Gameboy Audio Project

Colin Anderson

I loved writing tunes for Game Boy. Not the posh new-fangled Game Boy Advance with its eight channels of sampled sound - that was too much like a SNES - but the original Game Boy with its two square waves, a variable wave and a noise generator. As a creative person there's something wonderfully liberating about those sorts of harsh limitations. Perhaps it's because of the old cliché regarding art never being complete, only abandoned; when you only have four simultaneous sound sources available it's much easier to tell when it's time to abandon what you're creating. After all, if there's four sounds playing and you still don't like what you're hearing then there's only two options - write another tune or change the notes you've chosen in the current one. There's no "maybe it would work better with a different piano sound", or "perhaps it needs more compression on the acoustic guitar", or even "should I add a harmony to that lead line". Aaaaaah - the simplicity!

Last time I worked on Game Boy I was tasked with taking all the tunes I'd written for a Game Boy Advance project and making them work on this more limited medium. At first it was frustrating and I really struggled, but once I got the hang of it I began to really enjoy the process. In the end I actually preferred many of the Game Boy versions to the Game Boy Advance versions, simply because the arrangements had been strengthened so much by the process of conversion. Every note counts when there's only four available at any moment and that means as a composer you're forced to evaluate the impact of each one. Each note has to earn its keep - if you haven't experienced that as a composer I'd highly recommend it. You start off believing it's impossible and end up believing anything's possible. Very rewarding and inspiring.

Anyway, the point of all this was that while working on Game Boy I'd often found myself thinking that I'd love to try writing Game Boy music without relying on the hardware. While I appreciated the focus it brought through its sound palette and polyphony limitations the fidelity limitations brought by the cheap hardware components were less appealing. I enjoyed only having three monophonic waves to play tunes with, but I didn't enjoy the fact that the purity of their tones were often contaminated by all sorts of aliasing effects imposed by the cheap hardware components. Plus the signal-to-noise ratio was irritatingly poor, so even if you used headphones instead of the speaker it never sounded "hi-fi". What I really wanted was the simplicity of the Game Boy sound architecture without the fidelity compromises. That's where Reason took over...

When I started using Propellerheads' Reason package (www.propellerheads.se) in 2002 it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life - or at least a part of it. Up until then composing music was fun, but actually realising it - getting it in to a form that others could listen to - was a huge chore. The sound in your head always required Synth A to be routed through Effect B and - guaranteed - Synth A would be ten centimetres further away from Effect B than the longest cable you could find in your unfeasibly large box of cables. The result of this meant that "recording music" was usually a logistical/D-I-Y task than any sort of creative process and I often felt that manifested in the end results. It was those sorts of experiences that made me fully appreciate why recording studios employ dedicated engineers to assist with recording music. But Reason changed all that - suddenly the distance between Synth A and Effect B was no more that a mouse click (and, fortunately, they'd stopped copying the "hardware experience" just before getting to the point where they made you look through a box for the right cable only to find it was too short!). This change alone meant that suddenly the process of realising music was every bit as much fun as composing it in the first place.

At this point I decided it would fun to build the Game Boy sound architecture within Reason. Given the vast sonic complexity the package is capable of it appealed to my sense of humour that I could use it to build my "hi-fi Game Boy" with its massive four note polyphony based on the simplest sound sources. So, taking inspiration from the second Dundee Jam high-concept, "build", that's exactly what I did - I built a virtual Game Boy within Reason.

Actually, I did a whole lot more than that - that was just the first part and I'd finished that by about 10am. Next I wanted to get a tune working, but I wanted it to be interactive - so that I could "build" it (see - keeping to the spirit again!) in real time and in relation to changing events. That could be me simply thinking "now this part, now that part", but similarly it could be a game application triggering appropriate sections of the tune as the player plays through it. Reason was never going to be able to provide that functionality, so I decided to build the music within Ableton Live (www.ableton.com) as that's what it's designed for. (As an aside, I've always believed that DJs are far closer to understanding and appreciating what I would consider "interactive music" than any of those crappy "Direct Music" type algorithmic music packages ever were, but that's for another day).

By lunchtime I had my virtual Game Boy, courtesy of Reason, and various discreet parts of a tune that could be triggered in any order at any time (so, interactive-ish at least) courtesy of Ableton. I was then feeding the music data from Ableton in to Reason via a Rewire interface and the whole thing was working - it sounded just like a hi-fi Game Boy!

The afternoon was the fun part, although I was starting to go a little cross-eyed by then as I'd been staring intently at a computer screen for about 4 hours. If the morning had been about creating a high fidelity version of a Game Boy then the afternoon was going to be about exploring what could be done with that Game Boy if it retained its four note polyphony but gained an effects loop for each channel. Again - "build"ing (good, eh?) on the basic Game Boy system. I spent the whole afternoon (up until about 4.30pm - I couldn't go the distance with all the hardcore coders in there...) plugging different effects in to each channel and finding out what the creative possibilities were

In the end I had a composition that on the one hand could sound like a Game Boy, but could then be made to sound like something far more contemporary (and, for lack of a better term, like "real" music) through the application of extreme effects - all fully interactive, both in terms of the composition itself and the effects treatments applied.

The final result is interesting and not quite what I expected. I'd always assumed that the best improvements would come from modifying (however slightly) the basic Game Boy sound architecture. I thought that adding resonant filters to the oscillators would result in something far more impressive; those sorts of thing, but in actual fact I've discovered that what I enjoy most is the purity of the Game Boy sound, and the simplicity of its timbre, just subtly enhanced by the lack of hardware aliasing and with some really basic delay and reverb.

I'm looking forward to taking this system and using it as the basis for some other experiments to see what changes make the most impact on its capabilities. I'm hopeful that I should be able to get an "interactive game music" prototyping tool working before long. One that helps focus creators on the important parts of the process, such as when and why to change things, and less on the trivial parts such as musical composition.

Thanks to Dundee Jam for giving me the opportunity and motivation to try doing something I've been meaning to for years.

ENDS