Project Nimoy : First Audio Attempt

I've been playing around with FamiTracker the last couple of days. It's a great little tracker that allows you to compose 8-bit music. It's broken down into five channels:

• Square One and Square Two for "instruments" (sounds that can be adjusted for tone, pitch, etc.)
• Triangle - for drums
• Noise - for effects
• DPCM - I didn't use this channel (more advanced and didn't require it)

Only using the 4 channels, I broke down my background image into sections, then assigned a note for that section based on either the order in which the colours appear or by the amount of colour, just to see how those differences would affect the sound.

For my first attempt I broke the image down (left to right as that is the direction of scrolling when I get this into a game) into 16 segments and listed the notes in the order that the colours appeared from top to bottom:

I then plugged these into FamiTracker, assigning first note to Square One, the second to Square Two, the third to Triangle and the fourth (where there was one) to Noise.

Here is the result (bear in mind this uses the default tone for all fields, so it's going to sound rough).

I tried the same thing, this time breaking the image down into 8 segments and listed the notes in the order of amount of tone in the segment:

Here's the result.

Dramatically different but equally strange. It does work, however. Also I used basic rules, which could alway be changed so long as the design theory holds, that the background image dictates the music. I don't have to play each note every time....the first playthrough could just use the note in Square One, and the second playthrough could use Square Two, and I could alternate. Also, I need to create new "instruments" so it doesn't sound so generic.

The important this is that this DOES work, so for now I'm going to hold off on spending the time composing the music and focus on the Flash implementation of the idea.