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AdolfSatan

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Warning: This will be a dense and long-winded post, filled to the brim with autism. Proceed with caution.

On portraying Chinese music

I'm sure at some point in your life you've come across Hindi or Arabic pop music. And it most likely was presented for the sake of amusement, since who the hell could ever take such bizarre concoctions seriously?
Just look at how clichéd and ridiculous everything is; it's as if they were parodying themselves!
Apparently there's quite a huge industry behind it, and I'd swear that folks aren't putting so much effort and money into this just for the laughs.
So, what gives? If everyone's being serious about this, why is it so... shitty?

Turns out music isn't a universal language as many would have you believe. There's no divine message hidden that will move the souls of all men alike, indistinct to their origin and creed.
As I exemplified in my previous post, like the spoken tongue, it all boils down to a series of culturally inherited codes which, in tacit agreement, are assigned certain values by a community.
How could we ever understand a melody from a distant land if we can't even agree on how the octave should be divided? What the hell is an octave anyways, for that matter?
Not even through harmony could we ever hope to communicate meaning, since to many cultures the concept is entirely foreign, just like several of which I'll speak further on are to us.

Our pop music arrives to unaccustomed ears that pick its most salient and identifiable features. They reinterpret it under a new set of codifications, and thus such... interesting results are born.
The same will happen when, me, you, or anyone foreign to the culture tries to coin some Chinese sounding BGM. Because it's not just the music, but also what surrounds it.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the Chinese is a tone language; they employ different melodic patterns to change the meaning of a syllable that comprises several words, which spoken plainly would mean the same.
A slide, or any peculiar motif that might seem random or improvised into the music might actually carry a literal and well defined meaning to the knowing ear.

What happens when you unknowingly ignore these facts is what gave us many pieces (both musical and written) during the Orientalist period in European art. Which, while fantastic, had nothing to do with reality. It was indeed as many of them were called, an impression.
If you pick any Asiatic flavoured piece by a Western composer, you'll be more than likely to find a fine example of what I'm trying to portray. There they are: the pentatonic scales, hexafonic non-harmonies, parallel fifths, and disjointed polyrhythms that seemingly mimic the nature of such foreign music.
In short, all a trained ear could classify and keep in memory to later reproduce back at home; but there are several missing elements that make Asian music what it is.
We would often discredit noises, detunings, disharmonic overtones, and some portamentos, as an unwanted portion of the execution —merely a pitfall of the interpreter's shortcomings—, but in every single one there's a meaning we are failing to comprehend.

What I would suggest you do is, if you care about the music being true to the setting, hire a Chinese composer that's familiar with the classical tradition of his country. Describe to him what you want, and then select and fit the pieces in the game while trying to keep an ear towards the interpretation us westerners will have of it (no matter its original meaning, a vividly rhythmic major-sounding piece will strike us as odd in a moment of sorrow).
It's hard work, but completely doable.

Alternatively, you could avoid coming across as a cheap knock-off* by forgoing any intention of sounding "Chinese".
Rather than picking its most prominent features, or god forbid, trying to clad faux-music with emulated instruments for the sake of credibility, take the subjacent meaning and devise something new out of it, foreign to both ears. A lot of Asiatic music is programmatic in nature, which can lend lots of material to draw from.
Perhaps it needn't be made with melodies, but rather with textures. Or placing an emphasis solely on the rhythmic aspect. The possibilities are infinite, that's up to you and the composer.

*And believe me, this will happen. I've witnessed way too many times the folk music of my country butchered by foreigners. Even with interpreters that share our same language!
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Still aiming to release next month? Can't wait to play this!

I plead the fifth. On the one hand, my computer has apparently finished undergoing repairs today and is ready to be shipped back to me. On the other hand, I doubt all the art assets could be done by the end of September (although it's possible, the artist has been very reliable and productive so far), and I still don't have audio assets. Probably what I will push myself to achieve is a "content complete" version of the game with almost all the visual assets and no audio at all. If someone is willing to beta test, fantastic, but otherwise I will just play through it myself over and over again and tweak it while waiting for the last art assets and a final solution to the audio problem.
 
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Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Developer
Joined
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Messages
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Warning: This will be a dense and long-winded post, filled to the brim with autism. Proceed with caution.

On portraying Chinese music

I'm sure at some point in your life you've come across Hindi or Arabic pop music. And it most likely was presented for the sake of amusement, since who the hell could ever take such bizarre concoctions seriously?
Just look at how clichéd and ridiculous everything is; it's as if they were parodying themselves!
Apparently there's quite a huge industry behind it, and I'd swear that folks aren't putting so much effort and money into this just for the laughs.
So, what gives? If everyone's being serious about this, why is it so... shitty?

Turns out music isn't a universal language as many would have you believe. There's no divine message hidden that will move the souls of all men alike, indistinct to their origin and creed.
As I exemplified in my previous post, like the spoken tongue, it all boils down to a series of culturally inherited codes which, in tacit agreement, are assigned certain values by a community.
How could we ever understand a melody from a distant land if we can't even agree on how the octave should be divided? What the hell is an octave anyways, for that matter?
Not even through harmony could we ever hope to communicate meaning, since to many cultures the concept is entirely foreign, just like several of which I'll speak further on are to us.

Our pop music arrives to unaccustomed ears that pick its most salient and identifiable features. They reinterpret it under a new set of codifications, and thus such... interesting results are born.
The same will happen when, me, you, or anyone foreign to the culture tries to coin some Chinese sounding BGM. Because it's not just the music, but also what surrounds it.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the Chinese is a tone language; they employ different melodic patterns to change the meaning of a syllable that comprises several words, which spoken plainly would mean the same.
A slide, or any peculiar motif that might seem random or improvised into the music might actually carry a literal and well defined meaning to the knowing ear.

What happens when you unknowingly ignore these facts is what gave us many pieces (both musical and written) during the Orientalist period in European art. Which, while fantastic, had nothing to do with reality. It was indeed as many of them were called, an impression.
If you pick any Asiatic flavoured piece by a Western composer, you'll be more than likely to find a fine example of what I'm trying to portray. There they are: the pentatonic scales, hexafonic non-harmonies, parallel fifths, and disjointed polyrhythms that seemingly mimic the nature of such foreign music.
In short, all a trained ear could classify and keep in memory to later reproduce back at home; but there are several missing elements that make Asian music what it is.
We would often discredit noises, detunings, disharmonic overtones, and some portamentos, as an unwanted portion of the execution —merely a pitfall of the interpreter's shortcomings—, but in every single one there's a meaning we are failing to comprehend.

What I would suggest you do is, if you care about the music being true to the setting, hire a Chinese composer that's familiar with the classical tradition of his country. Describe to him what you want, and then select and fit the pieces in the game while trying to keep an ear towards the interpretation us westerners will have of it (no matter its original meaning, a vividly rhythmic major-sounding piece will strike us as odd in a moment of sorrow).
It's hard work, but completely doable.

Alternatively, you could avoid coming across as a cheap knock-off* by forgoing any intention of sounding "Chinese".
Rather than picking its most prominent features, or god forbid, trying to clad faux-music with emulated instruments for the sake of credibility, take the subjacent meaning and devise something new out of it, foreign to both ears. A lot of Asiatic music is programmatic in nature, which can lend lots of material to draw from.
Perhaps it needn't be made with melodies, but rather with textures. Or placing an emphasis solely on the rhythmic aspect. The possibilities are infinite, that's up to you and the composer.

*And believe me, this will happen. I've witnessed way too many times the folk music of my country butchered by foreigners. Even with interpreters that share our same language!

Chinese music has changed a lot over time, though, right? My familiarity with Chinese music is pre-unification or post-revolution, with a giant 2000+ year gap in the middle. I'm actually not interested in filling that gap, but I am curious what reproductions there are for pre-unification music. Do you have any knowledge or suggestions? I have seen the bell-sets that have been dug up, and from reading classical texts I know of various other instruments that they used. They obviously had different styles, too, just like the Greeks.

As far as I know, though, the ancient Hellenes and Chinese are in the same boat: there's no sheet music preserved from 2500 years ago. Just literary descriptions, the physical instruments themselves, and contemporary visual depictions of the instruments being used.
 

AdolfSatan

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
1,871
Chinese music has changed a lot over time, though, right? My familiarity with Chinese music is pre-unification or post-revolution, with a giant 2000+ year gap in the middle. I'm actually not interested in filling that gap, but I am curious what reproductions there are for pre-unification music. Do you have any knowledge or suggestions? I have seen the bell-sets that have been dug up, and from reading classical texts I know of various other instruments that they used. They obviously had different styles, too, just like the Greeks.

As far as I know, though, the ancient Hellenes and Chinese are in the same boat: there's no sheet music preserved from 2500 years ago. Just literary descriptions, the physical instruments themselves, and contemporary visual depictions of the instruments being used.
I spent yesterday looking for my notes from when I studied ancient and world music, but alas, I think I remember giving them away to the student's center when I left the conservatory. I found a .txt where I had saved some useful links, though.
Mind you, I never delved in too deep into the subject, so all of this is rather superficial.

Allegedly, most written music from the ancient era got lost when Qin commanded every book to be burned. Some tunes survive from the warring states period on the Shijing, Zuo Zhuan, and chapter 17 of the Liji, though, but I can't give you much more information on the subject because that's just as far as I went.
Their music evolved in the same way our has: it keeps constantly morphing, but some core aspects always remain, binding everything together.

Some songs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffCKlqWOewo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bof1GlvAo0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh98zIvyUd8
Many of these, if not all, carry a story or legend with themselves, as is the case for the first one: http://www.philmultic.com/home/instruments/guqin.html

Here (scroll down) you'll find a far more graceful explanation than I could ever give, by China's most prominent pipa player, on how simply dicking around a pentatonic scale has nothing to do with making Chinese music.

If for whichever reason you feel like obsessing over it, here's a pdf for Symbolism in Ancient Chinese Music Theory.
And here some other sites with further information:
http://users.wfu.edu/moran/Cathay_Cafe/G_tar.html
http://users.wfu.edu/moran/Cathay_Cafe/romaniza.html
https://journals.openedition.org/ethnomusicologie/202

I plead the fifth. On the one hand, my computer has apparently finished undergoing repairs today and is ready to be shipped back to me. On the other hand, I doubt all the art assets could be done by the end of September (although it's possible, the artist has been very reliable and productive so far), and I still don't have audio assets. Probably what I will push myself to achieve is a "content complete" version of the game with almost all the visual assets and no audio at all. If someone is willing to beta test, fantastic, but otherwise I will just play through it myself over and over again and tweak it while waiting for the last art assets and a final solution to the audio problem.
Perhaps you should make a proper thread in the General RPG forum once you've got the non-audio beta version and offer free keys to testers, I'm sure some will be interested.
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Well, it looks like development might be at a standstill again. I got my laptop back not too long ago... but it's worse than when I sent it. The keyboard seems ok (although the spacebar requires some force), but more importantly it just continually suffers from a "CRITICAL SERVICE ERROR" message that kicks me out of windows and turns the machine into a brick. I can temporarily fix it by reinstalling windows, but a few startups later the machine turns into a brick again. Frustrating.

I'll stop bitching there, but bottom line is I don't have a different PC I can program on. Thankfully I backed everything up on USB drives. If I can somehow fix the problem myself I can probably resume programming this week, otherwise I will just mail it off again & be without for another few weeks.
 
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AdolfSatan

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Dec 27, 2017
Messages
1,871
Sounds like someone neglected his duties to the gods. You should present an offering to appease them.
 

AdolfSatan

Arcane
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Dec 27, 2017
Messages
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I figure coding and the like would fall somewhere under Héphaïstos's department. Perhaps throw something for Apollo as well, to make sure.
 

Ninjerk

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Jul 10, 2013
Messages
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Better offer something up to Poseidon, as well--it'd be safer than taking the chance you have to wait another 10 years to finish the game.
 

Nutria

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Strap Yourselves In
I usually pray to Jesus when I have inexplicable networking problems and it seems to work slightly better than nothing. It helps that I'm already on my knees trying to plug in all the goddamn ethernet cables.
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I made a monetary offering to the god FedEx, whose priests are now transporting my laptop to the "City of Industry" for repairs. The laptop is still under warranty and MSi is not charging for a second repair attempt, so all I had to do was pay for shipping. Maybe I should have just sacrificed a house-cat to Hades and had him release my laptop's soul, but that's probably illegal these days.

I predict another 3 or 4 weeks before I get my computer back. That means no PC gaming, either, so maybe I'll just spend my after-work hours drafting content with pen and paper. Or, I will just replay Heroes' Quest 1/QFG1 through the browser on my work pc.

It sounds like there are some audio assets awaiting me, too, which is an exciting development. Before making a game I didn't understand just how much the music and audio adds to the whole package. This whole broken laptop thing has delayed the game a bit, but I'm definitely still going to get it out the door in a finished state well before the end of 2018.
 
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vlzvl

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I predict another 3 or 4 weeks before I get my computer back...

Well, if you need 4 weeks to get a damn PC fixed, forget all the weak gods, you better pray to Kratos
 

Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I predict another 3 or 4 weeks before I get my computer back...

Well, if you need 4 weeks to get a damn PC fixed, forget all the weak gods, you better pray to Kratos

Hermes could lend a helping hand, too. It takes a week for it to get out there and logged into their repair queue, and then it takes however long for them to get it back to my doorstep after they've fixed it. I did this same process in August so sadly I know how long it will probably take.
 

Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Some good news, actually. First, it looks like MSi fast-tracked my repair order, because as I was walking out the door yesterday a Fedex guy showed up and handed me my laptop. I'll check it out tomorrow when I get back, but at any rate I'm impressed. They must have seen that it was a second repair ticket.

Second bit of good news is that I received a message with links to a whole lot of music tracks. Looks like the artist I was speaking to has delivered a lot of audio assets for the game. I will give them a listen tomorrow on my hopefully functional and 100% repaired laptop.
:yeah:
 

Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Confession: took me a lot longer than "tomorrow" to listen to the new tracks.

Upside: The tracks are awesome. Instruments and style are right on point, and they sound smooth and professional. This project constantly teaches me that audio is important, a point I never understood or appreciated until I tried to make a game of my own. I sent a more detailed message to the musician and will communicate further to get permission to use the audio and include it in trailer videos, but it's impressive stuff.

I also finished up a pro se felony trial, complete with the defendant fleeing the courthouse one day only to return and berate the judge and jurors the next. Thankfully the jury brought back the verdict I was seeking, but work has been busy at any rate. Been years since I last took a pro se case to jury.
 

ERYFKRAD

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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I also finished up a pro se felony trial, complete with the defendant fleeing the courthouse one day only to return and berate the judge and jurors the next. Thankfully the jury brought back the verdict I was seeking.
What the hell
 

Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I also finished up a pro se felony trial, complete with the defendant fleeing the courthouse one day only to return and berate the judge and jurors the next. Thankfully the jury brought back the verdict I was seeking.
What the hell

I'm a criminal prosecutor. I handle a mixed felony case load of violent crime, felony firearm possession, and certain vehicle offenses involving extensive injuries, death, or where the offender has at least one trillion prior dui convictions. I've been doing this sort of work going on a decade now. I want to improve my programming skills and become a competent indie game dev, and then change careers and dedicate myself professionally to producing crpgs with classical Greek and Chinese content.
 
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Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I'm a criminal prosecutor
That I know. I was more curious about the runaway defendant who returns to yell at judge and jury.

Essentially, I couldn't convince the defendant to plead guilty in this relatively simple case involving a high speed car chase (by far and away the least important case I have, and literally the whole police chase was caught on video), so we called down the jury and the judge started reading out the initial introduction and instructions. About 15 minutes into the speech, the defendant suddenly stood up and walked out the door of the courtroom, and then somehow managed to flee the courthouse (budget issues mean that we don't have deputies/bailiffs in every room). Then a friend of the defendant burst into the courtroom and went "oh lordy it's over, it's over" and waved her arms around. We let the jury go and got ready to issue a warrant, but the defendant actually returned and we held things over to the next day.

We did the trial the next day, crossing over into the day after that. As the judge read the final instructions pre-deliberations, the defendant suddenly started pointing at the jurors and said they weren't appropriate and that they shouldn't be allowed to sit in judgment. Eventually the judge got the defendant to shut up, and the jury was released to lunch. They ate and about 10 seconds afterwards they brought back a guilty verdict.
 
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ERYFKRAD

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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Didn't the defendant have counsel to advice him against this thoroughly retarded course of action he took?
 

Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I deleted the more detailed post, but for those who didn't see it: yes, everyone made it clear that going pro se is a dumb idea. The judge even made a defense attorney sit in the gallery the whole trial in case the defendant had a change of heart.
 
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Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I swear I haven't just been sitting on my hands all day. Work & PoE2 has taken more than their fair share of my time, but progress has been made in content, audio assets, and visual assets.

In addition to working on new assets, the artist also revisited the old artwork for Troezen. Here's a couple of small pictures of how things have changed; both these locations are in the free demo that's available:

newtroezenhome.jpg



Here's a screenshot from the old version of the house:
lkJ0Q4.jpg


newtroezencross.jpg



The original town of Troezen now looks just as good, if not better, than the assets for Epidauros.

:yeah:
 
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