Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Analyzing NES Music: Harmony, Form, and the Art of Technological Constraint

Analyzing NES Music: Harmony, Form, and the Art of Technological Constraint

Schartmann, Andrew

Hardcover

Series: Studies in Game Sound and Music

ElectronicMusic Theory

ISBN10: 1835951090
ISBN13: 9781835951095
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
Published: May 28 2025
Pages: 250
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.70 Depth: 9.70
Language: English

This study of five of Nintendo's landmark music scores offers new insights into video game music composition and creativity with limited technology.

Faced with severe technological constraints on system memory, composers of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sought ways to disguise repetition in music that repeats extensively. Their efforts gave rise to a set of compositional techniques for creating the illusion of variety.

Andrew Schartmann distills these techniques into a theory of harmony and form for the analysis of NES music. It then uses this theory to analyze five landmark scores of the NES era: Super Mario Bros., Dragon Warrior, Metroid, Mega Man 2 and Silver Surfer. Both theory and analysis are scaffolded by a detailed description of the NES hardware and its attendant constraints, highlighting the ever-evolving dialogue between technology, commercial demand, and artistic sensibility that characterizes video game music of the 1980s and 1990s.

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