To me this is similar to saying "why call yourself a jazz musician when you could be a classical, world and street musician?" Nothing wrong with being all 3, but John Williams — inadvertently I’d imagine — makes it sound like it's a bad move to call yourself just 1.

1/ I understand his point, which I imagine was mostly to encourage people to not feel pigeonholed, but either due to genuine philosophical disagreements or clumsy wording, there are things I want to address.

2/

I always thought it was amazing how Nobuo Uematsu synced to Aerith's theme to her death scene, but as I heard recently, the scene was actually retrofitted to the song. I think it's way easier to fit visuals to music than vice versa Aerith's theme — and a lot of game music in general — has regular structure, and regular structure helps a lot in memorability. As far as I can tell though, cinema is much less inherently time-sensitive than music, so a compelling scene has a lot more flexibility w.r.t. time

I think of music in 2 dimensions: emotional investment and sensory immersion. Things like note choice capture the former, while more "para-musical" things capture the latter, like a fast string ostinato to convey flight or something irrespective of note choice. 1/ I think it’s not all that hard to write either an emotionally intense tune or a creative tune that evokes certain physical sensations, like flying, running or whatever else.

I think the mind is only capable of maintaining so big a frame of reference for the passage of time, and nostalgia, I think, is profound because it balloons our frame of reference from a few days to entire epochs of life. 1/5 Which is to say that the average sensation of “presentness” or “realness” if you like, I would guess spans maybe a couple of weeks or a month at the limit. 2/5

On the topic of parsing genres, motion to no longer refer to VGM as "VGM."

Calling VGM "VGM" is like calling soft rock "pooping in Walmart music;" I think it deserves more than to be defined simply by where it's commonly heard rather than what it actually is.

https://twitter.com/waltzforluma/status/1335430910536155137

Loosely, even something like "story music" would be better. In any case, when people ask me what my favorite genre of music is, I say "VGM," but as far as I can tell, the unifying property of the wildly disparate music thereof isn't a fetish for music that happens to be in games

I'm in a perfectly stable state of mind that would in no way make an AMA exciting.

AMA. Always happy to answer Smash questions, 🅱️ellas, but I do love me some music composition/theory/philosophy questions too

New video will be out by the end of the day, I think.

It's about why improving is such a pain in the ass and was largely inspired by a DM someone sent me, essentially asking about a mismatch between how much they felt they understood the game and their results. In other words, improving in anything requires two things even if not done consciously: breaking down concepts into more and more abstract subconcepts and framing information in ways that are useful. For an example I used in a recent thread

Getting good at anything is the same as saying you have a high degree of control over outcomes. Simple statement, but lots to unpack, since having a high degree of control means *knowing* what to control in the first place. The struggle of getting better at Smash or anything is mostly not knowing where to go next, and this is because, like I've said before, making meaning out of huge loads of information is extremely tough. Better control means finer-tuned understanding of small parts, but those small parts get more and more abstract

Watching EVO GFs last night reminded me of something that might be helpful to hear: there exists an awkward middle ground between liking something enough to be frustrated that you don't reap its fruits, but not enough to where you put the necessary time in. Thread time: I mentioned recently that after many years, I'm back into making music and as a result Smash is a distant non-priority. What getting back into music reminded me of is that you can want to pursue something to its final stages, but if the passion isn't there, you're in a bad spot