'I mean, Beethoven changed the world as we know it, and I doubt he would have done that through video games. 'I have a hard time imagining that,' Bell adds. Laughing, concert violinist and self-described 'video game addict' Joshua Bell says, 'Uh, well, that's quite a statement to say that about Beethoven. 'It's for this reason that I've always said that if Beethoven were alive today, he'd be a video game composer.' Tallarico explains that video game music isn't a passive experience, but an integral part of the foreground. Wall went on to score the third and fourth installments of the Myst series, and he based the main theme for Myst III on Karl Orff's Carmina Burana. The complexity of the music improved to the point where the score of a video game became almost indistinguishable from the music played in the finest concert halls. He says the game actually aided the player through the mysterious worlds, functioning as clues. It was 1993's Myst that made Wall realize the power of music in a game. That changed with the CD-ROM.Īs personal computers became more agile and more powerful, suddenly the music track could handle something resembling real music. But still, video game music was limited by its hardware. Video game soundtracks began to take influence from more serious places, like the Russian folk song in Tetris. Like the purpose of all great music, it's supposed to change your heart rate - to move you and make you feel. And it goes to show and prove how significant audio and music are.' Now they'd do the same studies without the sound, and the people wouldn't panic as much. Now, what the game programmers did was that they took the person's heart rate, and as they're getting closer and closer, people would start to panic. Video game composer Tommy Tallarico explains, 'If you remember in Space Invaders, you know, as the ships started to come down, the aliens, and as they got closer and closer, the sound got faster and faster.

However trivial these early video games' soundtracks may seem, they weren't serious for good reason. It's catchy and it's fun, but it's not exactly serious music. The bleeps and bloops, they kind of invade your brain.' 'Playing all those arcade games, I never even paid attention to the music,' Wall tells host Andrea Seabrook. One of today's top video game music composers, John Wall, spent much of the 1980s pumping quarters into Pac Man machines. The players hit a ball back and forth across a center line with that now-recognizable onomatopoeic sound. In the early 1970s, video game music wasn't exactly symphonic. What was the music? Uematsu's soundtrack for the popular video game Final Fantasy. In fact, there was almost a riot at the box office when people couldn't get tickets. In May 2004, a composer named Nobuo Uematsu joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a single performance of his most famous work. Video game music has come a long way since Space Invaders, but that doesn't make its soundtrack any less effective.

Myst video game soundtrack