Music Discs: Minecraft’s Trickiest Item | Deep Dive

The world of minecraft is very rich and complex with many interesting things to find ancient structures fill this place thriving villagers and evil illagers sunken ships and decrepit nether portals the game has a past and a present the world we find ourselves in has a story yet there’s one part of this story

Which i have not yet explored there are discs that can be found in various places they contain music when put in a jukebox why do these discs exist like this in the world who wrote and recorded these and why is the player able to find them welcome to deep dive a series where

We’ve slowly been uncovering the secrets of minecraft tonight we are going to tackle a subject which i have been avoiding due to its complexity the music discs are very challenging topic as we’ll soon see but i can’t run forever it’s time to take a look and see what’s going on

Hopefully our analysis will uncover the purpose and story behind the music discs join me for a dive beneath the waves The music discs in minecraft are an incredibly tricky subject to analyze to have any chance of getting to the bottom of this mystery we’re going to need to define an important word which is diegetic although the term diegetic sounds complicated it’s actually fairly simple to understand diegetic refers to sound heard within

The world as part of the action another way to think about it is that it’s a sound that can be heard by characters for example if a creeper explodes it’s going to make a loud noise this explosion is clearly produced by an origin within the game and would thus be audible to other

Entities most sounds heard within minecraft are like this mining a block lighting a fire the groan of a zombie all of these have a clear source within the context of the minecraft universe thus they would be described as diegetic however there’s a contrasting sound type which is a non-diegetic sound

This type of noise cannot be heard in universe a simple example of this is the clicking of the menu buttons although it’s useful for the audience it exists outside the fiction of minecraft non-diegetic sounds are used extensively in filmmaking in most movies the soundtrack is non-diegetic there isn’t an in-universe

Source to the music we don’t see any orchestra or conductors during a star wars fight rather the music exists outside of the story and is instead designed to communicate with the audience minecraft has non-diegetic music as well most of the soundtrack plays at random intervals with no clear source

Its purpose is very similar to the film score it communicates the mood to the audience which in this case is the person looking at the screen yet the interesting thing is that minecraft does have some music which is clearly diegetic these are of course the music discs by

Finding a disc and putting it into a jukebox music plays from that specific block as we move further away it gets quieter and we can hear where the sound is coming from just like any other diegetic sound in the game the result of this is an important point worth mentioning

Music discs have music that physically exists within the scope of minecraft it’s in the game world not simply overdubbed for the audience that distinction is important however things become complicated once we examine the music discs there are 13 different options and by mousing over we can see that each of

Them has a name for example the disc with the white label is strad by c418 and the orange disc is pixed by lena rayne the obvious question is how should we interpret these labels did c418 and lino reign literally exist somewhere in the minecraft universe and then create these labeled disks

In this case the answer is pretty clearly no the composers are not intended to be characters within the canon rather it’s an attribution so that the real-life composers are credited what’s a little bit trickier is what should we do about the names are the titles of the tracks known

Within the universe or is it also simple attribution if we look through the titles many do seem to be consistent with minecraft there are cats and blocks and piglens within the nether yet others have a less distinct connection such as maul and melohi at this point it’s hard to know for sure

If these names are in universe or not perhaps taking a look at the musical content will help remember these discs are diegetic so any sounds coming from them should exist canonically within the game however we quickly run into some issues for example ward quotes chopin’s funeral march Although the key has been shifted from b flat minor to d minor it’s pretty obvious that this is intended to be a reference chirp has a similar issue the opening sequence is a sample from the optican an electronic keyboard from the 1970s But we’re hearing this music diegetically in the minecraft universe does that mean that chopin existed in minecraft or the optigan in fact so many of the synthesized sounds found on the music discs have no known equivalent in minecraft did the melotron featured in melo high exist somewhere in the world

You may be starting to see the issue here we know that music discs are diegetic yet when we try to figure out how those specific sounds were produced we run into a wall there’s a dissonance diegetic sounds exist in game with no known way for them to have actually been produced in game

If we want to move forward the unfortunate solution is to just accept the music discs as they are we need to ignore the real world connections and references and instead approach the music from a formalist perspective as an isolated work within the game in other words we can’t think too much

About how these actual sounds were made despite this issue it does seem as though music production would be feasible in the minecraft world for example note blocks exist which can produce a wide variety of sounds from a technological perspective sound recording is not out of reach in real life the earliest recordings

Were done acoustically using wax cylinders a needle inscribed the vibrations of sound into a physical form the process could then be reversed physical grooves would produce sound Vibrations eventually this changed to recording grooves on a flat wax disk from there copies of the disk could be produced these copies were made of shellac which is a resin found on trees in theory none of this really seems to conflict with the level of technological advancement seen in minecraft

Another detail is that the jukebox is created using a diamond turntables often have a diamond tiff stylus which appears to be consistent with the crafting recipe nonetheless it would require a high degree of intelligence to produce something like this if you’ve seen any of my previous deep

Dives i’ve often talked about an extinct humanoid group called the ancient builders the evidence for their existence is immense i’ve argued that they constructed the pyramids and their loot is found throughout the minecraft world if you’re not sure what i’m talking about check out the above link these ancient builders had knowledge of

Redstone and would be a good candidate for the composers in practice it’s not quite so simple and the main reason has to do with where the disks are found out of the 13 possibilities only three are found within chests this includes cat and 13 which are in dungeons and mansions

As well as pigstep which is in bastion remnants dungeon loot is very similar to loot from other ancient builders with items like horse armor and golden apples yet the discs occur in mansions as well and the illagers who live in these mansions are also incredibly intelligent having discovered the secrets of life

And death through the totem of undying despite this it’s bizarre that the exact same discs exist in totally different places the nature of dungeons is mysterious as it is and we just don’t see any reason for the illagers to trek so far underground furthermore the dungeons were in a state

Of decay if they were actively in use by the illagers then they would likely be the pristine works of architecture like the mansions so how do these disks end up in two totally different spots and we still haven’t mentioned the third disk pigstep which is also found in a specific location

As explained in my piglen video the ancient builders did have access to the nether and they built the bastions but why would there be a disc specifically for the bastion is it an anthem of their mining progress in the nether is it a work song we can’t really know for sure even now

We’re finding that these disks tend to resist a logical explanation but we’re currently only looking at three disks things get much much worse when we discover how the other 10 disks are found they will never occur in any chest rather the other disks can only be found

When a creeper is killed by a skeleton arrow let’s break this one down it means that a disc must exist in every single creeper in the world somehow the technological marvel of recorded audio has made its way into one of the most common mobs in the game

However killing this mob with a sword causes the disc to be destroyed the creeper exploding causes the disc to be destroyed even killing it with our own arrow destroys the disc no the only way for 10 of the 13 discs to be found is if a very specific mob kills a

Creeper there is zero evidence that skeletons use a different type of bow and arrow setup than the player in fact a skeleton can drop both its arrows and its bow yet even by picking these up killing the creeper destroys the music disc it has to be a skeleton firing the arrow

The exact same setup fails if the player tries it how does the creeper know that it wasn’t a skeleton arrow this has no logical explanation there’s nothing physically different i’m racking my brain here and i cannot seem to find a self-consistent logic that allows a phenomenon like this to occur

Every component of it makes no sense from the secret disc in all creepers to the obscure drop condition i’ve made a youtube career by doing deep dives which are fundamentally based on examining the evidence and taking it to its logical conclusions but this creeper disc problem has no logical conclusion

It requires the creeper to have some type of knowledge about what killed it which it could not reasonably obtain so we find ourselves at a crossroads when it comes to interpreting these discs constructing a rational explanation for their physical location is not easy to do unless we are willing to take a massive

Leap of faith from that perspective the obvious answer is that the discs in the creepers are easter eggs they’re a cool item to find but not intended to show the lore if that is indeed the case then how do we interpret the three discs that can be found in chests

Well our previous logic continues to hold it’s reasonable to expect that the ancient builders or illegers might have had recording technology yet the specific methodology for these discs ending up in these chests remains an unsolved mystery suddenly we remember that tricky issue about chopin and the synthesizers that we chose to ignore

And when we stop and look at where we are we realize that there are so many facts that we either cannot easily explain or are required to ignore in order to progress and if 10 disks are already totally logical how much more are we willing to overlook

In order to find a solution to the final three but then there’s the counter argument the fact remains that these disks are diegetic it’s not background music they exist physically within the minecraft world and are played using a crafted jukebox to further complicate things disks 11 and 13 are not

Music instead there’s sound effects which tell a story One could very well argue that this is intended as lore if not then why have such creepy and provocative noises yet one could also ask how these sounds were even recorded is the person running carrying a phonograph while attempting to escape it almost doesn’t matter which side we choose we still lose

If the discs exist from a lore perspective then there are issues with their placement as well as the musical content on the other hand if the discs are pure easter eggs then why are they diegetic and what’s the point of discs 11 and 13 is it somehow possible that both things were true

Could the discs be primarily designed as easter eggs yet still offer some lore insight here are my thoughts after examining the evidence and context i’m forced to believe that despite their diegetic nature the physical minecraft music discs are not canon my investigations have not yielded a satisfying explanation

Throughout this video we’ve been making assumption after assumption nonetheless i don’t want to totally close the door on the significance of 11 and 13. i can still see a possibility of these discs containing some type of lore information even if they couldn’t easily exist in the world the audio still might be useful

My theories tend to be practically focused so something like this is admittedly a bit uncomfortable for me but the discs are so strange that it seems foolish to throw them out simply because of their lack of practicality however to really explore this would probably take its own video

Now this is probably not a satisfying conclusion i know that a lot of you who clicked on this were hoping for something a lot spicier such as the creepers being artificially constructed long-distance communication and explosive hybrid devices and there’s certainly a temptation for me to create an explanation just for the

Sake of it but i can’t do that i’m not going to make a theory more interesting than the fact suggests part of understanding the minecraft lore is realizing that some things don’t have a crazy thumbnail-ready explanation and in my explorations i simply cannot find a practical solution for the music

Discs that satisfies my evidence-first approach in my view music discs are just something fun to find and play this is without a doubt one of the trickiest deep dives i’ve ever done i had to rewrite the script a few times and even now i could be totally off base

With this video especially i want to know what you think please comment down below if this rather boring conclusion makes sense to you i could very well be incorrect here but i’m just not seeing a logical way for this to work so if you think you have something i

Would really like to hear it even though i couldn’t find it doesn’t mean that an explanation doesn’t exist if you think you have one please tell me you can also come over to the retro gaming now discord or post it on the subreddit we have some great conversations there

And i’d like to hear your voice the important thing is that we have a discussion and get more ideas out there we will go ahead and end with that this has been retro gaming now thanks so much for watching and i’ll see you all in the next video have a great day you