The brilliant idea behind the music of Minecraft

Minecraft’s Soundtrack is very special When C418 came across the challenge of compossing it He thought what we would all think “Let’s play misterious music inside caves and mineshafts, another one more pacific for refugees, even an epic one for when you’re fighing against an horde of zombies and skeletons

Or composing diferent music for each biome But he had to dismiss every single one of those ideas because of: How the players played How the game detected spaces And the enormous limitations the sound motor of the game had Nevertheless, it was thanks to this limitations that C418

Ended up making one of the most memorable and innovating soundtracks of videogames history And today, we’re going to find out how. [Clip for Alexelcapo’s stream – spanish Youtuber and Streamer] “This music rocks, dude, don’t mess with me, when you think in good music in videogames, I guess nobody says “Minecraft”.

And I find that pretty amazing” When you start a new game in Minecraft, the world is generated step by step. Each game’s world is different, first, you computer generates a “Perlin’s sound map” and it decides to read it as a map of terrain elevations,

Maybe it decides that white is montains and black is valleys and as you can see in AntVenom’s animations, this would look like this terrain without details also, the software decides to put water in all the empty blocks, exposed and with Y coordenate minor to 62.

Then it makes another round changing the generic blocks for dirt, sand… and then it creates the cave systems, those are gigantic finally, it adds minerals, trees, flowers, villages, temples… and then, you are positioned in any place of that world and you start playing

Imagine that you make a game with the same map for all the players You could make an invisible wall in this random hut’s entrance for the player to cross it and activate the “hut music” and when the player goes out, the music stops

It gives you the sensation that the hut is a space where things can happen but here, how does the game defines what blocks are your house? When you are completely isolated from outside? Then, if your shelter doesn’t have walls, it isn’t your house?

If you make a hole in a mountain, enter the hole and close the entrance, is it a house? That’s when the hut music should start playing? And if you’re home and suddenly decide to break a block in the wall? Should the music instantly stop? Or this, for example. Looks like a cave.

But if you dig up? Or if you add some stairs? When is it exterior or interior? And if you change every block for diamond blocks? If the cave is your home? The problem is that it being such a malleable world

Made of pieces you can put on and off as if they were legos programing a space detector that understands where you are and what’s going on was a lot of trouble Plus for an average player, his house can be this or this or this or this or this

And that’s already too much human context that the computer simply cannot understand This gave so much trouble that there wasn’t even a sound fader This means that if I have a sheep, and then put it betweet a solid iron cage and then on top of that I add a dirt layer

And on top of that a layer of stone It still sounds as “nearby sheep” [Sheep inside] That’s why you hear the monsters all the time as if they were in your ear even when they’re the other side of the wall in a cave. [enemies behind here] Because the game doesn’t detect them as:

“Locked in a different space than where you are ” For the game, everything’s just cubes in a reticle Now, with all of that, finally C418 and Notch (the developer), made a decision. It was the best decision they could’ve made. They knew that for the you there would be epic moments,

Like placing the last block of an enormous building. But if the game can’t detect those moments, how can the muic enhance them? The solution was for the music to play randomly. [the music starts playing] There could be time spans of 15 minutes where no music would play,

And then suddently a song faded in, or maybe three in a row. Randomly, expecting for the music to coincide with a very epic moment of your gameplay That out of the tens of memorable moments you’ve had, there’s one where you’ve been all night long hardly surviving but gathering lots of cool stuff,

And all of a sudden you spot your house on the horizon and the music starts playing randomly… [Sweden – C418 ] And it matches the sun rising. And you feel the security of the refuge you have built, and how much you have progressed since you started that world.

And that this scenes makes you astonished, as if someone had done it purposely. You feel like there’s someone watching writing music for your own actions. And it all fits perfectly. You’ve probably heard the song that’s playing a dozens of times, just one more piece of the whole soundtrack.

The previous times you’ve heard it didn’t mean anything for you. But this time, out of all of them, has coincided with a moment, that was epic for you. And then it has been created, spontaneously, a magic situation. C418 says in an interview for ‘The Guardian’ In fact, there’s people from some internet forums

Convinced that the music plays whenever the sun rises, or when night falls, because that’s the pattern that they think they have found out in the chaos. But the users who have analysed Minecraft’s code have seen that music just plays in totally random times. The music here serves as one more game mechanic

A really innovative and interesting one. It is some sort of a musical confirmation. As if I just said: “It will be a six” “And then a three and a four” I may look godlike but you are missing are the 3000 takes where the numbers wouldn’t show.

In Minecraft you miss all those times where music would just play but nothing remarcable happended. I mean, you hear them, but you don’t see anything interesting. That what’s brilliant about it. They could have played music constantly or play no music at all. But they choose these hybrid that creates meaning randomly.

But this is only half of the story because managing to create music that sound good when you play it out of the blue is not simple. Any music won’t do the job. If you were playing and this started playing: [Music from Skyrim] You’d thought that something disturbing is happening.

Then, what kind of music could Minecraft have? It seems as someone already asked this question. In 1978: the musician Brian Eno. But he wasn’t playing Minecraft. He was in an airport and he heard pop-rock music playing on the speakers and he thought: “Let’s see, this doesn’t make sense.

This is not the soundtrack of an airport. I’ve been waiting three hours to board my plane, it’s already been delayed, I’ve had to get up early, I’ve paid ten euros for a coffee. And Bruno Mars is playing? Which is exactly the same music that was playing in the bar with my friends,

But now I’m not in the bar with my friends.” Which music could be played for hours that doens’t distrub the passengers’ conversations, that could be interrupted by the public address announcements whiout the cut being a drama. That actually expresses the situation that people go through in airports. So, according to Brian Eno,

The answer to all of that is this: [this is similar to Brian Eno’s music. The original is copyright blocked] “So, I wanted to create a different feeling that… uh… you were sort of suspended in the universe and your life or dead wasn’t so important.”

This is in fact, the first album in history to be sold as ambient music. And it is based on the same principles as 33 years later would Minecraft’s soundtrack be based on. [Key – C418] It is music with no direction, it is textures, static chords. Music that anyone can use to relax

Or meditate. [Minecraft – C418] The fact that they are such quiet pieces… In fact in the game’s folders the developers called this piece internally “Calm 1”. Is what makes possible that whenever you are in Minecraft and the music starts playing, it fits with almost any situation.

But I want to focus on the point that it is not only calm, it is ridiculously calm. Because nothing happens in all the song It lasts up to four minutes and it has one chord. Not a single sequence of chords, a single chord. F sharp (F#) The harmony doesn’t tell a story

The melody doesn’t either, because it is a repeated loop. You could almost say that the piece “goes” nowhere And even though, it manages to tell a bit of a story thoughout the instruments it uses. The loop starts quietly with a piano [plays Minecraft – C418] A piano a soft instrument by itself

But to make it even more, the high frequencies are filtered out, which in production is called a Low-pass filter A filter that only lets the low frequencies pass To give that sensation of the piano being behind a wall or something. [I have applied the low-pass filed to this recording of the piano]

And slowly more instruments start to come in, some strings. And it reaches some sort of “climax” And then it starts to fade out as the instruments quieten But all of this that at the end of the day is a structure of introduction, middle and outcome. Has been built with ambiences with timber not with harmony, nor melody, nor rhythm. And the rest of Minecraft’s pieces are also like this

Some of them have more rhythm or more chords maybe two chords, or four chords. It is not that exciting But they all share that sensation of being… Ambient music [Oxygène – C418] A bit of a sidenote, although Brian Eno is considred to be a fundamental figure of Ambient Music.

That doesn’t mean that C418 was inspired by Brian Eno specifically. Ambient music has been developed a lot more since Brian Eno. It is also true, that some of Minecraft’s pieces for having ideas more rhythm-based, should be classified as “Minimalistic Music” Even for the player the results are the same [Haggstron – C418]

But something happens, although it is ambient or minimalistic music the small melodies in them have their own identity. They stick with you, you recognize them. [ElRubius – a spanish youtuber and streamer] “Oh” “oh yes” “Give it to me” [I can’t belive I had to translate that] They turn into recongnisable themes

“Let’s see. I love this Harry Potter music” The fact that it is ambient music doesn’t mean that it is “generic” music and even further, replaceable. And thus, for being spotable you’re able to associate them with your own memories, with in-games moments. You won’t mistake it for any other ambient music

It is the ambient music from Minecraft [Alexelcapo singing Minecraft’s music] And this is with no doubt the best music that Minecraft could have ever had. Or at least that’s what I think. Minecraft is a game with lots if inputs but it is slow it is contemplative.

Where you can easily spend a whole hour mining for the same material And suddently, and randomly every x minutes, one of these pieces fade in plays and fades out. And in many cases, you won’t even notice and in the end it is the smallest expression that music can have,

Without losing its capacity of being spotable and being able of holding meaning. That is stays on your memory as that unique piece that makes you remember that moment when you saw the sun rising as you heard it playing. And that’s it for todays video,

If you enjoyed it, you also have the analysis of Dark Sould soundtrackon the description and a stream analysing Soundtracks from videogames. You have the links on the description box and we’ll each other next week. See you soon! “This will be a six and a four” [Desperate laughing]