my super mario world music projects
Yes, Super Mario World (SMW) is indeed a game from 1990. But there is still today an active community around this masterpiece of video game history. In particular, there is a community which is devoted to creating new Super Mario World levels via manipulating ROM files (these are the files you use for playing SMW on a PC via an emulator). Since people don't want to use the same old songs all the time there are also many people creating new songs which can be used for these 'romhacks'.
I have been learning a bit about music theory and composition. In order to get creative here, I decided to combine my passion for
- one of my favourite SNES games
- programming
- composition
in order to create some SMW custom songs. My first goal was to get a song published on smwcentral.net, the main page for this community. I managed to do this with 'haunted house 2001', see song list below. I will hopefully keep composing according to my time and inspiration. Maybe, some day I'll have a song someone cosiders to use for a hack, that would be nice.
- Haunted house 2001: An unsettling piece for ghost houses and such. It's a bit weird and has some drawbacks. The beat and harmony is a bit naive and it's overall quite repetitive. However, I managed to achieve a quality to get it published. I actually like the third section of it, maybe some day I'll create a new composition around it. Here you find the Source and the publication on smw central.
In the directory spc you'll find a script to make working with spc files more convenient on linux, it basically wraps calling wine on the usual windows tools AddmusicK and SPCPlay.
In case you are interested in how this works, here is a great tutorial for creating music files for SMW: https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=89606
Work in progress and ambitioned: I also worked on a programm to automatically generate the source file for an SMW song from a MIDI file here: https://github.com/wol-e/midi_to_spc_template . Currently in a very rough alpha version, hopefully I will complete this some day.