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Blog #3, Iraheta

Technology is defined as some knowledge, technique, or tool that can assist people or animals and help achieve certain goals. This is a very broad definition and includes various examples, such as instruments and music notation. The technology I chose to focus on today is the synthesizer. This is a type of electronic instruments, being different from having a recorded sound and just playing those, this actually generates the sounds it makes.

This had a major impact on early video game music, as a majority of those consoles used synthesizers that were very limited. These limitations however, probably makes them more memorable, as it is hard to mistake them for anything else. An example of this is the Super Mario Theme Song, released in 1985 on Nintendo’s first home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. The composer, Koji Kondo, has stated that this took the longest to compose out of all the songs in the game, as he wanted to match the overall tempo of the game. He sped the song up and thought it fit nicely, also adding that when the player has less than 100 seconds on the clock, that it speeds up, to make it more frantic for the player.


2 Comments

  1. I like that you mentioned the use of the synthesizer in video games and its use in mario bros. I wasn’t aware that synthesizers were used for the music.

  2. I like how you wrote about synthesizers because its not something thats is usually discussed, so it was something new that i had learn. Along with that also how you didn’t only focus on how it could be used in regular music but for video games such as Mario and how much of a difference it makes as well.

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