Composer Breaks Down the Music of Minecraft

There’s something very strangely lonely about playing Minecraft by herself and back in the days when I started playing the game in September of 2011 which was over a decade ago yikes it was far more challenging to play with friends than it is now it was a whole Escapade of having

One of your friends set up a server through a painful trial and error process involved the downloading of something called log me in Hamachi which I still don’t entirely understand but the point is that it was such a hassle that the predominant way of playing the game for

A lot of people myself included was single player if you’re not familiar with the game it is essentially as open-ended of a game as you can get while still being accessible you spawn into a randomly generated World which is almost certainly completely unique everything is made out of blocks and you

Can break those blocks collect them and place them back down to make something that’s your own you can gather resources like food or various metals to make tools and so forth most people wind up with a house with some farms around it and the mine where the player has dug

Into the Earth to look for resources and if you’re me in seventh grade you have a cobblestone statue of a man pooping and casting glass in front of your house some things never change but what’s the point of it what are you working toward throughout the game well that’s the

Thing is that there is no point or rather the game doesn’t give you a purpose but instead the means to find one the point of building is to build and maybe you need certain blocks that require a certain material to create so you have to go out and find those things

But maybe you don’t have any armor or food so you need to get all of those things to go look for the stuff that you need to build the thing and then you’ve built an aquarium or a lookout tower or a swimming pool or a monument to the

Earth God floor mop and what was the point well the point was to be creative and to be able to create self-imposed goals the point was to do it for the sake of doing it however the point I’m trying to make is that it’s very easy for an eerie existentialism to sort of

Creep up on you throughout the course of all this especially if you’re alone there are no people around you and especially in those early days the world was nearly entirely Wilderness these days we have things like Villages and temples and outposts and such that randomly generate but at the beginning

There was almost nothing just forests deserts oceans and mountains and a lone player whose sense of direction and purpose was not even close to explicit with all that said it’s no wonder that urban legends such as the existence of Herobrine were such a significant part of the community whoa did I just see

Herobrine there’s a an enormous Factor however that keeps single player Minecraft from being a constant and completely terrifying reflection on the meaninglessness of existence and that is the music Minecraft’s music takes advantage of some things we might not expect when talking about soundtracks and the biggest of those in my opinion

Is silence the music in Minecraft happens very sparsely there are stretches of several minutes where the only sounds are made by the player in the environment and so it feels random when the music comes in because there’s no way for us to really consciously internalize how much time has actually

Passed since we last heard music and the effect that this has can vary simply by virtue of the fact that you could be doing literally anything at all and the music for the most part is not going to adjust itself to whatever that may be so this can have a comical effect where

Maybe you’re fending off hordes of monsters in the fight of your life all while there’s this cute little piano tune in the background and it just doesn’t fit the scenario at all it can have a comforting effect where maybe that sense of existentialism is starting

To creep up on the player but you hear a very soft Crescendo on some sort of drone or a little fragments of a tune that you’re about to hear and that Eerie loneliness is calmed down it can exaggerate the thing that you’re doing if the music happens to match your

Activity for instance whenever mice on Venus came on while I was exploring the world that feeling of Wonder and Discovery was always sort of emphasized and made more powerful and the thing that I think it does best is turning something mundane into something meaningful and magical I can’t think of

How many times I’ve been planting seeds or chopping down trees or just strip mining miles below the surface and the music has come on and I’ve just thought to myself what a lovely moment that became and I think if it weren’t for those enormous stretches of Silence between the music then the music

Wouldn’t have nearly as powerful in effect and again the music itself isn’t necessarily a one size fits all type thing where every track is going to work with every scenario but Minecraft in general is a very calm game and the music is mostly reflective of that there

Are tracks like mice on Venus that have a little bit more rhythmic action to them and the melody is a little bit more aggressive in how it weaves around Foreign but then there are tracks like wet hands which is called that for some reason it’s this lovely piano tune with a warm arpeggio in the left hand and a lyrical melody in the right hand and they just wash over these major seven chords Thank you the general harmonic language is very open and Spacey and the rhythmic language is that way too where the end of a phrase will just last an extra bar or an extra couple beats very few tracks have a metronomic or rhythmically strict feel to them Another thing that I think really hits home with that idea of comfort that when the music starts up it feels like everything’s gonna be okay is the fact that despite the sort of retro pixelated art style that Minecraft has visually the music doesn’t reflect that most of the pieces do involve synthesized sounds

In some way but they’re a decent amount and these happen to be particularly popular ones that are just a recording of an actual piano or at least the vsts are good enough that it’s convincing I think having something like wet hands or dry hands start playing while I’m

Building something like the Egg of the Nightcrawler or Georgie’s tacorito Cafe is a really friendly reminder from the game and its music that I’m playing in a silly block world doing whatever the hell I want and that is something to appreciate anyway Minecraft is great but

It would not be nearly what it is without its soundtrack and I think that above everything else I mentioned in this video it’s creative use of silence is incredibly unique and it’s also something that a lot of other games have I think noticed and taken advantage of I

Haven’t even brought up any of the tracks for the more recent updates such as the Aquatic update or caves and cliffs and by the way whole soundtrack is different depending on whether or not you’re in creative mode or survival mode too which is a really really cool thing

But yeah it’s all great stuff anyway this was obviously different from my other videos on Game music since what I have to say about the music is less about the details and more about the big picture so in any case I hope you enjoyed it and I appreciate you watching

And I’ll give a shout out to the prismcraft SMP where I play with some friends every Wednesday live on Twitch so come hang out if you are a fan of the game and if you love Dad Village alright I’m withered I’m withered yeah you don’t ah yeah

Okay thanks again like And subscribe if you want let me know what games you want me to talk about and I’ll see you next time