Final fantasy 6 soundtrack series#

Think of a Jenga tower: ItвЂ™s sturdy for a few levels, but the taller the tower gets, the less stable it becomes, and the more you expect it to crash down.ДЇF6В is a tower that crashes down. If one were to keep stacking and stacking, youвЂ™d hit all twelve notes in the chromatic scale before you circled back around to the first note in the sequence. But when you stack fourths on top of one another with nothing to undergird them, they start to get unstable. The perfect fourth is not particularly special in itself-itвЂ™s just a musical interval, the distance from C to F on a piano.

Final fantasy 6 soundtrack series#

The gameвЂ™s opening music is a series of six-yes, VI-pitches stacking on top of each other in slow succession, each one a perfect fourth away from the one preceding it (figure 3.1). And, like the Espers, the analog-for now at least-seems to be creeping toward extinction.ДЄ pipe organ is the first sound you hear after you flip on the SNES to play Final Fantasy VI. Like humans against Espers, the analog and digital have been warring with each other for generations. Pianos have, in turn, been outdone by advanced synthesizers, which not only replicate piano sounds and maintain pressure sensitivity but can also mimic hundreds of other instruments-including the pipe organ. They have been outmoded in many ways by newer keyboard instruments such as the piano-which, though a complicated machine in itself, responds more organically to the playerвЂ™s input. Organs are a triumph of engineering, but they are also an artifact. Music, that most human of endeavors, becomes extrahuman.ДЄt their cores, pipe organs are binary instruments: Their stops are on or off, their sound crescendos and decrescendos accordingly, and they render our input into a primitive kind of digital output. Organists sit behind their consoles pressing keys, pulling stops, flipping levers, and stomping on pedals, operating a mech suit that blasts out magic.

Screeching treble and thundering bass conjure the Alpha and Omega the sound can come from all directions at once, becoming an invisible force that barrels through the bodies of its listeners. Like the cathedrals they often inhabit, pipe organs exist in outsize proportion, engineered by humans to evoke the presence of the beyond. Organs can be small and light enough to carry or weigh hundreds of tons and fill up a freight train, but a pipe organ is more than the sum of its many, many parts: It creates a whole world of sound and gives you no choice but to live in it. The pipes can produce sounds ranging from monstrously deep to twinkly high, in sometimes hundreds of timbres. Hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of delicately assembled mechanical parts bellow a supply of wind through ranks of different-sized pipes.

It requires your entire body to play and hulks out music through dusty, antique science. The pipe organ is a lumbering, complicated machine of an instrument. Final Fantasy VI has received numerous ports since it first released in 1994, and is widely considered to be among the greatest video games ever made. This chapter of the book-which for the purposes of publication on The Logger has been split into two parts-is an in-depth analysis of the gameвЂ™s legendary and evocative soundtrack from longtime series composer, Nobuo Uematsu. Below is an excerpt from Sebastian DekenвЂ™s book on the classic Super Nintendo role-playing game, Final Fantasy VI.