Mark Danks » Music

Every Extend Extra Extreme

mdanks — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:08:17 +0000

I picked up Every Extend Extra Extreme (E4) this weekend. And by “picked up”, I mean I bought it from the XBox Live Marketplace. E4 is the newest game from Tetsuya Mizuguchi. He did some of my favorite games of all time: Rez, Lumines, and Meteos.

Mizuguchi-san is very interested in synesthesia, the idea that visual and audio elements can be mixed together. Kandinsky and Scriabin are probably two of the most famous people who experienced it. Mizuguchi-san referred to Rez as K-Project in reference to Kandinsky.

Synesthesia is something which I found when I was composing music with graphics. I often would think “I’ll change this B-flat into blue.” I am not certain that my audience ever saw it that way, but the fluid nature of music and visuals was always fairly natural to me. It was never so much that when I heard a pitch, I would see a color, but instead that I viewed the two as being interchangeable.

As a game, E4 is awesome to me. I have been playing two modes, the Game Time Unlimited and the standard shooter (The Revenge). They are each awesome in there own way. I find the Game Time Unlimited to be fairly relaxing. The Revenge reminds of Geometry Wars, only more interesting.

Unfortunately, I am sure that E4 is going to do as well as Mizuguchi-san’s other games…which is not very well. Rez is seen as a landmark game (back on the Dreamcast and again on the PS2), but it never sold very well. I am guessing that Lumines did okay. It will be interesting to see how well E4 does as a pure download title. On the other hand, except for Uno, most download titles do not sell well…either on XBox Live or PSN.

Music Page

mdanks — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:17:18 +0000

I added back the music page. The page is pieces which I wrote mainly back in graduate school many years ago. There are some audio files, scores, and other notes about the pieces.

Lately, I’ve been “composing” ambient pieces. I listen to a wide range of music, from Fred Hersch to Frederic Chopin to David Lang to Nine Inch Nails to James Holden. However, when I create music, it tends to be more like Biosphere or Stars of the Lid. Once I am happy with some of them, I will post them here.

Playing the Piano

mdanks — Sun, 13 May 2007 05:27:55 +0000

A few months ago, I bought a piano. Nothing special, just a Yamaha upright console piano. I have played piano since 1st grade and took lessons for about 12 years. During college and graduate school, I played off and on, although it usually involved working on my own pieces.

My daughter started taking piano lessons a few months ago, which is what caused me to buy a piano. I have not sat down as often as I would have liked to play it…I am sure that she plays it more than I do these days. But days like today make it worthwhile. I played for well over an hour. Mostly I played the “old standbys” like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Bartok, and Satie (yeah, Bartok and Satie are “old standbys” to me…my Master’s degree is in 20th Century composition…what do you expect). Being able to sightread those pieces and enjoy them is something which I am extremely happy that I can still do. Apparently, all of those years of lessons which my mother forced on me actually paid off.

I need to make sure that I spend much more time playing music…maybe I’ll even dig up my classical guitar…