The Music In Winter Levels Sounds Like Winter

[@12tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) Another way that subjectivity creeps into this is deciding which labels apply to which pieces in the first place. In the case of instrumentation, this isn't that hard, (although with synthesized instruments, there is some level of judgment involved) but, like, what counts as arpeggiated accompaniment? How heavy does the reverb have to be to qualify as "heavy reverb"? These are questions a human has to decide the answer to. 2) While I largely agree with the prominent tags the authors chose to ignore, I am somewhat unsure on their decision to exclude woodwinds, specifically flutes, from their analysis. These are also highly correlated with the other winter tags, and while it's true that they also show up in other settings, they do still feel wintery to me when used in winter themes, much like arpeggiated accompaniments do. It's possible their use of meta-tags, grouping all woodwinds under the "woodwind" banner obscured how prominent flutes, specifically, were in their dataset, but I dunno. 3) Speaking of arpeggiated accompaniment, another thing to note is that not only are they common in retro video game music, they're also common in orchestral pieces (due to the prevalence of single-note instruments in orchestral settings) which are a major influence on modern video game scores as well. 4) That harp part in Antidote was a huge pain to transcribe and it's very possible I got parts of it completely wrong. If so, whoops! 5) Technically, Winter Bliss has more of a dance drum kit, not a rock drum kit, but I mostly just meant that standard trap-set beats are still common, albeit less so than one might naively expect. 6) On that, I feel like I may not have made it clear that the main point here is that, outside of drum kits, there are basically no other non-metallic percussion instruments that show up regularly. No timpani, no congas, no orchestral snares… And, like 4/4, drum kits are so common across video game music that their presence here doesn't really signify much.

[@donkeymccarrots8718]

Hi 12 tone! Since you made this winter video, I was wondering if you would be interested in making an analysis of the summer camp track from psychonauts? The one called : whispering rock psychic summer camp, I think it captures the scene of a hot summer day in a forest like no other game ever made... The whole game actually has amazing scores...

[@Digitalhunny]

Have you ever heard of the band TOOL? If so would you _please_ consider explaining to us their style of music to us untrained music lovers? I'm talking what the heck is their scale? Most importantly _how & why_ does it work? Any of these songs of their could use _some_ explanation, please? Songs: Schism, Stinkfist, Vicarious, Right in Two, The Pot or Prison Sex. Thank you for _all_ of the music education, explanation & fun doodles you've provided us over the years. *HUGS, from this Canadian gal. 💕💕🤗💕💕

[@christiannorton9400]

See, when I think of flutes in themed music, I tend to think of nature as a whole rather than just winter. I definitely see a case in either direction, but my point is that both cases exist

[@SteveN-dw1uy]

Find it strange that they didn't include a corpus of non-winter (computer game) music so they could screen out the features common to both. As mentioned the 4-4 feature probably shows up in both, but the heavy reverb or metallic percussion should show up disproportionately more often in winter music rather as compared to the general corpus, and would also help answer your questions on arpeggios and woodwind instruments. It's one thing to know a feature is common in winter music, but more important to know it's *only* common in winter music. Also, you might find negative features, like say winter music includes jazz or syncopated rhythms far less frequently than other computer game music (as a hypothetical example). I don't think they can easily identify this type of feature with their methodology. Still an interesting piece of research I would never have thought about, thanks for sharing it!

[@xKatjaxPurrsx]

Suggestion: Playing God, but it's a 12tone video!

[@wmxx2000]

I like this idea as a series. What makes a desert level? What makes a forest level? What makes a cave level? What makes a sky/flying level? There is a lot of options here.

[@thebrokenpuppet2714]

Yeah there’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about that is adjacent to this.

[@fantomflasch2289]

Since deserts are more regionally specific than "winter", it's a lot more simple, imo. Desert music contains stylistic elements borrowed from either: traditional Southwest Asian music (and globally nearby regions like North Africa and South Asia), or American Country Western, or Mexican and/or Spanish. I haven't personally heard anything else.

[@sclom5676]

You could even add things like boss music, battle music or the like.

[@allhailklisz]

@@fantomflasch2289 That's what makes things particularly interesting to me for deserts - the fact that desert level music often borrows from the music of those regions is well-known, but I'd be fascinated to see if there are any signifiers *beyond* those.

[@fantomflasch2289]

@@allhailklisz Yeah, 12tone's video mentions the frequent use of "cold" metallic instruments in winter music, I wonder if there is also instrumentation that is considered "dry."

[@smalleranimals]

yep. what you need for winter is 'sparkly and brittle' - crisp arpeggios, bright metallic instruments, lots of reflectivity (reverb / delay), and a lot of high frequencies. because that's the sound of a beautiful hard-frozen landscape - bits of ice tinkling onto frozen ground, bright flashes of sunlight catching in ice, hard echoes, and a bit of danger lurking (because you can freeze to death)

[@aeroandspace]

Also, snow dampens lower frequencies, so we hear the higher frequencies more starkly in real-world wintery environments

[@mr.bennett108]

I was told by a musician "video game and movie soundtracks are just what olden days opera music was." It's interesting you didn't mention the concept of cliches. Each level type is defined by a set of musical cliches.

[@RafaelSolaPACalsaverini]

As someone who does computational statistics for a living, one thing I missed is including in the dataset pieces that are definitely NOT winter themes. This way, instead of only looking at shows up frequently in winter themes the authors could have studied what distinguishes winter from non-winter themes. What are good predictors of "winterness"? One idea would me to randomly select other level themes from a pool of not-winter-related levels. Of course this would be a lot of additional work so, that's probably why it wasn't done. It doesn't invalidate the conclusions. It would only make them stronger. But it would help clean up blatant population effects like "being in 4/4" and add adequate weight to features that aren't as strong like "arpeggiated harmony ".

[@Sibula]

Oh, definitely. I feel like arpeggios are overall very common in video game music, probably because of the limitations of older hardware like he mentioned. But are they more common in winter levels? Probably?

[@eaglescout1984]

2 observations: First, I'm surprised you didn't mention Vivaldi, since he actually wrote music titled "winter". And although reverb and percussion weren't a thing in baroque music, the second movement employs plucked strings. So, that's been a theme in winter music for 4 centuries now. Also, Diddy Kong Racing has a winter song (Frosty Village) and you might as well call it "variations on winter wonderland". So, some video games do sample public domain Christmas/winter songs to evoke winter as well.

[@astaphe9186]

I was also surprised. Reverb obviously didn't exist but the trilled strings and use of harmonic tones creates a similar effect--one that I think a lot of video game snow-level music also copies

[@augiegirl1]

1:41 He draws Olaf from “Frozen”, but doesn't even mention the music from that movie! Also, “The Piano Guys“ do an INCREDIBLE mashup of Vivaldi’s “Winter” & “Let It Go”. Also, the only game that I play is “Frozen Freefall”, by JamCity; the game itself is very similar to Candy Crush.

[@Kousaburo]

Well if it ain't Baroque, don't fix it.

[@RAFMnBgaming]

Interesting that that happened with both that in DKR and with riffing off teddy bears' picnic for grunty's theme in Banjo Kazooie for a fairytale feel, despite DKR and BK being scored by different composers (David Wise and Grant Kirkhope respectively). Guess great minds thought alike, at Rare, in essentially the same development cycle window. Weird.

[@MatthewMe]

I'll add my thoughts here, though I'm not a trained musician. Winter music is often about evoking environmental conditions though the music. And this showed up the study indirectly - metallic instruments evoke the sounds of ice cracking, sleet falling, and the hollow sound of movement when the environment is blanketed in snow or ice. This is often accomplished with bells and chimes. Reverb gives the impression of echoing cold winds. Great video! Thanks!

[@DC_Prox]

I don't know if this needs to be a series, but I notice that water levels and dessert levels also have their own sounds that would make for some good analysis. Also, less common but almost as iconic: tech levels.

[@furiousfap3369]

Lava levels too. Magmoor Caverns in metroid prime especially comes to mind.

[@Glasshouse828]

Dessert Levels? You mean like levels made out of candy and sweets?

[@mxspokes]

There's often a Wind subtheme to winter levels, a lot of open things like hisses or breeze design but harsh and cold.

[@chrishillery]

A lot of these characteristics are common to the soundtracks of "winter" movies, especially Christmas movies. Which is hardly surprising - if there is a video game vocabulary for "winter" it almost certainly was derived in large part from movie soundtracks, which in turn probably got it in large part from Baroque and Classical music.

[@Lemanic89]

I think the western association of winter with the Alps and Russia can explain the arps and string instruments used here. They want associations to Mozart and Tchaikovsky with that. It’s that simple.

[@teucer915]

Click Clock Woods from Banjo-Kazooie goes through all four seasons using variations on the same theme. It's fascinating as an example of this.

[@carbonmonoxide5052]

A lot of these pieces focus on the high end instead of middle and low. It’s hard to define pitch ranges specifically for this but it’s definitely a correlation (which makes sense since glockenspiels and such are high end).

[@aloysious1432]

I believe it may be more accurate to say that reverbing the high frequencies of a song gives it a winter-feel, as that gives a shimmering bell effect. That's what I notice across all those songs.

[@Drakethatsme]

I had the pleasure of hearing Prof. Lavengood present the paper at the AMS/SMT/SEM conference last year! Afterward, I actually brought up the winter as a place vs. winter as a season idea that you've brought up here!

[@danielcorrigan8805]

I'd love to see the same analysis for underwater themes since that is another setting that has a very clear musical style, and invokes some of the same techniques like heavy reverbs.

[@andyduke6119]

This has been my favorite by far, and I'd love to see a series about video game music or a "why this music type has these traits".

[@isaac_lin]

Interesting thoughts about reverb in winter--personally, freshly fallen (or falling) snow is the archetypal image in my mind for a wintery scene, and in the real world the sound is very hushed with a lack of echoes, as light, fluffy snow absorbs sound really well.

[@tfdband]

This is very cool! I do a composition exercise with my gaming-inclined students that involves writing a short theme based on a level, town, or character. It’s really fun to hear how different students interpret the same themes.

[@NanixsQuickieFoods]

Eyyy Snowdin town shoutout! Nice! Really fun video - I appreciate your analysis of the study itself, really nuanced the conversation!

[@timothybell9348]

okay this video is both timely and relevant (I keep bouncing around the idea of writing a "soundtrack" to Dungeon Keeper Ami and weaving winter-type music into her songs like a leitmotif would work exceptionally well) so it's getting saved to my favorites.

[@feltcute_mightdelete]

Thank you for citing Megan's paper. I saw her present it at SMT last year. I am a master's in music theory student and my thesis is on seasonal topic and affect in casual games. I've presented my paper on this in regards to Stardew Valley at a few conferences. There is surprisingly little research on seasonal music even though it has exist least since the Baroque era

[@feltcute_mightdelete]

One thing that I have found in my research on winter themes in SDV, is the lack of thirds or suppressed thirds that provide an empty feeling. In SDV, there are often clear chords being presented or arpeggiated but they lack the quality defining third.

[@msr0ry7]

I love this so much. Winter themes in music, movies and video games are always my absolute favourites

[@SebiStr99]

If I had to describe winter-themes I'd say: bright; short notes/arpeggios; no/low mids; bells, chimes and other metallic "ding"-sounds; reverb on higher frequencies; (sounds like snow drowning out the mids and bass, ice sparkling and reflecting at the top end) Edit: usually similar to crystal-cave themes, probably due to crystal caves having an ice like aesthetic

[@peccantis]

For sure. The Great Crystal theme of FFXII even has an extremely wintery "chilly wind" glissando just where the track is about to loop.

[@PurpleBroadcast]

8:49 you got to the point, finally

[@Respectable_Username]

The fact the study didn't have a "control" group of non-winter levels to compare results against surprises me. I would have considered that an obvious if not _primary_ step in the data analysis, seeing the delta between the frequency of these elements occurring in the winter music versus the non-winter music

[@scottbubb2946]

I didn't see the title, but that music made me think of caves. And the threat of something menacing. Definitely an ominous connotation.

[@bmac4]

One thing I'd be interested in is an analysis of how stuff like modes and tempo affect it all. I imagine major key and higher tempo winter stuff would be focused on the "warm" side of winter, like a holiday/Christmas-y or even just that vibe of "fireplace respite in a cold snowy area" while the more desolate, colder stuff would be minor key and at slower tempos with more minimal instrumentation. I also imagine a good chunk has to do with how VGM is a scene so heavily built off influence from predecessors. Nobuo Uematsu is among the most esteemed and influential composers of video game music, and he was inspired by an eclectic amount of sounds including Tchaikovsky, whose compositions in the Nutcracker Suite are practically a standard in terms of Christmas music in the musical zeitgeist.

[@AuroraFirestorm]

I'm surprised you didn't bring up high pitches. High pitched percussion especially sounds delicate, and snow and ice are also very delicate.

[@timpunny]

first 12tone notification i actually clicked on in a while. my prediction: jingle bells and high pass filters

[@Reditect]

Heyo! I'm in the process of finishing a winter level in my video game. This video has been a great help with understanding what direction I should go in for the background music. I love that a research paper was brought into a KZbin video; I think more things like this should exist. Anywho, I'm striving to learn as much as I can about music theory and generally educate myself about video games in various aspects. So, I will be sure to read the paper and continue research on this topic. Appreciate the video for sure! The visual style of it all is very enticing. :)

[@lawrencebates8172]

Coming at this as someone who does some computational biology, this was interesting. There are a few things that I would really like to see in order to get a better sense of how robust and powerful this approach is. The first is pretty much required: a control group. I realize it's a lot of work, but labelling up a comparable number of non-winter tracks, ideally from the same panel of games, would make the analysis way more interpretable. Is it reasonable to exclude 4/4 or use of the major key? Having a control group will make it easy to tell. While the use of sleigh bells is probably winter-specific, maybe the lack of a main drumkit is actually more common among video game music than we realize. Second, I'd love to see some cluster analysis. In the paper they look at how the different tags cluster and interconnect, but it would be really interesting to look at how the tracks themselves cluster; by performing dimensional reduction analysis, you can go from a big table with all of the tags down to a 2D plot with the tracks clustering closer together with other tracks that have similar tags and further from those that have different tags. Combined with the use of controls, this will first off give a very clear idea of whether winter tracks are a distinct catagory of videogame music, or if the tags used are too generic to pick out these details. It will also suggest if they are subclasses of winter tracks; fully orchestrated tracks should sit apart from 8-bit tracks. If this is the case, it's interesting to look at what features they still share, and they may be groupings that you might not have otherwise noticed. You will also likely be able to pull out some distinctions based on when the music was made, since the technical limitations mean that some tags are just impossible to find in earlier music. This brings up the third point: regression analysis. There's a lot of data about the context in which these tracks occur, from the date they were released and the hardware they used, to the tone of the scene and genre of the game. Looking at how the different tags are enriched or avoided against a panel of these context cues would be really neat. Again, a control group would be useful to see which of these trends are broadly applicable to videogame music and which are winter-specific. This relates to your point about the distinction between ice-themed areas vs seasonal (winter/christmas) tunes; those are pretty easy categories to analyse in this way.

[@robertellis6853]

While gathering all the winter level themes together into one isolated group is certainly one way to get an idea of what makes a song "winter," its prone to a lot of excess variables that muddy up the results. This is something you point out when talking about how the researchers had to toss some things like 4/4 rime signature because it was ubiquitous not just in winter themes, but all video game music, amd western music as a whole. I feel that a way to move the research forward would be to vastly increase the dataset, not with winter themes, but with a selection of non-einter themes from the same games. That way the model can demphasize characteristics common to video games, or even to that game/composer. Of course, this makes a much more complex model, and even more manual tagging, so I can understand why the researchers didn't go that route.

[@EllisThings]

"if I play you a different star wars clip..." HAHAHAHA sublime choice!

[@scottgray4623]

Kudos to 12tone for digging up Ewok Celebration - I'm still baffled as to why it got removed.

[@jafujiyoshi]

Wonder if they could’ve subtracted from the tag population of randomly chosen tracks from the same games. Would take care of the 4/4 issue - I think 3/4 would actually be more relatively common. Also would bump up something like sleigh bells, if 25% of winter tracks had them and 2% of random tracks did. Maybe that also provides insight into the contribution of technology.

[@porgy29]

One thing that is common among some of the tags (and in many of the clips) but wasn't mentioned specifically, and I felt was left out, was the tendency for prominent parts of the melody to be higher pitch. Something that glockenspiel, pizzicato violin, and sleigh bells have in common is that they all tend to be pretty high. Even the entire melody is not in the high end it sounds like many many have prominent high notes sprinkled in as accents. If you go through the examples used they all make use of a lot of high "bright" notes. FFX, Mega Man, Donkey Kong, Metroid, Pokemon, Undertale, Kingdom Hearts: all tend towards the top end of the scale.

[@StormTheSquid]

I'm currently trying to write some music for a winter themed campaign arc for my d&d game, and this is actually incredibly helpful! Thank you!

[@ShadowDrakken]

I feel like two additional things got completely missed: there's a floaty quality to winter music, though that may be the reverb. But more importantly, there's an up and down wave in the music rather than rapid changes in direction.

[@Armakk]

3:37 Finally.... a walrus.

[@Yupppi]

Add christmassy noises like tambourine, high pitch dings, bells, swoosh windlike tones etc. Reverberated, short notes too. Like ice breaking.

[@kedrak90]

I think the next step to do is to look at the reverse just to see how much it checks out. I mean it would be interesting to rank random themes on their winteryness and see if the computationally most wintery non-winter theme feels wintery to humans as well. I think something like the great fairy fountain fom Zelda OOT would fit great to a winter level in a different game. It fits pretty well with its reverb, plucked strings and arpeggios.

[@warbossworm]

Lake Wintergrasp from World of Warcraft is a fantastic wintery piece. Segments of it consist entirely of sparsely-arranged, reverbed, metallic percussion.

[@syruplease]

that trumpet

[@everestjarvik5502]

Where I live, it doesn’t snow much- so one day in 2019 where it snowed like a foot and a half, I was inspired to make a snowy feeling song I subconsciously used pretty much all of these tropes, the only exception being missing drums (although one of the drum sounds I used was footsteps walking through the snow so)

[@toblexson5020]

This has got me thinking about almost the opposite of compositional based work. How effectively can you evoke environments with a single instrument? Can a solo guitar evoke snow and cold? How about a drumset?

[@TheMister123]

It's the sound of wind blowing. And some other stuff. But mostly the sound of hollow wind and crackling of ... any number of things associated with winter.

[@TheThomNorth]

Drawing Marge to signify the word "neat" is just fantastic.

[@JovanDacic]

And below that, drawing the brain teaser that looks simultaneously like a bunny rabbit head and a quacking duck head to illustrate "subjective"!

[@beenaplumber8379]

Wow - I live in Minnesota, and I can tell you that when there's snow on the ground, especially fresh snow, especially when it's still falling (heavily), the ambient sound is anything but reverberant. Stepping outside into that can be like stepping into a dead recording studio. I wonder if this is another one of those artifacts of people working in Hollywood having to guess at what other people think winter sounds like rather than trying to match reality (kinda like they do with thunder) when they might not know themselves. Winter sucks the sound out of the air. When the snow is hard and crunchy, the crunchy sound you get from stepping on the snow is absolutely dead. I don't think ice is as reflective as concrete or other surfaces. It's not as hard as other common solids, unless it's extremely cold, like dry ice cold, in which case it's still pretty soft. (Not malleable soft, but easily disrupted with light pressure.) I think it absorbs more than it reflects. I wonder if composers are thinking more of glass, which is spectacularly vibrant when shattered?

[@Leloup6760]

This is by far one of the most interesting videos I've seen from you. and I would love to see this idea of weather/environment themed musical theory explored in greater detail. with things like analyzing desert levels. or tropical levels, underwater levels' you get the idea.

[@cambabiak]

This was a great video, You need to follow this series to the end.

[@themanyouwanttobe]

Well now you've opened the box. We need to see a video about Yub Nub.

[@Merennulli]

I always thought it was the reverb or similar light ambient sound filling (wind can take the place of reverb, for example) coupled with more open space in the music for the ambient sound to dominate in spite of being light and a range that carries well in cold air. I wasn't aware of all these other examples, and honestly didn't hear winter in Chill Penguin's stage as I was more focused on the metallic factory aspect. I don't play a lot of games, so I wasn't aware of a lot of these. The twinkling sound of snow comes from real world percussion of flakes by the thousands hitting against surfaces that can reverberate. The bells, though, are almost entirely from Christmas traditions drawing from northern Europe where the bells had more practical origins. They aren't natural and they carry well in cold temperatures. I am really curious to see the video on how melody can convey the same feeling. Thank you for including mention of that video as well as covering this topic.

[@aeroandspace]

Did you know that the speed of sound isn't constant across all frequencies? As air gets thinner, more and more frequencies get attenuated, moving from higher to lower frequencies. So if you analyzed very hot, lava environments I'd expect it to emphasize deeper tones. Meanwhile, colder environments, even ones without snow, should have higher tones. Even when I play trumpet in winter, my trumpet sounds brighter because the metal is colder, so it's more stiff and amplifies higher frequencies. Also, when there's a lot of snow there's a very noticable deadening effect except for the absolutely highest, purest tones, which is why I think metallic instruments reign supreme

[@Malaphor2501]

The more I watch these, the more I start to pick up on the little references in the drawings. If he doesn't publish a book with all his best drawing's, I think it would be neat to be able to buy individually framed pages.

[@MrArghylesteward]

The thing I disliked the most about the re-released Original Trilogy was George Lucas’s decision to replace the Ewok celebration song at the end of RotJ. Thanks for that tiny piece of nostalgia!

[@unofficialyartifcial9108]

I deadass just got into video game music production. You are a magicain

[@victoriaj2129]

This is remarkably similar to analysis of how cells can be broken into different types by comparing their gene expression, even with the same kind of conflicts re weighing unusual vs common events when trying to find defining characteristics.

[@Mix1mum]

Throwing shade out the gate! Spicy 12tone today!

[@Glasshouse828]

A video about winter music released in late spring

[@jrsviking215]

as someone who hasnt played final fantasy it did sound like winter stuff, didnt even read the title just saw there was a new 12tone video and clicked it

[@pantheon777]

If I remember right, Carol of the Bells is in 6/8 and it is very wintry, moreso than a lot of other Christmas music which I think in addition to being wintry also evokes more cheerful and warm themes -like the warmth of a fire on a cold winter night, or some hot cocoa in a frosty clear morning

[@AustinOnSugar]

As part of a recent video, I had to analyze what elements are common in, of all things, train levels! Studying what I'm now starting to call reverse-wordpainting (might just be "musical imagery" with extra steps) for trains was surprisingly interesting! Suffice to say, if you wanted to dive down the level-trope rabbit hole, there's no end to interesting trends and features to learn about.

[@IsaacMyers1]

I think the time signature can be extremely important. For example, even though I have no study to back up my claim, it feels like a significant amount of water themes are in 3/4.

[@Lacainam]

Bless you for using the original (and therefore, to me, the best and only) celebration song from the end of return of the Jedi.

[@eli0damon]

Looking at music that has been deliberately attached to winter imagery mainly tells you what musical features *composers* associate with winter. It doesn't tell you what musical features *listeners* associate with winter. For that, you would need to do a different kind of study, one where you would play music attached to winter imagery and other kinds of imagery, without context, and ask subjects what it reminds them of, and then see whether their impressions correlate with the hidden context. Also, you'd need another kind of study (I'm not sure what, but probably something cross-cultural, which would be hard because the same video games are played almost everywhere) to test whether the given musical features remind people of winter because of some natural connection or because they merely remind people of other music that they already associate with winter. That being said, the reverb thing makes a lot sense for the reason you gave, and the strings thing kind of makes sense (at least in combination with reverb) because the hard onset makes the reverb really obvious.

[@benjaminbaron3209]

I often heard "Oh, there's a ton of German words in English." but then when you ask for them, it's just Kindergarten and recently Zeitgeist. Now I have two more: Glockenspiel and Leitmotiv.

[@peccantis]

Schadenfreude.

[@crit-c4637]

I'd like to see a baseline study of all music done to set a constant. Then you could compare common things, like 4/4 time, and see if a certain genre or theme uses each element more or less. Also maybe a time period study so we could do the same comparison within each time peruod and see how things developed.

[@amrys_argent]

Okay I haven't even watched the video yet, but I had to laugh when I saw the title because it was less than a week ago I was playing Stardew Valley and mentioned to my husband how weird it is there are just some musical elements that you hear and immediately think "winter."

[@AndersonPEM]

Listen to the OST of I am Setsuna. The game OST is played mostly on piano and the scenery is basically all on winter, snowy places. It's amazing! :)

[@shlomophobe5582]

The Ice Land music from Super Mario Bros. 3 always struck me as the perfect example of appropriate winter video game music

[@timpunny]

did you just write leitmotif backwards

[@JustinLe]

I think the video is played in reverse

[@timpunny]

@@JustinLe that would mean it was recorded with an eraser pen? unlikely

[@andreasheld2362]

He's lefthanded - writing words that way prevents the ink from smudging.

[@timpunny]

@@andreasheld2362 makes sense. i just haven't watched a 12Tone video in a while, and it was just unexpected

[@SwankemasterSupreme]

He sure did.

[@wangledteb5671]

For the part at 13:18 about orchestration, I do think there might be some interest in looking at the sound design used and how it might reflect certain orchestration techniques even if the sound hardware/software being used can't replicate acoustic instruments (or if the composers simply chose not to) because like. That specific example there, I would call that a string-like square wave just because of the envelope being used, compared to something with a much faster (or instant) attack and delay which I'd consider more "plucky" :P

[@elecboy5126]

The brightness of the mode mixture might be a good thing to measure

[@pedroscoponi4905]

ff10, huh? That's a choice I can respect! I get MMOs are not for everyone, but ff14 has a very special place in my heart :) (And has some of my favorite music in the entire franchise!) I've been wondering for some time if 12tone would cover some video game music! This is nice, I'd love to see more 👀

[@beigeguest]

No shade on FFX, but when I saw the premise for this video I immediately thought of FFXI Jeuno Christmas kzbin.info/www/bejne/eWXQaapvrdCYotk MOAR SLEIGHBELL

[@Sibula]

It's more of a reaction plus talking about production thing, but Alex Moukala has done videos on a lot of FF music including FFXIV (plus a lot of other video game music). Definitely check him out if you haven't.

[@peperoni_pepino]

To me, your very first example actually didn't sound very 'winter' (but rather more like a cloud platformer) and I'm surprised this was limited to video games. I think that for instance the Swan Lake has had a lot of influence on winter games, with every game with some ice skating mechanic I have ever played trying to refer to it. I also suspect that if you correlate all the music within a single series (like all Zelda music, all Mario music, all Nier music) you will probably find that winter games are generally a bit more classical. EDIT: Actually, if you are doing a computational analysis anyways then why do a winter search separately at all? Isn't it easier to treat 'winter' like a tag, just like 'desert', and instead compute the (symmetric) correlation between any two tags? That would automatically filter things like the 4/4, as that will not correlate with winter even if it is common. There is a whole niche of using things like K-means clustering to find correlations, but that is already quite a mature field so that shouldn't be too bad? Or is there a reason correlations will not work and you have to use a system which uses absolute frequencies like the authors did?

[@peccantis]

Swan Lake? Not Nutcracker?

To be honest, my assumption (ignoring the obvious guess based on the title of the video) for the first sample was "crystal caves". It didn't really sound very wintery to me.

[@queens.dee.223]

I has a similar reaction, or maybe water.

[@Kiaulen]

I am a little surprised that bells didn't end up on the list, given their prolific use in religious and secular winter holiday music, and general rarity outside of that. I guess glockenspiel is a good stand in though.

[@retstak]

Well, he did mention sleigh bells, and bells fall into that metallic instrument category as well.

[@Desirsar]

Seems like it comes down to a learned language. The Lake Macalania music makes me think of a cave, not necessarily even cold. The Chill Penguin theme makes me think of a generic fighting game level theme. Makes me wonder if people that played more of one genre of game will have common thoughts for a new piece of music, or if it's specific to the games and there won't be a pattern at all.

[@Nixitur]

I feel like the authors probably also should have considered things that definitely _isn't_ winter music in their computations, to weed out things that are common among all video game music. This would have gotten rid of common time, and probably some other common things as well. Because the question should really be "what is common among winter music that makes it _different_ from non-winter music".

[@benwake4823]

You alluded to this point a little at the end, but I wanted to underline something. If I were trying to figure out what a subset of musical pieces had in common, the most interesting aspect to me would be to compare them to pieces NOT in the subset. This would, if done well, deal with the whole "4/4 issue" very simply - we're looking for qualities that are overrepresented in the sample rather than simply common in the sample. In order to determine overrepresentation, we would need a baseline for how common those qualities are in the population.

[@Mnnvint]

It seems their dataset is very focused on console games, Japanese composers, and Nintendo console games in particular. Even some of the computer games they've included (Stardew Valley) are plainly console-inspired. There's a lot of excellent, original video game music which is not console or Nintendo-made, and they may be identifying the musical tropes of a fairly small group of mostly Japanese full-time composers. Now, there's a lot of good music there for sure. Great winter music too! I especially like the opening theme of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is a lovely winter theme by the chief Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, and the themes of Drawn to Life by David J. Franco. Drawn to Life is the sort of game which has a winter world, a forest world etc. so it's great for comparisons too. But western game composers, especially from 30 years ago or so, were very different from the Japanese ones. When the Japanese ones were typically classically educated, professionals in every sense, the western ones were younger, more into prog and electronic music, and much better at using the sound chips as instruments. Japanese composers usually had the luxury of composing on a piano or a synth, and having a separate engineer do his best to convert it to chip music. Western game composers usually had to program the chips themselves. So Japanese games have better melodies on average, and more sensible harmony - but less variability, and (with a few honorable exceptions) a lot more basic use of the synth chips. One western computer game which has great music and also a winter world, a water world, a fire world etc. is "Cool Coyote in Fire and Ice" by Graftgold. Jason Page made the music for that one, and it's a fantastic soundtrack that most people haven't heard (maybe due to the game itself not being very good apart from the art).

[@tulsatrash]

See when I heard that intro music I didn't think winter I thought "oh it's dark. We're underground or down low in a place with a lot of verticality. Like ab urban canyon on a hill, or tunnels that used to be street level before they got built over.

[@quietone610]

Advance Wars has characters that are supposed to invoke themes: warbirds, pirates...and then there's Olaf, who dresses like Santa Claus, uses snow, and rants about it.

[@jehmarxx]

Have you ever done a collab with 8-Bit before?

[@captainGrammar1]

Scanning the comments for this. It's basically required now.

[@kamakazy13]

Literally this morning I was like "damn, winter levels sound so much like winter, very cool" then you release this vid. How How Howwwwwwww

[@Wraithknight2]

If I hadn't seen the title I would have thought this was a castlevania level. I get the concept. I would not have chosen this piece, I would have chosen the winter theme for stardew valley.

[@GayGrlAlyx]

I spent so much of my childhood on FFX, extremely impactful game to me. Thank you for calling it the best FF game!

[@Thornbloom]

Instrumentation matters just as much as chords. I like Wonder Panorama for NOT sounding like a typical ice level.

[@Agadorn70]

Halfway into this video, I find myself thinking "how about comparing Winter Level music with 'The Four Season winter' pieces?"

[@vincentkalman4572]

I've contemplated attempting such analysis on the soundtracks to Mechwarrior, Heavy Gear, and perhaps also Armored Core to isolate the essence of battlemech based music

[@glenrobertson8006]

I cant believe 12 Tone just Yub Nubbed me

[@davidjairala69]

Fun fact, this is basically the same statistical method used to design personality tests

[@peccantis]

IMO they should have divided the data into two subsets and compared and contrasted those with each other and the non-winter samples. There's obviously two species of winter level music: "naive" and "adult". The former is more likely to feature prominent sleigh-bells, upbeat melody and tempo, syncopated or otherwise elaborated rhythms, brass winds or glockenspiel, major harmonies, arpeggios and elaborations, and 3/4 time-evoking the wonder and majesty of a snow-covered landscape, the delicate beauty of snowflakes and the sparkling of snow and icicles, the joy of outdoor winter games and activities like downhill sliding and ice skating. For quintessential "naive" winter, Waltz of The Snowflakes, which has without doubt influences a lot of winter themed game/film music. The latter is more likely to feature a plodding motif with low/falling melody/harmony, high pitch violin or woodwinds, low tempo, minor harmonies, simple rhythm-evoking the harshness of pervasive cold and dark, bitter wind, desolation and lifelessness of a landscape, and the peculiar mix of desperation, exhaustion, and determination one feels when travelling, out of necessity, distances in deep snow wearing heavy gear. Just e.g. for the "plodding", compare Lust For Power, a FFXII track for a winter-mountain area (it has very subtle sleigh bells), and Lumessakahlaajat, a rock song explicitly about wading in snow in dire circumstances.

[@gilb_4]

Describing a winter sound is surely... Hard Times!

[@ThisCommentWroteItself]

Looking at the thumbnail before I saw the title, I thought this was going to be a breakdown of I Am the Walrus. That would've been awesome.

[@SameAsAnyOtherStranger]

Cool to learn reverb in eight bit game sound required use of one of (the only) three sound channels. I would have thought it was a scheme like faux MIDI reverb. Ever since I saw a video of a bluegrass type rock band playing in sort of shack where it was obvious it was as cold in there as it was in the cold winter weather outside, I have wondered about the aural effect of cold, denser air. I thought 12 Tone dude was going to mention it, but now that I think about it, there's probably not that much of identifiable difference.

[@sarahrawlinson6271]

Cold air is closer together, so when sound hits cold air, it travels farther and clearer than warm or hot air allows. Couple that with a coating of snow on the ground, and sounds change drastically when compared to a bare ground. If you live in a place where it snows, I’m sure you’ve noticed it but subconsciously.

[@hectorvaldes3582]

Very informative!

[@MatejNovakCreative]

Another word I’d use is “brittle.” A lot of those sounds have that quality in common. Also, not sure why, but I associate water levels with 3/4.

[@qsquared8833]

It's the bells. "...but what is it?" It's the bells "so what sounds wintery?" it's the jingle bells!

[@ChipAltmanxD]

Melody, yes. My first thought was the whole-tone scale.

[@moppermop5287]

11:21 Just so you know, Undetale music isn't copyrighted. Toby has said that if you recieve a copyright claim, you should fight it and you'll always win.