Moondust is a 1983 Commodore 64 game that is considered by some to be the first art game. The soundtrack is generated by the player's actions.
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More of an interactive musical art demonstration than a game.
‘How fascinating to feel that part of oneself might, 'in a twinkling of an eye', energise by sympathetic resonance an atom... of an arbutus tree... of an amethyst... of a sea anemone... [...] and... of the galaxy of Andromeda.’
– Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, 1972.
Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (20th Jun. – 26th Jun., 2023).
A year after founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram left the radio service due to aesthetic differences and opened her own studio in Fairseat, Kent, to explore her new instrument, the Oramics. Oramics produced sounds from shapes drawn on strips of 35mm film, which were read by photoelectric cells before being converted into sound signals. From 1959, she devoted herself entirely to this artistic project, producing a powerful discography in which the exploration of music intersects with a meditation on history and human societies. Among others, 'Bird of Parallax' (1972) revisits the musical contrasts she introduced in Still Point (1948), with complex instrumentation and extensive work on timbre and rhythm, emphasising the silences and expansive spaces between notes.
In her essay An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972), Oram theorises her musical project and describes the importance of intermodulation. She explores musical production as a metaphysical contemplation that enables a greater understanding of both the forms of visible things and our own human condition. It is the layering of patterns that makes it possible to create novelty and music. The same project can be found in Moondust. An experimental game by Jaron Lanier, the title questions the relationship between interactivity and experimental music. Lanier was at the beginning of his career, and although he had already shown a definite interest in composition, he worked mainly with the traditional Western orchestra, to which he added world instruments. Moondust is an exploration of synthetic music, not unlike Suzanne Ciani's masterful albums such as Voices Of Packaged Souls (1970) and Seven Waves (1982), with their sometimes alarming, sometimes soothing sounds.
In Moondust, the player controls an astronaut and a series of spacecraft, tasked with spreading coloured particles as close as possible to a target in the centre of the screen. The controls are erratic, and the various figures bounce off walls and sometimes follow chaotic trajectories. Moondust takes advantage of the technical capabilities of the SID chip to create fairly rich layers of sound, although it never quite reaches the level of long, tightly composed arpeggios. Instead, the game is an explosion of textural sensations that only imperfectly translate the traces and shapes left on the screen. In 'Bird of Parallax', the first eight minutes are a rather disconcerting cacophony, with birdsong intruding into the sonic panorama, trapping the listener in a bubble cut off from time. The same sensation is found in Moondust when the title is first played. Sounds burst into one's ears, with strong contrasts in dynamics. In the closing minutes, 'Bird of Parallax' is much more structured: a melody is clearly audible, accompanied by organic pulsations, as if order is emerging from chaos.
Once the player understands the underlying mechanics of Moondust, the stars can align and the player can control the various elements with profound geometric discipline. What looked like Brownian motion becomes elegant choreography, and the music is modulated according to this newfound order. The experience becomes a sort of ethereal meditation: the screen expands into higher dimensions, and the quest to spread moondust becomes a metaphor for the expansion of life across a vast, dark universe. At this point, Moondust fully exploits the interactivity of video games to generate its music, pioneering generative music along with Brian Eno and other British musicians. As Oram pointed out in An Individual Note, the player is then in control of the method of music production, free to explore it and meditate on their own role as creator. This is perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Daphne Oram, Jaron Lanier and Suzanne Ciani: art is born out of chaos and is within everyone's reach, as long as they accept the exercise of introspection. In Oram's words: 'The greatest music is composed when the composer [...] [reveals] such a range of understanding that they too can say: 'this is great music for I sense, think and feel it to be so'.' [1]
__________
[1] Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, Galliard, London, 1972, p. 59.
– Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, 1972.
Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (20th Jun. – 26th Jun., 2023).
A year after founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram left the radio service due to aesthetic differences and opened her own studio in Fairseat, Kent, to explore her new instrument, the Oramics. Oramics produced sounds from shapes drawn on strips of 35mm film, which were read by photoelectric cells before being converted into sound signals. From 1959, she devoted herself entirely to this artistic project, producing a powerful discography in which the exploration of music intersects with a meditation on history and human societies. Among others, 'Bird of Parallax' (1972) revisits the musical contrasts she introduced in Still Point (1948), with complex instrumentation and extensive work on timbre and rhythm, emphasising the silences and expansive spaces between notes.
In her essay An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972), Oram theorises her musical project and describes the importance of intermodulation. She explores musical production as a metaphysical contemplation that enables a greater understanding of both the forms of visible things and our own human condition. It is the layering of patterns that makes it possible to create novelty and music. The same project can be found in Moondust. An experimental game by Jaron Lanier, the title questions the relationship between interactivity and experimental music. Lanier was at the beginning of his career, and although he had already shown a definite interest in composition, he worked mainly with the traditional Western orchestra, to which he added world instruments. Moondust is an exploration of synthetic music, not unlike Suzanne Ciani's masterful albums such as Voices Of Packaged Souls (1970) and Seven Waves (1982), with their sometimes alarming, sometimes soothing sounds.
In Moondust, the player controls an astronaut and a series of spacecraft, tasked with spreading coloured particles as close as possible to a target in the centre of the screen. The controls are erratic, and the various figures bounce off walls and sometimes follow chaotic trajectories. Moondust takes advantage of the technical capabilities of the SID chip to create fairly rich layers of sound, although it never quite reaches the level of long, tightly composed arpeggios. Instead, the game is an explosion of textural sensations that only imperfectly translate the traces and shapes left on the screen. In 'Bird of Parallax', the first eight minutes are a rather disconcerting cacophony, with birdsong intruding into the sonic panorama, trapping the listener in a bubble cut off from time. The same sensation is found in Moondust when the title is first played. Sounds burst into one's ears, with strong contrasts in dynamics. In the closing minutes, 'Bird of Parallax' is much more structured: a melody is clearly audible, accompanied by organic pulsations, as if order is emerging from chaos.
Once the player understands the underlying mechanics of Moondust, the stars can align and the player can control the various elements with profound geometric discipline. What looked like Brownian motion becomes elegant choreography, and the music is modulated according to this newfound order. The experience becomes a sort of ethereal meditation: the screen expands into higher dimensions, and the quest to spread moondust becomes a metaphor for the expansion of life across a vast, dark universe. At this point, Moondust fully exploits the interactivity of video games to generate its music, pioneering generative music along with Brian Eno and other British musicians. As Oram pointed out in An Individual Note, the player is then in control of the method of music production, free to explore it and meditate on their own role as creator. This is perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Daphne Oram, Jaron Lanier and Suzanne Ciani: art is born out of chaos and is within everyone's reach, as long as they accept the exercise of introspection. In Oram's words: 'The greatest music is composed when the composer [...] [reveals] such a range of understanding that they too can say: 'this is great music for I sense, think and feel it to be so'.' [1]
__________
[1] Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, Galliard, London, 1972, p. 59.