Insert Credit Art Jam 2.0 | February 2023 | Machines

IncompatibleKaiser

DavidNoo I am also having this problem. I got a temporary workaround though it might drop the img quality.

edit: I’m not gonna make an account for a new uploader right now. This one is called Heartless Machine God

rejj

I don’t think there is a good solution if you are posting from your phone, but if you are on mac/pc you can do the steps yourself that the forum would do for you in the background. It’s a bit of messing around but not too bad, and works:

go to https://imgur.com/
click the green “new post” in the top left
upload your image
once uploaded, right click the preview of your uploaded image and copy the image location
- exact wording in the right-click menu will depend on which browser you use. it’ll be something like “copy image location” or “copy link to image”
paste that link in to your post on the forums, and surround it by [img] … [/img]
- eg [img]https://i.imgur.com/IM5fkp0.png[/img]:
you can use use width=XX or height=XX inside the first [img] tag to change the size of the image if you want to shrink it down or blow it up or whatever
- eg [img width=80]https://i.imgur.com/IM5fkp0.png[/img]
- [img height=200]https://i.imgur.com/IM5fkp0.png[/img]

I’ll double-post this to the text formatting thread also

antillese

Insert Credit February 2023 Art Jam Artist Statement

This Genesis action game has a pretty amazing soundtrack! As the explosions surround your character, the music makes you want to either plug in some nice headphones and adjust that slider up to the top or possibly turn down the volume so you can barely hear the audio at all.

DJ Tent Mode’s Mega(drive) Mechanical new track drops now!

You can download an mp3 of “GEMS (Generic Electronic Machine Sounds)” here.

The Genesis is a Machine

Last month we discussed how the Genesis and FM synth in general have some mixed reviews due to perceptions in sound quality¹. This has less to do with the capabilities of the sound chips themselves and have much more to do with the capabilities of people programming the FM patches and storage capacity of game carts of the time. That’s why last month I was using FM patches that are (allegedly) used by Yuzo Koshiro: I knew they would sound good even if they sounded more like they came from a PC-88 game than a Genesis game. (They probably did come from a PC-88 game that Koshiro wrote.)

The Genesis had a distinctive sound especially to American ears because of the GEMS software that was commonly used in the English-speaking world. You can learn more about the GEMS (Genesis Editor for Music and Sound Effects) here. It was a DOS program that was pretty constrained in how you could define the FM operators as opposed to the more flexible tools that were available to Japanese-speakers.

This month, I wanted to go the opposite direction of “sound quality”. I wanted to lean into the most default sounding FM patches I could, and make them loud. I only used default FM instruments that are provided in DefleMask. This is not an indictment of the default instruments included with DefleMask - there are many that sound very good! And then there are many that sound like they are “Generic Electronic Machine Sounds”. They are G.E.M.S.

Reminder that the Genesis supports Stereo Audio. I did not use it subtlely.

Writing Music for a Machine

Go load up a bunch of default-ass instruments. (Or are they “default ass-instruments”? Determining this is an exercise that is left to the listener.)
Make a “Whap!” snare hit on the down beats and put a base kick on the up beats.
Compose a rhythmically boring but effective pluck bass on the quarter notes.
Go to town with the slides on that lead guitar.
Add in some funny synth-swells. (I noticed that the swells in general seem to be one of my personal musical styles, as I use them in several of my pieces.)
Go back and fix the bass line so it’s not so damn boring. You can do this by nearly changing the octaves of some of the notes and doing literally nothing else.
Break up the drums a bit more and give it just a bit of variation.
It’s March 4th and the next art jam prompt is up. Ship it.

Repairing the Machine

To Do:

More variations in the bass line, especially rhythmically
Fix the levels; adjusting the volume levels on the Genesis is surprisingly finicky because the scale is logarithmic, so even though we have a range from 00-7F, anything that’s less than say 65 is barely audible.
Samples???
Next time, go all in on the machine theme and have ChatGPT generate my informative and yet entertaining post.

Footnotes

¹ Regarding frequency modulation audio timbre:

JXUA

Hi. So, I reckon I’m A little late but I wanted to share. A couple weeks ago I saw online where people have been taking the VR painting tool Vermillion and somehow loaded up the canvas and paints into a few different game maps. Fallout, Half-life, etc. and it totally captured my imagination. Packing up my paints and easel and wandering out into the world to set up and paint is something I haven’t been able to do in ages due to covid and living situation. The idea of carrying that same spirit into a familiar gameworld to see it from that angle is irresistible to me.
However, I don’t have the many tens of millions of dollars laying around required to Get VR so it remained a dream until someone here on IC shared a link to noclip.website which lets you load up and fly through a huge number of game world. Plus its got a random button. So I hit the random button. Here is my collaboration with Machines. As a landscape it does look sort of amateur-ish but still better than I thought given my rustiness. I’m excited to make more of these!

“de_nuke” PaintTool SAI Ver. 1, Photoshop 2023, noclip.website.

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