Cultural Imperialism in Capcom’s Mega Man Series

With its diverse “orchestral” palette and complex forms, the Nintendo NES repertoire stands as a monument to innovation—a creative outpouring driven by a compositional challenge inherent to the NES medium: how to create music that repeats extensively without drawing attention to the fact that it is repeating. In response to this challenge, composers developed ways to create the illusion of variety. On the one hand, they pushed the limits of the 2A03 sound chip by crafting timbral and textural effects to deepen its well of possibilities. On the other hand, they employed modular and layered compositional techniques to simultaneously maximize and disguise repetition. Innovative as they are, these methods capture only a portion of the NES repertoire’s sophisticated makeup. This article moves beyond the details of technique and form to examine NES music from a new angle, one that centers on the impressive network of cultural meanings with which it engages. By treating deviations from normative musical traits as hermeneutic windows, my work draws on Japanese cultural studies, postwar Japanese history, and anime to interpret Capcom’s Mega Man series, and in particular Mega Man 2 (1989), as an allegory of cultural imperialism.

The Atari VCS

This chapter explores the Atari VCS, the machine that took video games out of the arcades and into the living room and established Atari as the dominant player in the home video games industry, at least for a time. It examines the context that surrounded the birth of the Atari VCS and how that influenced its hardware design, in turn shaping both the sound and people’s expectations of video game music. The Atari’s sound chip, the Television Interface Adaptor, gave the Atari VCS what might charitably be described as a ‘characterful’ voice. By reviewing the hardware, this chapter explores how and why the Atari VCS sounded just the way it did, and by exploring some of the games that were released for the platform the chapter shows how, while sound games did indeed sound dreadful, with a little musical ingenuity they could work wonderfully as game soundtracks.

The Ultimate Soundtracker?

In the early days of home computing, writing music was as much a technical as a creative process. This chapter explores how the launch of a software music package, Ultimate Soundtracker, for Commodore’s Amiga created a new, symbolic way to compose and edit music. It was sample-based and structured music using a grid-style interface that could be navigated using the computer keyboard, and its music files distributed both, making it easy to share—and copy—others’ musical ideas. This ‘open-source’ approach allowed nonprogrammers and nonmusicians to experiment with music making and for the sound to promulgate. This was also the period from which the term ‘chiptune’ emerged; the Amiga’s sample-based chipset allowed it to create other sounds beside raw electronic waveforms, and chiptune was used to highlight tracks written in the 8-bit sound chip style.

The Commodore 64

Commodore’s C64 was a musical powerhouse. Its on-board sound chip, the Sound Interface Device, gave it the functionality of a professional three-channel digital synthesizer. This chapter explores the development of the machine and how its feature set was determined by a corporate battle over cheap calculator chips. The power of the Sound Interface Device, however, made it very complex and difficult to use. Even seasoned developers needed time to explore all of its intricacies, and it took time to unlock its full potential. In the days before graphical editors, writing music on the Commodore required a high degree of musicality and a deep understanding of the low-level hardware architecture. As a result, it was on the Commodore 64 that the role of video composer became more specialized and more professionalized and the craft of writing music drivers, code to perform digital music, really became established.

A Novel Approach to Build a Generic Model of Photovoltaic Solar System Using Sound Biometric Techniques

This chapter presents the proposed model of combination between Photovoltaic solar system resources and sound biometric techniques, to generate power energy from the sunlight using the PVS controlled by a sound biometric technique. This work contributes to research knowledge by proposing and validating a sound biometric technique for allowing to reduce the consumption of the generated power energy by turn the lights on for the public roads only when there are vehicles on the way and only for some period of time to make the driving out of harm's way and trouble-free. The proposed and combination models between the PVS and biometric sound chip is used for generating electric power by using solar cells to convert energy from the sun light into a flow of direct current electricity, which can be used to power equipment or to recharge a battery. In addition the Sound biometric techniques can enable PVS to listen and understand their surrounding auditory environment since turning the lights on all the time will get through a lot of energy which it might be used in other significant concerns.