Sonic Music Mania
It's beginning to look a lot like Music Plant Zone around here!
Summary
Sonic Music Mania is a compilation of audio and music projects relating to the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. What started out as a couple of audio engineering projects with the goal of remastering music from a handful of SEGA Genesis Sonic titles eventually turned into a music mixing frenzy where I became interested in combining music from the source genres that composers took inspiration from for the soundtracks of classic Sonic games with the music from those classic Sonic games themselves. In addition to remastering tracks and mixing them together, I also explored environmental sound design in combination with music. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Sonic Music Mania YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
Remastering music tracks was eventually what led me to mixing music and further exploring the realm of audio-engineering with white noise, environmental tones, and the science behind music. I would take recordings of music tracks straight from games or source their MIDI and play around with tempo, pitch, bass, treble, reverb, deafening, resonance, and other aspects of the track to make it sound sharper or more full. The process included the use and learning of tools such as MidiEditor, foobar2000, Audacity, LMMS, Renoise, and several others. Many of my earliest attempts at remastering music tracks was driven by my desire to remix said music, but I found remastering to be the proper first step in understanding the technology and science behind sound in both analog and digital formats. This journey started around the mid 2010s and eventually lead to me mixing music and composing music in addition to exploring the art of SFX design.
Reflection
Sonic Music Mania was my way of getting to further explore the realm of music from a place of familiarity when I was younger. I really enjoyed the genres and soundscapes of games such as Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic CD, or even Knuckles’ Chaotix when I was growing up as a kid and had no idea where said kind of music originated from until I started researching and studying music seriously in my late teen years. That is when my love for music in general blossomed and my explorations with sound in general became much more commonplace. Understanding the nature of sound, how music is made, how audio is mastered, and what can be communicated through the language of audio were some of the most sizable benefits of crafting this project.