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.