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Music In Pinball

Pintastic New England·video·51m 28s·analyzed·Mar 30, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (batch) · $0.015

TL;DR

Dr. Neil Lerner examines the history, musicology, and cultural significance of pinball sound and music composition.

Summary

Dr. Neil Lerner from Davidson College presents academic research on the history and musicology of pinball sound and music. The presentation traces the evolution from mechanical chimes and bells in early pinball machines to synthesized melodies in solid-state machines, discussing how pinball composers create soundscapes that establish mood, theme, and game state. Lerner explores definitional questions about what constitutes music, draws parallels to film and video game music traditions, and identifies key innovations in pinball sound design.

Key Claims

  • Gottlieb introduced three-chime bars in 1969 with the pitches C sharp, E, G (a diminished triad), appearing consistently across all machines studied, though the designer and reasoning behind these specific pitches remains undocumented.

    high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner presenting academic research findings; notation based on direct examination of multiple machines

  • Fireball home version from fall 1976 had seven different melodies programmed, ranging from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to a funeral march when tilted.

    medium confidence · Dr. Lerner citing game manual documentation; he has not personally seen the machine in operation

  • Freedom from late 1976 opened with a programmed melody, marking the first time a pinball machine created a melody like that, though subsequent videos of the same machine don't have this opening sound, suggesting possible modification.

    medium confidence · Dr. Lerner discussing research findings; confidence lowered due to discovery of contradictory evidence in other videos of same machine

  • Knight Rider was among the first Bally solid-state games to open with the 'Call to the Post' melody, predating arcade video games' use of programmed familiar melodies.

    medium confidence · Dr. Lerner citing multiple corroborating videos; described as research finding still being verified

  • Circus from late 1977 was the earliest arcade video game found with a programmed familiar melody, using the Tararabunda theme and Chopin's Funeral March.

    medium confidence · Dr. Lerner presenting research on early video game history; based on video evidence review

  • Hot Tip (Williams' first solid-state game) included dummy scoring mechanisms that created the sound of spinning scoring wheels even though the game had digital displays, designed to ease customer transition from electromechanical to solid-state machines.

    high confidence · Dr. Lerner citing historical product design documentation and intent

  • Space Invaders' increasing pitch/speed during gameplay was not planned by designers but discovered as an artifact of the processor slowing down as fewer objects were drawn on screen.

Notable Quotes

  • “It turned out to be a great topic that has created a lot of interest, and now a lot of people in the field write about film music, and it's not seen as a shocking, radical, illegitimate topic anymore.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ early presentation — Reflects Lerner's academic trajectory and the legitimization of studying commercial/applied music in academic musicology

  • “There are people whose careers and lives are creating music for this stuff and we study composers and music so musicologists can look at this.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ mid-presentation — States the core mission of Lerner's work: elevating pinball composers to academic recognition

  • “Video game didn't emerge just out of a vacuum. It came out of this industry and infrastructure for coin-operated amusement machines. It was already decades old and really centered around pinball in a lot of ways.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ early presentation — Key historical argument connecting pinball sound innovation to early video game music development

  • “I was struck at the fact that these machines making these kinds of sounds are appearing at just the same moment that concert hall music is starting to get interested in minimalism.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ mid-presentation — Draws cultural/musicological parallel between pinball and contemporary 'serious' music movements (Glass, Reich, Riley)

  • “I'm curious if it was maybe just something that got modded in this one machine. I'm a little less confident now that it was the first.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ mid-presentation — Demonstrates scholarly rigor and willingness to revise claims when new evidence emerges

  • “I don't know that I would go that far myself, but this is a really characteristic sound from pinball.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ discussing scoring drum sounds — Shows nuance in defining what qualifies as 'music' vs. functional sound

  • “It's really just that sound means, oh, we are going back to the beginning. That's kind of what music is for me.”

    Audience member — Contributes lay perspective on how sound design communicates meaning in pinball gameplay

Entities

Dr. Neil LernerpersonDavidson CollegeorganizationPintastic New EnglandorganizationWilliamscompanyBallycompanyGottliebcompanySterncompanySteven DahlfeldpersonHarry Williams

Signals

  • ?

    content_signal: Formal scholarly presentation on pinball music history and musicology at Pintastic New England event, indicating growing academic interest in pinball as legitimate research subject

    high · Dr. Neil Lerner presenting as musicology scholar from Davidson College with published work in Oxford Handbook; discussing academic conference presentations on pinball

  • ?

    historical_signal: Detailed chronology of pinball sound design evolution from mechanical chimes (1930s) through electronic synthesis (1970s-1980s), documenting specific games and innovation timelines

    high · Systematic presentation of Contact (1933), Lightning (1934), Fireball (1976), Freedom/Knight Rider (1976), Circus (1977), Hot Tip, and Flash; patent research and manual documentation

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pinball sound design serves multiple communicative functions: establishing mood/theme, signaling achievements and game state changes, increasing player immersion, and managing player transition expectations during technology shifts

    high · Dr. Lerner's framework identifying mood establishment, achievement signaling, game state indication, and Hot Tip example of dummy scoring mechanisms to ease EM-to-solid-state transition

  • ?

    design_innovation: Gottlieb's 1969 three-chime design with diminished triad (C sharp-E-G) is consistent across all examined machines, but designer identity and intentionality behind these specific pitches remains undocumented mystery

    medium · Dr. Lerner's direct examination of multiple machines; music theory analysis identifying diminished triad; acknowledged gap in historical documentation

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.154

0:00
Hi everybody. This next seminar came about from my careful and conscientious scanning of Pinside where this guy asked what seemed like an innocent question about sound and the knocker being used to represent the replay as opposed to anything else in pinball and it turns out I'm going to be a as yet unresolved research question in the pinball sound and music community, apparently. So but it did lead to me having a few long conversations with him and he's been doing some really interesting work. So coming up from film studies to video game studies and then branching off to pinball, We're trying to help him find more information. Maybe some of you have answers to his questions or maybe you have questions for him after the presentation which will be at that microphone up there. So please welcome Dr. Neil Lerner from Davidson College. Dr. Neil Lerner, Davidson College, Thank you all. Are you getting my voice pretty well as I'm coming through? Great. Dave and the fantastic folks for setting all this up. It's really a great opportunity for me to come and share some of the work I'm doing. I really am just eager to get information that you all might have too. So there are places in the presentation where I've got questions I'm going to open up and ask you for. Let me just go through a quick outline of what I want to try to cover in this talk. I want to quickly introduce myself to you all in terms of what my work is, what my sort of background and approach is. I want to define what are some basic keywords in the work I'm doing, so words like music or pinball music, terms that need a little defining. And then I want to go through just a quick history of music from pinball machines and I've already got one essay out that came out last summer, an essay on early pinball sound that's in this Oxford Handbook of video game music and sound. I've got another essay in print that's supposed to, excuse me, in press, that's supposed to Well I'm in the first year and about to Zoom What the F-Ex Boris увеличinya weli and write a poem orchestra
3:01
So for the first part how arduous is the opgeel I'm going to talk about the way that music school has really been written about and said about music in pinball so far. Now, I'll try to define what I mean by pinball music in a second because there's been a lot of stuff written about certain kinds of pinball music and Dave is one of the pioneers in this as far as I've been able to tell. So I'll get to that. I put musical style in the talk title so I just wanted to sort of quickly go over that when I use that term, I'm coming from musicology, the scholarly study of music. And I started when I was a grad student a long time ago writing on music and film back in the 1990s when musicology was a field that really only wanted to study concert hall music and opera and sacred music and so forth. So I committed career suicide according to a lot of my professors by choosing So that's a lot of people that are interested in film music as a topic, and it actually wasn't career suicide. It turned out to be a great topic that has created a lot of interest, and now a lot of people in the field write about film music, and it's not seen as a shocking, radical, illegitimate topic anymore. From film music I started working on music in animation, music in television, music in video games. I was one of the first musicologists to work on music in video games, and my work The work is really focused on the early sound and music from the 1970s and early 80s in video game music. And it was from thinking about that period when video game music emerged that made me start to think about pinball. Because video game, of course, didn't emerge just out of a vacuum. It came out of this industry and infrastructure for coin-operated amusement machines. It was already decades old and really centered around pinball in a lot of ways. So that's how I've gotten to this project so far. So musical style refers to the certain decisions that a composer or creator makes regarding melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, tone, color, form, texture, those are some other things. But this is what I mean by musical style. So it's why the music in Deadpool might sound real different from the music in a Star Wars machine or music in an early 80s solid state machine or something. So many different issues of musical style. Styles not the same as genre. Genre are the categories of stuff. So a category of type of game or the type of science fiction theme versus a crime theme versus a gambling theme or a horse racing theme or something. Those are all different types of genres. And so styles often line up with different genres. So what is it that I've been studying? At first I just started looking at videos on YouTube and listening to pinball sound. And that was the main thing I had to study. I started to look through industry periodicals like Automatic Age or Play Meter or Replay or those sorts of things. Sometimes there's stuff written about the music, usually not. It's usually More the advertisements in those that I find useful to see what's being hyped up and promoted. I've been going through patents just to see if I can find sort of some evidence of when certain ideas were introduced into how music and sound was used in pinball machines. I've been fortunate to get a number of composers to speak with me on Zoom and they've been I've been so helpful and given me a ton of information. I've been able to go on to field work and have gone to different collections and museums where I've made audio and video recordings and then I can go back and study that and listen to it really closely. I'm not trained really in how to read schematics. I've just been training myself for the last few months, but schematics are another really important place where I can find information about what the sounds were, what was going on in the machines. I'm not at the point yet of being able to look at game code and understand it, but that's probably another place I'm going to need to explore. In terms of pinball composers, these are names that I've found so far and several of them I've already managed to talk with and stuff. I'm sure I've probably left out some. I don't at all mean for this to look like a comprehensive list, but I really wanted to make a list just Just to show that there's this whole group of people who are doing really incredible creative work. Sometimes it's creative work that involves technological cleverness and innovation. Sometimes it's the creative work of coming up with interesting new melodies and harmonies and combinations of all these things. But one reason I'm doing this work is I think the work of these people needs to get more attention and more highlighting than it has. Just that they're even pinball composers. I've done a few talks now at academic musicology conferences on pinball and folks are just shocked. They're like, pinball? It has music? Yeah, it has music. It has composers? Yes, it has composers. There are people whose careers and lives are creating music for this stuff and we study composers and music so musicologists can look at this. So pinball music itself as a kind of genre of music. This is what I'm interested in. So I'll say a little bit more about what that means, but as a genre it has certain forms and functions. What do I mean by that? So the music in a machine can establish mood, it can establish time and place, it can establish genre. These are things that film music, TV music, video game music has long been able to do. Sometimes there's no connection at all. I'll just put that little caveat that sometimes the music might not have a connection. And I'll give you some examples of that later in the presentation. The music may increase player immersion. I don't really study immersion per se. To really study immersion requires psychological studies, social science work that I'm not doing. In general, I can make the general claim that it can increase immersion, but there are also people who like to play without the music or block out the sound or have the sound turned off. I'm not able to get granular on all those different contingencies that might happen. Music can signal all sorts of achievements within a game, from scoring, extra ball, extra game, to jackpot, and it can signal changes in game state as the game progresses, from starting a game, through things that happen in the game, to ending the game. So forgive me for getting to this one. Maybe this one seems like an obvious one, but from teaching college music courses for years now, it's not an obvious one. It's not an easy term to define. And if we just look at some of the sort of big major definitions you could find out there, if I go to the 18th century encyclopedia from one of the achievements of the enlightenment of the 18th century, we could see that music is the science of sounds as they are capable of pleasantly affecting the ear, or the art of arranging So, this is a really traditional definition, but it highlights science and art, it highlights order, sound, pleasantness. The Oxford English Dictionary, the sort of current gold standard definition we could find right now if you pull that up, says that it's the art or science of combining vocal We're going to be talking about the way that musical or instrumental sounds produce beauty of all these different things. It doesn't then define how beauty is to be assessed or determined. They're kicking the can down the road on that. It's sort of similar with art. Some more experimental or avant-garde definitions of music would allow a lot more than the previous two definitions we just saw. So the concert hall composer, Edgar Varese, famously came And then we came up with this definition of organized sound. So there's nothing in there about beauty, about art, about pleasantness, about order. It's just organized. Famous example of this might be John Cage's Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds where in the 50s he had a piano player go and sit at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and the ambient sounds that happened in the room were the musical composition. And this was a pretty radical redefinition of the term and a lot of people wouldn't consider that music. But I just want to put that out there as one of the spectrums, one of the ends of the spectrum of how music could be defined. John Blacking is a musicologist who came up with the idea of humanly organized sounds, which is, you know, an interesting way to sort of split it out, too. That's now been problematized in terms of it being speciesist. You know, what about birdsong? What about whale song? Is that not music because it's not a human that's organized the sounds?

high confidence · Dr. Lerner presenting established video game history; well-documented in gaming literature

  • Flash brought dynamic, continuously changing sound into pinball machines just months after Space Invaders introduced this concept to video games.

    medium confidence · Dr. Lerner presenting research findings; timeline claim requires verification

  • The Contact game from late 1933 (and its successor Lightning from 1934) featured an electric bell that was so novel and appealing that players consistently chose machines with the bell over identical machines without it.

    medium confidence · Dr. Lerner citing documented origin story from Harry Williams; exact sourcing varies in available documentation

  • Pong, the first video game with pitches, used only three pitches: B flat (at octaves) and B natural, creating completely aleatoric melodies dependent on gameplay outcomes.

    high confidence · Dr. Lerner citing established video game music history; documented in his Oxford Handbook essay

    • @ Q&A section

  • “I hated that this article that's going to appear in August might already have errors in it like that.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ mid-presentation — Reflects concern about publication timing and accuracy; indicates upcoming academic paper on pinball music

    • person
    Flashgame
    Hot Tipgame
    Space Invadersgame
    Ponggame
    Contactgame
    Lightninggame
    Freedomgame
    Knight Ridergame
    Circusgame
    Fireballgame
    Playboygame
    Kissgame
    Harlemgame
    Neptunegame
    Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Soundpublication
    Pinsideorganization

    historical_signal: Pinball sound design parallels contemporary 'serious' concert music movements (minimalism by Glass, Reich, Riley) using repetitive, aleatoric approaches, suggesting shared cultural zeitgeist in late 1960s-1970s

    medium · Dr. Lerner's observation of contemporary emergence; repetitive chime sounds in EM machines compared to minimalist compositional techniques

  • ?

    historical_signal: Space Invaders' famous ascending pitch effect was unplanned: artifact of slow processor creating pitch acceleration as screen-drawn objects decreased; later copied intentionally in pinball designs like Flash

    high · Dr. Lerner citing established video game music history; documented accidental innovation becoming deliberate design pattern

  • ?

    product_launch: Transition from mechanical chimes to synthesized electronic sound in solid-state machines (mid-1970s) allowed pinball manufacturers to program familiar pre-existing melodies (William Tell, licensed music) for thematic integration

    high · Timeline of Hot Tip (William Tell), Playboy/Kiss/Harlem (December 1978 with licensed music), demonstrates deliberate strategy shift

  • ?

    product_strategy: Williams intentionally retained dummy scoring wheel sounds in solid-state machines despite digital displays to prevent customer alienation during EM-to-solid-state transition; preserving auditory familiarity while changing underlying technology

    high · Hot Tip design documented as deliberate product strategy; described as manufacturer concern about losing customers to technology shift

  • ?

    content_signal: Dr. Lerner has published essay on early pinball sound in Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound (published summer before presentation); another essay on broader pinball music in press, expected August publication; indicates growing academic infrastructure for pinball studies

    high · Lerner referencing published and in-press work; specific handbook titles and timelines mentioned

  • ?

    research_methodology: Lerner employs diverse research methods: YouTube video analysis, industry periodical review, patent examination, composer interviews via Zoom, field work at collections/museums with audio-video recording, schematic study (self-taught), with future plan to study game code

    high · Lerner's explicit description of research toolkit and ongoing skill development

  • ?

    community_signal: Significant undocumented history in pinball sound design: designer of Gottlieb three-chime pitches unknown, various 1976-1977 game openings requiring verification, indicating opportunity for community contribution to historical record

    high · Lerner soliciting audience input multiple times; expressing uncertainty about Freedom vs. Knight Rider first opening melody; unanswered question about Gottlieb chime designer

    • 12:38
    But it's another way to do it. It separates it from a, I don't know, a dump truck backing up and that beeping siren or something like that or a fire alarm or an alarm clock going off Those are organized sounds but they not pleasant or artful to most people In fact some of those are irritants that make us want to not have them around So the really big keywords are things like sound, art, science, organization, beauty. So with these things in mind, I'm curious what you all, some of you all might think if you're willing to share, what are the earliest, what is the earliest pinball machine that creates music? There's not a wrong answer to this. I've tried to set it up to show you that music, you know, that there are different positions people have on what constitutes music. So with that in mind, I'm just really curious what you all would say to that. If anyone's willing to share. Yeah. Well, going by your example of John Page, you could flip a pinball game that had no sound effects, just a ball hitting the head of the pin. How does a flim spin sound quality do it? That would probably be the most basic. Yeah, no, that's great. And it's a great sound, right? I mean, it's just the clinking as the ball hits the pins, and there's the ball rolling down the wood. Steven Dahlfeld, another academic who has presented here before, owns a game where at one point a ball rolls across a succession of chime bars that it's just to make a sound. Like you did something good and part of your psychic reward for playing is the ball is rolling down these chime bars and playing sort of a little tune-lit. Do you remember what game that is? It's a 30s game? I don't remember off the top of my head, but I'll put you in touch. Great, great. Thank you. Anyone else? So, I might start to ramble, so if I can please stop. But I'm trying to make a connection between what you're saying qualifies as music. You're saying a dump truck doesn't qualify as music. I shouldn't have thrown that in there, but yeah, that was too judgmental on my part. I tried to make it more egalitarian. From my brain I can see it as, it's really just about associations and what it's doing inside your brain. Okay, so with the sound of the pins and the ball rolling on the wood, it really just, there's no music per se like generated by a person that was intended until you get the time. It's really just that sound means, oh, we are going back to the beginning. That's kind of what music is for me and pinball is there's only different generations that you get from pins and rolling wood and chimes, the little beats from early solid state to there's a machine over there that blew me away because it looks like it's from the 1970s, 1960s and it's playing disco music. So it's really just kind of like you associate it with what signal is it sending in your brain? And that dump truck that's just beeping, it's telling you something. The exact same way a call out is telling you something on a playing field. Is it just a call out that, I don't care, I don't want to pay attention to that. Or is it a call out of, ooh, ooh, ooh, now's the time to make the shot. Right, right, right. That line between music slash sound slash noise, I mean, at the furthest end of the spectrum, if it's considered an unpleasant sound, it's labeled a noise. The Sound of Music is more neutral. Music has a higher valuation in, oh, music must have something artful maybe or beautiful to it, just in the ways that culturally it's been defined. I really shouldn't have thrown my own opinion in there. I would not want to sit and hear a concert of sounds or dump trucks or something. If people had paid money to go here four minutes and 33 seconds, would they want a refund? Well, yeah. Probably would. Male Presenter 1 But at a certain point, and really what I'm trying to say is when you start to get away from just there's ambient noise being generated by stuff going on to somebody intended chimes to ring when you hit a certain action. Somebody intended a call out to be your signal, look out for that truck backing up, look, okay, look out for this is your shot. So humanly organized sound, that definition might be most relevant to that. Any others? Any machines? Like any, yeah. I was thinking there's, I don't know the era that's out, but I'm hoping to start them out. And I think the one had like the sort of horse racing thing. And so, don't pay attention to them. You can also picture them running in here, or I'm assuming that was the thing. And then, you know, being into like the R.O.A.L.D. dollars, in particular. They seem kind of invited to be strong, but related to the game. I've got examples of it later in the presentation. That's exactly right. And they start out, no, they start out with games that are horse race themed, but then they're non-horse race themes that continue to use that same music because that's what they programmed into it. So yeah, no, that's a great example. And I think there's a good argument that maybe once the machines can be programmed to play back a series of pitches to create a familiar melody, is that when music So, in the late 70s, in 77 or 78, maybe that's when music starts in pinball machines. Anyone else? Any other thoughts or ideas? I've got possible answers in the remaining slides. So, the famous improvements in Bagatelle from 1871, if we just look at the patent, it has a couple bells in it. So, in addition to the sound of the ball rolling down the The ball hits nails. You also would sometimes get a chime if you did it correctly and the bell ran in, if the ball ran into the bell. So arguably going back to, you know, as early as we wanted to find pinball maybe, we could say there's music in it. That might be too radical of a claim for some people. Another starting point might be the game Contact. This sort of first time you start to get electromechanical solenoid that affects the gameplay that kicks the ball out. The first time that happened. The game was originally out in late 33. Later versions of it that Harry Williams added a bell and I found a couple different origin stories to how the bell came in there. That's all in that first publication I've got. But Contact had an electric bell that was really blowing people's minds. I believe as Williams told the story of setting up two machines and one had the bell, the other didn't have the bell and just watching and everyone went to the one with the bell. That's the one they wanted to play. The other one just was deficient to them. So I recently started to get the pinball bug. So I bought a couple machines now. One, the most recent one I got was a lightning machine from 1934, which is the same design as Kontakt. It was just, he sold it off to exhibit supply to another manufacturer. So it's a similar design and I've just been going to town on it. The version, the one I got actually had three different bell units within it. I'm not sure which, if any of them, might have been the actual authentic one from 1934, but this was the one that I think is probably closest in there. Let's see. There might be some time lag on this one, but this is how it sounds. Not too bad on the lag. So a doorbell sound, it was essentially the same mechanism that got worked into a pinball machine. If we were going to go really radical with the definition, the sound of the drums, the scoring drums resetting at the beginning of the game is a really typical sound in an EM I don't know that I would go that far myself, but this is a really characteristic sound from pinball.
    21:38
    The chimes. So bells and chimes are the main things that might be considered musical in pinball from the 30s until the 70s when you start to get synthesized electronic sounds. I have been really struck, I discovered when I was listening to all these different machines, Gottlieb's three chime chime bar that they introduced in 1969, all the ones I've heard and studied have the same three pitches. They're all C sharp, E, G, which if you're into music theory, it's a diminished triad. It's an unusual triad. I was, the first time I was listening to one, I was like, wow, there are a bunch of tri tones in this, why is that? And then And I realized the middle tone, it was a minor third. I said, oh, wow, it's a diminished triad. And that's a kind of harmony that has a particular function and use within tonal music. A C sharp E G diminished thing, there's a very strong pull to want to go to some sort of D major or D minor from that if the C sharp is heard as a leading tone. I don't think that's got anything to do with why these pitches are chosen in these Gottlieb machines. I've not been able to document who came up with this idea. So this is one of these questions that I'm still trying to track down. I know that it was Skipper when they introduced this feature and they hyped it in the advertising and they talked about the new musical sounds, the multi-tone chimes that will attract and stimulate players. But I don't know exactly who designed that chime box and who and why they picked these pitches. For all I know, They could have just had a bunch of these particular sizes of metal lying around that they wanted to use. I mean, there could be so many decisions. I'm thinking the musical decisions were not much of what motivated this. This is what, of course, one of these chime boxes looks like. And here's a little bit of gameplay from what this is Neptune from a Gottlieb EM machine that uses it. And I've got them filming from both the playfield and also the chime box inside.
    24:09
    Okay, so are these music making machines? This goes back to some of my initial definitions of these terms. It's a great sound. It's a sound that triggers nostalgic good feelings for me because I'm of a certain age where I remember EM machines and then solid state machines. But is it music? Would I listen to a recording of it just to listen to music? I doubt it. I am struck at the fact that these These machines making these kinds of sounds are appearing at just the same moment that concert hall music is starting to get interested in minimalism, this idea of repetitive music that might be indeterminate. There are pieces of music where composers might just tell a performer, okay, play this particular melody, repeat it as many times as you want, or sequence from this set of notes to this set of notes. It's really similar. Actually, pinball machines from this period are doing some of the same things that pieces by Philip Glass or Steve Reich or Terry Riley were doing, which is cool. Some sort of larger cultural zeitgeist issue, I think, is happening here. In my earlier work, I'd noticed in the game Pong, that's the first video game that has pitches to it as far as anyone's found, and it only has three pitches, a B flat at octaves, The ball goes out So the volleying sounds will give you that octave back and forth and then whenever someone scores a point whenever you avoid missing ball for high score that gives you the note that different the B natural And this is just a quick little demonstration that where I tried to show this is a sound waves out of audacity with the low B flat the high B flat ending on the B natural
    26:09
    So similar thing, limited set of pitches, completely aleatoric. It'll be different every time someone plays it, depending on what happens in the game. If this is in any way interesting, I've got an essay out there where I talk more about all this stuff. It's in this other Oxford handbook if you ever want to look that up. It won't be heard if you don't. So solid state machines are a huge step forward because they allow a machine to have a set of pitches and rhythms that can play back. Now there have been melodies before, they've just been random melodies. So those were melodies in the Gottlieb machines with the three chimes. There were melodies coming out of it but they're not melodies that we could predict because where the ball goes and when will be different every time. So the trick is can we get a machine I'm sure there's a team that will play a melody that will be a familiar melody, like a call to the post or William Tell Overture or something. Well, yeah, we'll be able to get to that. Now I have only, I've not actually seen footage or seen one of these in person, but going through the manual for this home version of Fireball from the fall of 1976, the manual Indicates that it had seven different melodies that it would play. And from the Beethoven Fifth Symphony to the funeral march when the game was tilted to da ba ba da ba ba da da da da. Have anyone here seen one of these? I'm just not, yeah? Okay. Great. I'll, I'm, I'm still. So, is this homebrew or this is separate than the fireball that was out in the wild? Yes, not a home brew, but a home... Male Speaker 2 in audience question. Playfield's different. It's, it's, it's, it doesn't have the spinner, is that right? But... Male Speaker 2 in audience question. This one has the spinner for the real fireball. Okay. Yeah, I'd love to see it in play. And it seems like somebody was getting a little too clever at this point. It is the same, it's the same sort of musical choices that you find in early video games at this point. And a lot of these musical codes for, you know, celebration, achievement, bad thing happened, these are things that come out of early film music. So the film music practices from the 19-teens and 20s, those get filtered through cartoons and then I'm not sure if you're familiar with the video game industry, but I think it's really cool to be able to see how people find their way into video games in the 70s and also pinball is what I've been able to determine. So the early machines that can create repeated melodies, I found a video when I was doing this work of a freedom from late 76 that opens up with I made a point of it in this essay that's in print and I marked this as the first time a pinball machine creates a melody like that. I've now found other videos of the same solid state machine that don't have that opening sound. So I'm curious if it was maybe just something that got modded in this one machine. I'm a little less confident now that it was I'll go on and play it. This has some of Todd Tucky talking about this. Of course this has the old fashioned chimes. And see the computer could play the notes as a rallying call. Okay, if it indeed did that. I have seen Bally four chime boxes as a part of the assembly. So I think the four chimes Four Chimes was an official Bally product. Were they programmed to open with that is what I'm curious about. Yeah. As early as... They wouldn't have had Four Chimes unless they were aiming to play them. Yeah, okay. That would be great because I've only discovered those other videos a few weeks ago and I hated that this article that's going to appear in August might already have errors in it like that. If it's not Freedom, I'm certain it's Knight Rider. I found several different videos that corroborate the Knight Rider as well as a bunch of subsequent Bally games that had that same call to the post. There it is. So that was interesting. The date's really interesting to me because it's before video games start to do melodies. The earliest video game I found that arcade video game, Not home, but arcade video game that has a melody programmed into it, a familiar melody is Circus from late 77, which has the da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da Tararabunda A when you clear out a row of balloons and whenever the clown face plants it does the Chopin Funeral March from the sonata, the bum, bum, ba, bum, bum, ba, da, da, da, da, da. All right, Williams' first solid state game, hot tip. This was, you know, that transitional period. People still concerned that not everyone will want to buy solid state, so they were making both EMN solid state machines. The Hot Tip came out with the promotion of the delightful sound allowable because of solid state. And that delightful sound will be the William Tell Overture. Of course, it's known that they put dummy scoring things in there. Well, they're not really scoring, but they're just things that will make the sound of a scoring wheel inside of the solid state machine So that people wouldn't miss that sound. Even though it will have the digital score displays, it would still create the effect as though there were scoring drums spinning around back there making that sound. Just worrying about that transition, worrying that they'll lose customers or lose interest because of that. So you get that William Tell which is decades, century of association with riding a horse and a chase and stuff from the opera William Tell, but then the Lone Ranger radio and TV stuff really solidified that in the 20th century as a horse riding galloping song. It's got that galloping rhythm and Hot Tip is a game about horse racing so it all makes It makes sense. It's a really nice theme.
    33:38
    Stern finally starts to open with melodies. So these are game start sounds. And today, if we were going to talk about, in terms of the genre, what's the function here? To indicate that you're starting the game. It gives you a melody. It's exciting. Maybe it establishes something about the theme. Stern's first two games that had one of these melodies. It's an interesting, it's a fanfare melody, but I've got a hunch on what it might be.
    34:12
    It is just a fanfare. You might hear a pep band at a sporting event play that. It's that sort of fanfare. But I can't ignore that in fall of 77, something else was getting a lot of play.
    34:23
    So, I don't know if that was on someone's mind even subconsciously. Legally distinct. I don't mean to dig up any sort of, you know, copyright infringement mess here, but just thinking about that period in time. Whoops. So when William shifts from using chimes to electronic synthesized tones, they still stick with the same, you know, some of the same programming it seems. They're just having a trigger on something on a chip instead of, instead of a solenoid to hit a chime. So World Cup in 78 starts with that same William Tell. At this point, horse racing, we're not doing horses, it's soccer. So the theme is getting a little more twisted here. You had brought up that Bally starts to open up games and some very famous and well-known games with very famous and well-known opening melodies. So December 78, they began with the Playboy machine and Kiss, Harlem All of these are games that are really well known for those opening melodies, these first attempts to try to use pre-existing music that could be used in connection to a license. Even though it's a rough rendition of it. So KISS opens with Rock and Roll All Night. Which gets reduced down monophonically to this. The most important change in pinball game... So dynamic sound. Flash is known for bringing the idea of continuously changing sound into a pinball game. So Flash does that just a few months after Space Invaders had introduced this into the video game world. In Space Invaders, you have these four descending notes, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, that just loop around and repeat as you play, as you shoot, and the fewer invaders, the speed increases. This was not something that the designer and programmer had actually planned. They just discovered it because the processor was so slow that as there were fewer things to draw on the screen, it ran faster. And it became a brilliant part of the gameplay. So it's more exciting as you shoot them all down and it goes faster and faster. And the sound sort of changes from this idea of marching alien feet is how one person is how I think Karen Collins has described it, bum bum bum bum, to where it gets so fast that you can't even tell it's four different notes. It's just sort of a blur. I'm very struck as a music historian that it's descending a perfect fourth, a lament tetrachord, a certain kind of baseline movement that has a lot of meaning in history going back to opera and Renaissance music where it's music connected to lament and sadness. Dido's lament uses it, A bunch of Requiems use it. So it's actually a really interesting thing from a music historical point of view, as well. Male 1 in audience 2 in chat Male 1 in audience 3 in audience 2 in audience I don know if the programmer was thinking lament tetrachord out of the European Renaissance but I don know it for certain I thinking more it just it also the notes you get if you start on a tonic and go down to a dominant from a one down to a five So it going to do that same thing My guess is that probably what it was But I don know I don know how hard those four pitches would have been to generate at that point with this technology
    39:01
    So the dynamic audio in FLASH consists of two tones, two pitches. One stays static or constant, is high F. The other, it starts at a low E flat and then gradually moves up. The tones are not in equal temperament. So I first sat at a piano and tried to pick out the tones, I had trouble doing it because some of them were in tune with my piano, some were not. I realized, okay, it's not equal temperament. I don't know enough to be able to look at the code or the chips to figure out why that is, but to create equal temperament is not an... I mean, that won't happen easily. The Atari 2600, it doesn't create tones in equal temperament. That's why it sounds so out of tune if it tries to create a familiar melody. But it's pretty close anyway, so you get this increase in pitch as the game goes on and it gets higher and creates this excitement that hadn't been heard from a pinball machine before.
    40:25
    And so on. This is one of my more recent discoveries. The Incredible Hulk Pinball Machine, it had two different musical sound sets that you could put into it. One of them is this organ sound that's doing some of the music taken from Bratz, Toccata, and Fugue in D minor. In D minor. . So that was not, that was just a little . So why? What's going on? Why Bach here for Incredible Hulk? That's a great answer. That was a lot of what was going on with the video game music sound, and I'm sure with some of this pinball music decision making as well. I actually have a I have a hypothesis on why that was in there. That music also comes back in 82 in the first machine that creates polyphony in Haunted House. It also uses that Bach. Here's some of that just to quickly let you hear how that... So what I've transcribed, what it's giving there, and that's so the lower notation, That's where it's now using multiple voices. It's got multiple lines of melody. That's a huge step forward in pinball music. As far as I can tell, this is the first time it happens here in mid-1982. Oops. The end of it is particularly spectacular. The closing measures from the Bach are repurposed I've got a little bit of a list here for the game over music and I transcribed it and it's almost note for note from the box. It leaves out some of the lower pitches and I've gone through and looked at it in different waveform analyzers to look at the... it doesn't have some of those lower pitches but it has at points, at times it has up to five pitches happening at once.
    43:26
    Okay, so in the little bit of time I've got left, I want to try to explain why I think that makes a lot of sense in there. That piece of music has a long history of being used in horror films and fantasy films and science fiction films, but the first time we get it in a sound film is in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So the description of it, you're sorry, Just some of the opening of it, the .
    44:09
    I think someone was very clever and smart. I think the idea of Hulk as a Jekyll and Hyde sort of character, to work that into the music like this, that's really smart. Like that was really great design by someone. I presumably Craig Firewalls is if that information I've got is correct. One last example, the game Punk from 1982. Punk is a new wave in music. Now in games too. It features the sights and sounds of today's young players. It feels so cringy and desperate. So the music that it's referring to, and it's very carefully dodging licensing things by having graffiti in the background that has parts of band names but not all of the names. So we've got like, you know, Ramones in the upper left back, just M-O-N for the Ramones, or X-P-I-S or P-E-C-H-S, like it's hinting at these bands. The PESH mode doesn't usually get classified as punk though. A lot of, you know, it's more synth pop or new wave and the music that accompanies the game punk is definitely not punk music. It's, it's much more new wave synth pop. This is one where if anyone has any leads on this, I would love it. Four different, three different sources online that I found that all credit different people. I'm pretty confident David Thiel had nothing to do with it. I've watched and heard a few interviews and he never mentions this is work he's done. He does, he of course did the music for the video game Reactor and that was used in Punk, but I suspect that's why he got credited for it. But he, I'm confident also he probably did that as a work for hire and had no rights to the piece after he sold it for the video game in Reactor. And I'm so sorry, I was, I've confused rock and punk here, what I was just saying. That didn't have the react music. Here we go. So this is what Theo wrote for react. And this is how the game rock opens. So I switched from punch to rock. And that gets me to the end. So I'm happy to try to field any questions. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for coming. You've been very patient to listen to a musicologist at a pinball show. So I... Line up behind me for questions. So I saw you flash by that Suzanne Cianni slide, and since she's from the Boston area originally, an alum of Wellesley College, I think we should get the New England connection in here. And of course, she wasn't on your first screen of pinball composers because she did just the one... That's a terrible omission. That's right. So what would you say her contributions are? This is a score that's way ahead of its time. It doesn't usually get attention for being dynamic and continuous, but it is. So the Xenon game has this ostinato, this loop of bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, the top one that I've transcribed. It's in groupings of five. It's in five four. So that's an unusual meter to use already. I mean, it's fine to use it, but it's not a common one you find in a lot of popular music and other pinball music. Whenever you do the spinner, you get this B diminished seventh arpeggio really quickly, and whenever you go through the in-lanes, you get a C diminished seventh arpeggio. So these are setting up some close chromatic harmonies that are really radical for this This time, there's nothing else in pinball music that's doing anything close to this.
    49:00
    When you took aحigkeit, had a reuse. So harmonically, these are some of the things that somebody accompanying silent film in the 19 teens and 20s would be doing. They'd be using these kinds of diminished seventh harmonies just to kind of vamp and stall as you're going from scene to scene. So I don't know her exposure to early film, early cinema. It could be coincidental, but I'm guessing at some level that was probably coming into her thinking on this. I would love to be able to ask her this or something someday and talk with her about it, because it's it's doing stuff that's very similar to what a live player would have done accompanying a film in the 1940s.
    50:18
    Two quick points. One, the slide with your name on there. Make sure you put that DR in front of your name. Take some pride in those letters. No, just like have you talked to people that are in the industry making those machines? Like Gary Stern, you can still get to him and ask like, hey, do you have any records of who was doing the original work? I'm curious to know, because maybe I missed it when you were showing the people you've already spoken to. I don't think I didn't have a slide with who I've spoken to, I don't think. No, that's a great, I hadn't thought of, like if I could ever get Gary Stern, I'd love to, and you're right. I can get you his number. Well, thank you. I mean, I have, so I've spoken with Brian Schmidt, Dan Forden, Bob Baffy. In December I had a long set of talks with Chris Granner. So that's who I've spoken with so far, people who are still in the industry. But I'm trying to get as many as I can because they're just treasure troves of information.