The original for this song actually came into being about three years ago, when I was testing the limits of a newly acquired sound program (see The Big Mixx for more on this). At any rate, after working on part of it, music dropped off the map for a while, and I somewhat forgot about its existence. While working on some other music a couple of years later, though, I came across this track and realized that it sounded cool enough to deserve finishing. So, after upgrading the samples and messing around with the end of it, I had a decent composition. While repeptitive in parts, it has some nice sequences towards the middle and a decent ending.

Kyoto Nights was created using an innovative technique for creating freeform music – a program called ColorMusic (written by Shinichiro Hirama). This program translates the movement of a mouse over contrasting colors in an image file, and converts the result to music in the form of a midi sequencer file. The raw source for Kyoto Nights came from using a screenshot from the game Oni, and then edited and processed with different instruments in Melody Assistant.

If you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy game, you’ve probably heard of Cid. knowing that, you’d be quick to realize that this song has absolutely nothing to do with that at all. In fact, it’s named Ced’s march for the main chord progression: C,E,D. Aside from that, not much else to say about this song – it sounds kind of like brass-heavy marches by some british composers, hence the “strange british variant.”

The very first musical track that I ever sequenced on the computer, while trying out one of the early versions of Melody Assistant. And yes, that is my voice, after pitch shifting at the end of the track.