Analysing Minecraft’s Music (ft. Mumbo Jumbo)

Minecraft is the most popular video game of all time and one of the few games that i actually play now usually on this channel we don’t talk about video game music but i feel like minecraft can be an exception to that minecraft’s music is not only beloved by the players of the game

But it’s also a slightly less typical choice of style for a video game soundtrack imagine you were tasked with writing the music for minecraft this is a game where you can explore vast landscapes kill zombies and monsters in dungeons search for treasure build towns craft weapons so perhaps an obvious choice of music

Would be something epic and cinematic like you’d hear on a game like skyrim or Zelda Then again minecraft also has a retro pixelated look to it so maybe actually a chiptune soundtrack would be a good fit Well daniel rosenfeld better known as c418 was the person actually tasked with writing music for minecraft and he didn’t go down either of these routes instead we got music that sounds like this not epic cinematic orchestral pieces not 8-bit retro chiptunes but a chilled out minimalistic slightly melancholic

Ambient soundtrack perhaps not the music you would expect to accompany a game like minecraft but like i said before minecraft’s ambient minimalist soundtrack is beloved by the players to show just one example of this i asked minecraft youtuber mumbo jumbo what he thought of the minecraft soundtrack

For me personally the minecraft music is minecraft like they are they are intertwined with one another there they’re connected i can’t imagine minecraft without the music and i can’t imagine the music with without minecraft you know when you’re when you’re playing the game they just go together so well you know you’re

Exploring and it just feels the music feels like exploration it feels curious it feels adventurous it feels like there’s a sense of wonder to it you know it’s they’re kind of perfectly matched they complement each other so well but how did minecraft actually wind up with a soundtrack like this

In the first place well it all comes down to limitation breeding creativity under most circumstances the last game you would describe as limited is minecraft minecraft is an open whaled sandbox game with an infinitely big randomly spawned map the player has no objectives to achieve no levels or challenges they are forced

To complete the player can literally do anything they like but this freedom that the player gets actually presents a problem when you’re trying to compose music that suits that game typically in a video game certain events like walking into a new area will cue a new piece of music so that

Piece of music can be paired with that event rosenfeld originally wanted to have different music themed to each biome each area of the map so for example if you are sailing across an ocean you might get serene epic ocean music And then when you enter a cave you might get scary tense cave music the problem is in minecraft players can actually move across biomes really quickly so if a player was traveling across the map at some speed you’d keep entering different biomes before the music could even catch up

Listen to this clip of daniel rosenfeld discussing the challenges he faced when composing for minecraft so imagine this the player is in the savannah and there’s a force nexus and like now you say uh well it makes sense that the players in savannah you know we can play uh

Savannah music right and then you just like randomly play savannah music but now the player goes to the forest and because players don’t really stick in one point in minecraft that player in the force really quick and now the savannah music is playing now we have to stop it

And then just play forest music all of that is really clunky and like uncomfortable similarly rosenfeld originally wanted minecraft to feature battle music after all in most video games if you encounter a monster then a dramatic battle theme would begin as you start to fight them however once again due to minecraft’s

Unstructured nature it actually makes it quite hard to determine when an event like a battle begins and ends so imagine there’s an enemy in a player and well in zelda they should start making battle musics right so we could play battle music but a problem in minecraft is that battles are really

Short so the player could just run away and it’s like a two second thing so we can’t really play battle music because there’s no time so ultimately trying to write music for minecraft that actually match the events happening on screen would be like trying to score a movie without reading the script

Rosenfeld’s only option really was to write this ambient so-called general soundtrack that could match any event happening on screen so it would never contradict what was happening in the game so this is how we wound up with this ambient sate-esque soundtrack ambient music can avoid evoking any particular emotion or mood

That might accidentally contradict the events happening in the game at that moment the music is non-intrusive with simple repeating harmony and fairly homogeneous dynamics now when described like this it makes minecraft’s music sound like it’s just generic background filler music that’s not really meant to be listened to that

It’s just meant to feel the silence in the background and this is actually the perception that many people have of ambient music that it’s boring generic music that acts as background noise ambient music is often conflated with musac which is that typically cheesy soulless music that you might hear when you’re on hold

To a call center or walking around a shopping mall but ambient music is not just background noise the term ambient music was coined by brian eno in the liner notes of his 1978 album ambient 1 music for airports in those notes eno actually defends the value and purpose of ambient music

The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by muzak inc in the 50s understandably this has led most discerning listeners and most composers to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention whereas canned music aims to blanket an environment

Ambient music is intended to enhance an environment it must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular it must be as ignorable as it is interesting this is a perfect description of why minecraft’s music works it’s as ignorable as it is interesting the music can

Just sit in the background and be ignored by the player but then as rosenfeld describes in this clip sometimes the music will happen just at the right time that it perfectly enhances and complements what the player is doing in that moment we basically made the music just like

Randomly happen between 15 or 50 30 minutes just like like for no reason at all and what happens because of that is like players uh do like their terrible dirt hut and it like it’s an ugly thing but they like had an effort put into that and like if the music just randomly

Happens to play because of that like just because like they made like a dirt hub it makes them remember that moment like more like specifically that is actually kind of an interesting thing that didn’t even occur to us that the music could do that like

Or or like they like build a boat and the sun is setting and the music kicks in and then like people keep coming up to me and tell me yeah i had this thing happening i went into a dark cave and it was lava and skeletons and the

Music came in it was amazing so now that we know how minecraft got its ambient soundtrack let’s take a closer look at the music itself we’ll start by looking at one of the original pieces from minecraft sweden sweden slowly rotates around a four chord loop with the melody slowly

Developing above with each rotation The use of these chord extensions such as the sixth and the major ninth lend a mellow almost jazzy tone to the music quite reminiscent of one of the earliest names in what we now call ambient music eric sate in fact sweden’s slow lush piano chords give the piece a very similar tone to

Satay’s most famous piece gymnopidi number one If we look at another piece from minecraft this one entitled wet hands you can see a similar sate-esque use of major 9th chords however this time they’re played as Arpeggios Wet hands also features the mixolydian mode as we can see from the characteristic lowered 7th degree here the mixolydian flavour lends to the mellow whimsical mood of the piece the major 7 chord and the major 9 chord which contains a major 7 chord both appear quite often across the minecraft soundtrack

For example the piece subwoofer lullaby is based around this c major 7 chord these major seven chords are one of the main elements giving the music its relaxed yet uneasy sound major seven chords achieve this contradictory mood of calm and unease because they blend dissonance and consonants the main character for

Interval in a major seven chord is of course the major seven interval in a c major 7 chord this would be the interval between the c and the b and as you can hear this on its own sounds dissonant however a major 7 chord also features two other notes and these

Two other notes introduce a whole range of consonant intervals to the chord like perfect fifths and major thirds this abundance of consonant intervals effectively dilutes the dissonance of the major 7 interval resulting in a chord which sounds consonant but with a potent dash of dissonance if i take the major 7 interval

Out of subwoofer lullaby you can hear how that uneasy eeriness disappears this is subwoofer lullaby with its major seven chord and this is without The final thing i want to discuss today about minecraft’s music is its intentionally lo-fi sound you may have noticed for example when the piano is used in these pieces of music it’s not a clear pure realistic piano tone like this but instead it has a muffled degraded tone an artificial sound to it

According to rosenfeld he did want the music to have a natural quality to it hence the choice of instruments like piano harps and strings but he also wanted the music to have a low-fi tone to it as rosenfeld puts it himself i like the idea of low quality music that is still good

To me this natural yet lo-fi sound is the perfect music for minecraft just look at the graphics for minecraft these are lo-fi renderings of natural landscapes much like the music is low-fire renditions of natural instruments and yet despite the low fidelity of the graphics minecraft can be a visually stunning and

Beautiful game to play the same is true of the music it may be lo-fi but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful i asked mumbo jumbo what he thought of minecraft’s lo-fi aesthetic i think the lo-fi quality of minecraft is actually his biggest strength because it means that people

People are curious about it they don’t quite understand why people are playing a game that looks so rubbish when there’s such beautiful games out there and there’s an inherent curiosity there so why are people so interested in this maybe i’ll give it a go and then as soon as you start playing

You can instantly look past the one meter by one meter by one meter cubes and you just let your imagination go you know if you want to build a castle you build a castle if you want to build a village you build a village if you want to build your dream house

You build your dream house as long as you can build it using blocks then you can build it and i think the biggest strength of the blocks is the simplicity of it anyone can do it any age can do it it’s it’s accessible to everyone and it’s limitless you know you’re completely limited

By your own imagination you can do whatever you want in the game i’ll leave you with this clip of brian eno explaining how he first conceived of the idea of ambient music a friend of mine came over to see me and i was confined to bed i couldn’t move

But as she left she said should i put a record on i said please and she put a record on and then left the record was much too quiet but i couldn’t reach to turn it up and it was raining outside so it was a record of

18th century harp music i remember and so i lay there at first kind of frustrated by this situation but then i started listening to the rain and listening to the these odd notes of the heart that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain and this was a great

Musical experience for me and i suddenly thought of this idea of making music that didn’t impose itself on your space in the same way but created a sort of landscape that you could belong to you could be part of and this i called this so i

Pompously gave it a new name which i called ambient music so a big thank you goes to mumbo jumbo for taking the time to be in this video i emailed him about a month ago and told him about how many of you guys think that i sound like him and he

Thought that was really funny and he was very happy to be involved in this video and as always thank you to everybody who supports me on patreon including the names you can see on screen now and andrei science diagram andrew andrew brown andy deacon austin barrett austin russell bob mckinstry britney parker

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