Do you have any idea what this is?
It’s an ecstasy I never dreamed possible.
On getting my new phone and discovering that ringtones are basically MIDI files — a format I had a little familiarity with in the wake of hacking the player piano — I went a little bit nuts. I found a site with a slew of game tunes lovingly re-created and remixed by fans (many of the original composers’ names, which might otherwise be lost to history, are inscribed deep in the files) and downloaded as many as I could.
Most of them are too long to be used as ringtones if you don’t want to be one of those awful people who interrupt meetings and moments of intimacy with jangly songs. I have, however, considered the possibilities of cranking the game music when confronted by some kid on the subway playing the latest 50 Cent song as loud as his tinny little Motorola speakers will bear. (A beatdown? Perhaps more thought is needed.) Anyway Austin pointed out that it probably wasn’t too hard to edit MIDI files, so I looked into it.
Sure enough, you can drag and drop ’em right into Garage Band, and the tracks spread out across your screen in the green blocks above. The song pictured is an obscure one — the first level music for the game Quartet, for the Sega Master System. We never had a Sega, but my cousins Peter and Emily did, and we’d play when we visited them in Sacramento, sitting on the cool floor in the living room of their old Mission house. We were young and uncoordinated, and we’d put the game down after a few tries. As a result this song, despite its macho Eighties noodling, holds a little more sadness for me than the game’s story or the minor notes would warrant. This was a song we’d hear maybe two or three times a year.
But I’d play it back in my head all year long. It was full of cousin rambunction: secret code, parody songs, trips to the ice cream store and that incident with the giant lollipop; the half-wild animals at the Folsom Zoo and the rabbit skins we bought at Sutter’s Fort just because they were soft; that time I erased Uncle Bob’s entire hard drive playing Manhole. That time we showed up and an hour later someone ran over their cat, overshadowing the whole trip. The soporific heat of Downtown Sacramento in the summer, and the salvation of the live oak trees. Going back by way of older, more intimidating relatives’ houses in San Francisco; a last stop for candied fruit slices at Fisherman’s Wharf, and then a plunge back down through the Central Valley jammed in the brown velour backseat if you were unlucky and the air conditioning at full blast thank God as we passed by the feedlots, back down by the roads to camps I’d never go to again, by the amusement parks; back to the new-minted divorce. Back to my unease with myself, my gender, my parents all spilling over onto my waning relationship with my so-much-girlier cousin.
If you had ever told me that one day not only would posessing a copy of a game song be easier than holding my tape recorder up in front of the TV and shushing my sisters while we attempted to beat the level — if you had told me I would be able to track down that song from my own living room, that I would with almost no effort take it onto a computer with a screen colored as vividly as a television — more colorful than the game itself! — and pull and snip and shape, with the movements of my hands rather than ones and zeros, those same notes…
I just had no idea this was coming, did you?
Look at them. In a written-out MIDI, the notes themselves look like a level. Think about Vib Ribbon and the Harmonix games and reconsider… there’s got to be a way to build more of a world on the platforms made by the notes…
Garage Band can also write out the tablature:
and who thought my computer would ever do that for me? Forgetting the clef for a moment and looking at it with a violist’s eyes, it’s terrifying: they want me to WHAT with my fourth finger?! It’s true. Those notes are impossibly high. They’re to be played by unearthly instruments.
It’s kind of cool to see them dignified in that old-fashioned calligraphy, so much less transparent than the MIDI file. A secret code of another kind. If I wanted, I could play the song on my accordion now. Well, maybe not THIS song; my fingerwork was never that fast. But I bet I could play some of the Mario music.
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