build a Katamari so big that you eventually manage to roll-up the planet you’re on, then continue to build your katamari until you make a star of all creation, sucking up black holes and galaxies? Eventually, you get so big that you realize that the entire universe is but one small molecule in an infinitely recursive cosmos, and you can actually continue to expand your universe throughout infinity? That really does seem like the natural conclusion of the concept.

Computer simulation is a helpful way of expanding your imagination out of what Richard Dawkins calls Middle World. Even slight changes in scale would make a big difference in our experience of the world. Shortly after getting Katamari, we also got a new kitten. I would turn off the game and then sit and watch him explore our apartment from his tiny vantage point. What is it like to be that small? Katamari put me in the perfect frame of mind to imagine it. I’d love it if somebody did a detailed simulator of the ordinary life of an NYC pigeon, or rat, or cockroach. Even better, I’d love a game set in a human immune system, like Fantastic Voyage meets Osmosis Jones.

Katamari’s lovingly weird design extends to its soundtrack. It uses an album’s worth of fully-produced songs in a variety of genres, all of which are about the game. The soundtrack was a hit in Japan and won their equivalent of a Grammy. It includes a couple of peculiar love songs:

I know you love me, I want to wad you up into my life
Let’s roll up to be a single star in the sky

This is sung by a Japanese guy, in English, in a clear effort at emulating Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, missing both targets by a mile but succeeding at creating a crooner style of his own.

The soundtrack is best known for this hook, sung here a capella by composer Yu Miyake:

The tutorial sequence adds a charmingly old school chiptune accompaniment to the hook.

The game includes several variations on the hook, ranging from an introspective solo piano version to this:

The MP3s come from here, so Namco, if you’re looking for someone to sue, sue them.

The overall sound design is mostly standard beeps and bloops, but there’s one nice touch, the King’s speech, which sounds like turntable scratching.

Katamari has spawned several highly recommended sequels. We Love Katamari is the same basic idea, but with new wrinkles. One level takes place on a racetrack environment with a race going on, and you’re hurtling around at many times your usual speed. But you’re not participating in the race itself, you’re just rolling stuff up as usual, so you’re free to roll against traffic, off-road among the spectators, whatever you want. Another level has you seeking out objects based not on their size but their monetary value. Finally, there’s a serenely beautiful underwater level. The soundtrack continues to be mostly delightful J-pop.

There’s also a sequel for the PSP called Me And My Katamari, combining features of its predecessors with more widely varied topography. The cartoony graphics translate very well to the tiny screen. There’s also a port for iPhone, which is fun too, though the tilt sensor doesn’t give anything like the same control sensitivity as analog thumbsticks. There are a couple of titles for newer consoles too, but I’m a cheapskate and still haven’t moved beyond the Gamecube.

Too many American games aspire to the condition of movies. Japanese games tend to be truer to their medium, focused more on the experience than the visuals and other decoration. On our honeymoon, I spent some time in arcades in Tokyo and Kyoto, and was surprised to find that in addition to the expected super high-tech games, there were quite a few older titles in active use. Street Fighter II has never gone out of style in the arcades over there, even though it sits alongside more advanced sequels and imitators. People were also playing a lot of computerized mah-jong, with graphics suggesting something you’d get for free with Windows 95.

Japanese gamers were earlier adopters of music games like Dance Dance Revolution than we were here in the US. They generally take games a lot more seriously than we do, so their TV shows and movies show a lot of video game influence, as opposed to the other way around here in the US. Keita Takahashi, Katamari’s designer, says he was going for the vibe of Pac-Man. I think he’s got the right idea.

See my images tagged Katamari on Flickr

Update: hear a mashup that includes the Katamari theme song.