Oliver Sacks talks to Jon Stewart about the fundamental impact of music on the brain. Rhythm, he says, is a purely human trait...only humans can listen and respond to music by dancing to the beat. Makes it all the more tragic that music programs and education are getting cut from public schools, doesn't it?

Check it out.

I'm going to this Friday night at 1015 Folsom: the launch of Tenori-On, featuring media designer Toshio Iwai and I am Robot and Proud.

Tenori-On is a new electronic instrument designed by Toshi Iwai. Check out this demo:

Harmonix's Chris Foster pointed this out to me: Jonathan Coulton is playing the Great American Music Hall on the last night of GDC. The venue is a really great one - long ago when band actually played shows we played there with Bis. One of my favorite shows ever was seeing The Magnetic Fields there. It's a very nice space. And should be a good show!

New blog game-ism has the right idea: this Yoshida brothers tune would so rock to play! No vocals though, so I think it has to be a Guitar Hero tune, not Rock Band. Hm.

I used to think the shamisen was a very ugly instrument - it has this twang that I never liked. But it works really well in these tracks.

So, if you listened to 1UP Yours last week you know I bitched about what Activision/Neversoft did to the female characters of Guitar Hero, especially Judy Nails, whom a lot of people loved to play for her brash, tomboyish punk look. Look at them side by side now: Judy Nails 2, totally fierce! Judy Nails 3, totally trashy! Totally slutty! Totally gross!

Ugh. Anyways, I have to admit that while I love playing the Guitar Hero series, I have never really listened to heavy metal or classic rock, so none of those dudes were really my personal guitar heroes. Slash? Carlos fucking Santana? WTF? Who cares? When I was learning guitar back, oh, a decade or so ago, I was inspired by my own heroes - and heroines, because frankly, the whole Guitar Hero series is missing some serious diversity there. Most of the musicians I swooned over as role models are women. And some day when we can import our own music to play along to, these are the musicians whose tracks I will import and play my heart out for. Keep on rocking in the free world!

This is neat! Music video of Bjork's single "Innocence" styled like a 2D platformer game, Super Mario Brothers style.

Parappa the Rapper is a seminal music game, one of the first to cross over into North America with cult success. Parappa is such a charming character, and the engaging, clever, sweet songs were part of what made the game so fun.

A great original soundtrack can really elevate a game to the next level. I feel that way about both Katamari and Loco Roco - Katamari would be good, but not brilliant, without the amazingly far-ranging and creative soundtrack. Loco Roco, a less successful game, is still a minor jewel because of its adorable, completely hummable songs. In the case of Loco Roco, the music goes a long way to imparting personality to those simple little blobs, too.

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So now that I have list of Jpop and Jrock songs (thanks, everyone!), I want to collect the media. Right now I've got a lot of low-quality videos from Youtube and Daily Motion that at least let me hear the song. But I want decent-quality MP3s of this stuff. Should be easy, just go to iTunes Japan, right?

Oh, if only it were that easy. But for some reason known only to the Apple overlords, only customers with billing addresses in Japan can purchase songs in the iTunes Japan music store. There is a work around, of course - American otaku are not to be daunted by such a small obstacle.

But it's irritating, from a philosophical standpoint, that customers outside of Japan can't use the internet to buy a digital download. Doesn't that seem backwards to you?

In any case I have ordered my prepaid iTunes card and will be soon using my aunt's address in Ibaraki to start downloading awesome Japanese music.

We all knew/hoped that this was happening, right? Harmonix, MTV, and EA announce the project Harmonix has been working on since Guitar Hero II, and it's Rock Band.

Read the Gamasutra story, the 1up.com story, the Gamespot story, and the USA Today story.

This is fantastic; and I can see the possibilities of next-generation music games already on the horizon. Pretty soon I won't even need to go to the studio to practice, my bandmates and I will just pick up our remote instruments and get online.

By the way, I'm disappointed that none of these stories mention how dreamy Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos is. I expected more out of you, Gamespot.

I'm looking for good Jrock and Jpop - I used to be more into the scene but now I've really lost touch. There's a lot of new stuff out there. Here are some that I like:

B'z: Love Phantom
Electric Eel Shock: Rock and Roll Can Rescue the World
Gackt: Vanilla
Glay: Beloved
GO!GO!7188: Otona no Kusuri
Hamasaki Ayumi: Is This Love
L'arc~en~ciel: Blurry Eyes
Luna Sea: Storm
Mr. Children: Fake
Orange Range: Sayonara
Puppypet: Gogomonkey
Radwimps: Yushinron
Utada Hikari: Hikari
X Japan: Silent Jealousy

Also, Guitar Wolf - but man, their songs are all good, I can't just pick one.

Do you have any recommendations? What should I be listening to?

Tycho at Penny-Arcade makes a great point in the last paragraph of today’s news post in response to the recent Gamespy review change. In it he criticizes reviewers for concentrating on music they like or dislike in rhythm games rather than the actual gameplay. According to Tycho, "What I want to know is if these new songs provide interesting, original rhythms I can play solo or with my friends when they come over. Will it extend the amusement I get from the peripherals I purchased?"

The man is on to something. Just because a song is good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fun in a game. With a game like Donkey Konga, no one expects Pink Floyd’s The Wall or some such music. It wouldn’t work, nor would it feel right. Meanwhile, bouncy pop songs are far more fun for pounding and clapping on a plastic drum.

The music that I like on my stereo is far different from the music I like in my video games. I may bounce like a wounded whale playing “Butterfly” in DDR, but that doesn’t mean I listen to it while writing. On the same token, I may have a saccharine affinity for The Geto Boys, but I doubt anyone would want to shake electric maracas to their music.

The problem, of course, is that a music video game is not the same as a music video. In the majority of music videos, what occurs on screen is propelled and filtered through the music, which is produced to be listened to on its own. In rhythm games, you have the opposite. The music is filtered through the gameplay. Therefore whether a song in a rhythm game is enjoyable or not relies far more on how fun the game is than if it will fall into some form of collegiate musical canon.

Unfortunately I can't provide a direct link, but The Bees' "Chicken Payback" video directed by Thomas Hilland (and hosted on his site) predates the DJ Format video directed by Keith Schofield we linked to earlier, and works on a similar theme.

Worth the 3 minutes it takes to watch it.

Awesome music video imagines an arcade game based on freestylin. If this were a real game, it'd be really hard. Although after having watched Missy Elliot's Road to Stardom I'd begun to feel like, yeah, I could do that!

I love how candy comes out of the machine as a bonus. This is courtesy of ClockWorkGrue - who's probably too busy working on The Godfather game to post. That's okay. Thanks, Ben!

By the way, speaking of music and videogames, I forgot to mention that Freezepop played a post-GDC party at Lulu's house last Saturday. As some of you may know, the band contributed a track to the crazy racing/beat-matching game Amplitude, sequel to Frequency. Read an interesting music review/dialogue about that game here.

It's only Thursday, feels like Friday. Sigh.

So here I am wondering why there was no mention of this at the company meeting a few weeks ago. The New York Times is reporting (FRR) that Electronic Arts is partnering with Cherry Lane Music Publishing to form Next Level Music (get it? It's a clever pun based on the fact that it's music from videogames, but also implying that the music is better than the competition!). Apparently, the genesis of this idea came when Universal Pictures approached Electronic Arts to ask about using the orchestral theme from the Metal of Honor series in a trailer for Seabiscuit.

There are a couple of EA videogame soundtracks floating around out there, including some rather rare ones, like the vinyl promo singles from the NHL game that came out a few years ago. There's a copy of that one tacked to a wall near the sports bar downstairs from where I sit.

What this likely means is that, in the future, EA will probably try to secure exclusive tracks from artists it puts on a game soundtrack, and then release soundtrack albums on its own label. Like a movie studio, really. Nevertheless, I will quietly hold out for The Best of Archon b/w Theme from Pinball Construction Set.

Nerdcore hip-hoppers rejoice, Yosumi Records has put forth two complete albums of videogame beats and breaks. The records, entitled Video Game Breaks & Sound Effects Volumes 1 & 2, are rife with samples from games ranging from the original Donkey Kong to the first Shenmue. Thankfully, the producers saw fit to not simply include popular games from throughout history, but also those that simply had awesome soundtracks; my elation at hearing the unmistakable theme from Moon Patrol cannot be understated. The most recent games appearing on the albums seem to be Dreamcast games, which makes sense, considering that the Dreamcast was the harbinger of the current generation of game consoles, where videogame soundtracks really began to move away from synthesizers.

The albums as a whole are a fairly mixed bag. I don't think there would have been much of a way for Yosumi to avoid this, though, just due to the volume of samples on these disks. Any DJ or producer who checks them out is sure to find a few gems, but one of the problems I encountered was that most of the tracks contain samples and effects from many different games, which may cause problems for rapid access unless you mark your records with stickers. Another issue that may bother some is that occasionally the game music samples are taken while somebody actually plays the game, the resultant embedded sound effects may mess with the beat enough to render attempts at juggling it useless. Finally, a few of the themes (most aggrivatingly the overworld theme from the original Zelda) are provided in only about 4/5 of their entirety, so if you really want those, you're going to have to record off an emulator or a TV.

The albums also include a few premade remixes. These are good for scratching over, mixing, or what-have-you. Unfortunately, the remix of Super Mario Bros. is the only place any of the classic SMB Theme can be found. A clean version would have been nice. Thankfully, Castlevania is better represented, with a remixed version, and clean versions of several rocking themes.

The part of these records that I've given the most use is, surprisingly, the vocal samples from Mortal Kombat. Scratching "You weak, pathetic fool" over Blockhead's Insomniac Olympics is just too much fun.

If you're curious, you can find RealAudio needle drops of both these albums about 5/6 of the way down this page, and near the top are drops from the venerable 8-Bit Construction Set.

But there's no money involved, so I don't feel bad about it.

"Kids, don't let your parents tell you that video games will get you nowhere in life." - Kellin Manning, musician, in the liner notes to Boomkatalog One, a new album by Boomkat.

Amusing NYTimes article chronicles the rise of Boomkat with an emphasis on the role of the Codemasters' "MTV Music Generator" for the PSOne. "I had been struggling with my traditional four track," Kellin is quoted as saying. "And I was sort of anticomputer. I thought you had to make music the old-school way. This game was a revelation. It totally opened my mind to sequencing and editing."

My favorite part, proving yet again that sequels are not always better: Kellin doesn't like the PS2 version. The original software let you record samples from any source, burn them onto CD, and then manipulate the samples. The newer one requires the use of an optional "Sampler Kit." But Kellin said even so, he doesn't like the sound of the samples.

As a gamer and a musician, I of course find this fascinating. We've tried a lot of different recording techniques in my band, and most of them required weird patches and complicated (and very expensive) software. Sometimes we like the crappy gritty sound of cheap 6-tracks; sometimes we need something warmer and more sophisticated. But most of all we need a fast way to sketch out a song as part of our composition process - just to be able to see how all the parts fit together, and then an easy way to do quick edits before we spend the time and money in recording the master. A videogame interface sounds like a brilliant solution. Why didn't I ever get this before?

Gamers.com reports that the first-ever North American concert of video game music, featuring an orchestra and chorus, will be staged on the final day of this year's E3.

A neat thread about video game music can be found on Metafilter, with some links to video game music archives.