study-music

Video game music

Chiptune music player, also my attempt to show music theory in it

Otocky (1987, NES) - an early example of a music video game

Music theory

• 🎥 8-bit Music Theory

• Seventh Sam - VGM analysis, all analyses in an archive

• Christopher J. Hopkins. Chiptune Music: An Exploration of Compositional Techniques as Found in Sunsoft Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System And Famicom From 1988-1992

• https://web.archive.org/web/20110815082924/http://dutycyclegenerator.com/
• https://github.com/chrisdonahue/nesmdb
• Eunjin Choi et al. YM2413-MDB: A Multi-Instrumental FM Video Game Music Dataset with Emotion Annotations
• Karen M. Cook. 8-Bit Affordances: Jun Chikuma’s Soundtrack to Faxanadu
• Elizabeth Medina-Gray. Analyzing Modular Smoothness in Video Game Music
• Richard Evans. Analyzing and Designing DMSs for Games
• Sean E. Atkinson. Soaring Through the Sky: Topics and Tropes in Video Game Music

Musicology

These resources focus more on a historical context of origin or usage of certain music in video games, rather than a deep analysis of its specific harmonic/form traits:

• Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers. Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music
• 🎥 Beep: Game Sound History
• Retronauts podcast
• Karen Collins with Chris Greening. The Beep Book: Documenting the History of Game Sound
• https://soundcloud.com/retrogameaudio
• books and papers by William Gibbons
• Game songs that have real life mimics (Or vice versa)

Trackers

• https://famistudio.org/
• https://deflemask.com/