Music In Pinball

Pintastic Pinball & Game Room Expo·video·51m 28s·analyzed·Mar 30, 2026

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Musicologist Dr. Neil Lerner presents academic research on pinball sound evolution from mechanics to synthesized music.

Summary

Dr. Neil Lerner from Davidson College presented a comprehensive musicological analysis of pinball sound design history at Pintastic Pinball & Game Room Expo, tracing the evolution from mechanical bells (1930s) through Gottlieb's three-chime systems (1969) to solid-state programmed melodies (late 1970s) and licensed music integration (1978+). He discussed open research questions about the origins of Gottlieb's diminished triad chord selection and the true first pinball machine with a programmed opening melody, revising earlier conclusions as new video evidence emerges. Lerner is conducting academic research for a forthcoming book titled "A Cultural History of Pinball Music" and highlighted the lack of scholarly attention to pinball composers despite their significant creative contributions, while drawing parallels between pinball sound design and minimalist concert music, film music conventions, and video game audio history.

Key Claims

Music in pinball did not begin until solid-state machines in the late 1970s could play back programmed melodies rather than random sounds from mechanical chimes.
medium confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, presentation on definitions of pinball music; acknowledges uncertainty and states '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 starts in pinball. So in the late 70s, in 77 or 78, maybe that's when music starts.'
Gottlieb's three-chime bar introduced in 1969 uses the same three pitches (C sharp, E, G—a diminished triad) across all machines studied, but the designer and rationale for this choice remains undocumented.
high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner describing Gottlieb's innovation; states 'I've not been able to document who came up with this idea' and speculates the pitches may have been chosen for material availability rather than intentional musical theory.
The home version of Fireball from fall 1976 featured seven different programmed melodies including Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Chopin's funeral march.
medium confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner examining the home version Fireball manual; notes 'I've not actually seen footage or seen one of these in person' but the manual indicates this feature.
Freedom (late 1976) was likely the first pinball machine to open with a recognizable melody (Call to the Post), though recent video discoveries suggest Night Rider may have done this as well or earlier.
low confidence · Dr. Lerner revised his earlier published claim after discovering contradictory video evidence weeks before the August publication date; acknowledges uncertainty: 'I'm a little less confident now that it was this early.'
Bally games beginning in December 1978 (Playboy, Kiss, Harlem Globetrotters, Dolly) were the first to attempt using preexisting licensed music in pinball, rendered monophonically.
high confidence · Dr. Lerner presenting timeline of game releases and opening melodies; cites specific game titles and licensing strategy.
Flash (Bally) introduced the concept of continuously changing dynamic sound to pinball just months after Space Invaders pioneered this in arcade video games.

Notable Quotes

“I was surprised to find out how little has really been written about and said about music in pinball so far.”
Dr. Neil Lerner@ 3:08 — Establishes the novelty of his academic work and the gap in pinball historiography.
“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.”
Dr. Neil Lerner@ 8:16 — Highlights the shock value of pinball music research in traditional musicology circles and validates the field as worthy of academic study.
“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 starts in pinball. So in the late 70s, in 77 or 78, maybe that's when music starts in pinball machines.”
Dr. Neil Lerner@ 18:20 — Proposes a threshold definition for when 'music' as opposed to 'sound' emerged in pinball history.
“I'm 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, this idea of repetitive music that might be indeterminate.”
Dr. Neil Lerner@ 24:37 — Draws a cultural parallel between pinball chime sounds and contemporary minimalist concert music (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley).
“I hated that this article that's going to appear in August might already have errors in it like that.”
Dr. Neil Lerner@ 30:31 — Reveals the challenge of publishing academic work in a field with incomplete historical documentation and the risk of errors from newly discovered evidence.

Entities

Dr. Neil LernerpersonDavidson CollegeorganizationPintastic Pinball & Game Room Expoevent[name withheld pending review]personStern PinballcompanyBally ManufacturingcompanyWilliams ElectronicscompanyGottliebcompany

Signals

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historical_signal: Evolution of pinball sound design from mechanical bells (1930s) → electromechanical chimes (1960s-70s) → programmed melodies (late 1970s solid-state) → licensed music (1978+) → dynamic audio (late 1970s+). This traces parallel development with video game audio.
high · Dr. Lerner's comprehensive presentation timeline documenting Contact (1933) with Harry Williams' bell, Gottlieb chimes (1969), Freedom/Knight Rider (1976-77), Bally licensed music (December 1978), Flash dynamic sound, and Space Invaders influence.
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design_philosophy: Pinball chime systems (1960s-70s) appear contemporaneously with concert hall minimalism (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley), suggesting a broader cultural zeitgeist toward repetitive, indeterminate musical organization.
medium · Dr. Lerner observation: 'pinball machines from this period are doing some of the same things of pieces by Philip Glass, or Steve Reich, or Terry Riley. It's some sort of larger cultural zeitgeist issue.'
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design_innovation: Bally's strategic deployment of recognizable licensed music opening melodies (December 1978) in Kiss, Playboy, Harlem Globetrotters, and Dolly as a thematic and marketing differentiator in the solid-state era.
high · Dr. Lerner documents Bally's 'first attempts to try to use preexisting music that could be used in connection to a license' beginning December 1978 with monophonic renderings of existing IP music.
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design_innovation: Flash (Bally) introduced continuously changing sound based on gameplay state—two pitches where one stays constant (high F) and the other gradually moves upward from low E-flat, creating tension and gameplay feedback integration.
high · Dr. Lerner's detailed analysis of Flash's two-tone dynamic system appearing months after Space Invaders demonstrated the concept in video games.

Transcript

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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 I was told that this was going to appear late August and this is on the transition from electromechanical to solid state sound and I've been spending the last few months on a sabbatical working on this book that I am tentatively calling right now A Cultural History of Pinball Music. So I'm really interested in this area that I'm fascinated by, just by what I've heard and discovered. I was surprised to find out how little 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, the way that musicologists 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 I started music as a career suicide, according to a lot of my professors, by choosing 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 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, or 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. Style is 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 So, I'm going to talk about the different genres of pinball. And I'm going to talk about the different genres of pinball. 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 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 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. And 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. I really wanted to make a list 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. They can establish time and place, 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 I'm not doing any of those 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. So 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 These are all four ways you can see when a game is running. 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 and managing sounds. And it all has to do from their order of hearing. 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 or instrumental sounds to 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. 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 up with this definition of organized sound. So there's nothing in there about beauty, about art, about pleasantness, about order. Just organized. Famous example, this might be John Cage's Four Minutes and 33 Seconds, where in the 50s he had a piano player go and sit at the piano for four minutes and 33 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 John Blacking is a musicologist who came up with the idea of humanly organized sounds, which is an interesting way to sort of split it out too. That's now been problematized in terms of it being speciesist. What about birdsong? What about whalesong? Is that not music because it's not a human that's organized the sounds? But it's another way to do it. It separates it from a I don 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. 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. It's actually a call out. It's 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. So, the music is sort of 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. So, I would not want to sit and hear a concert of sounds of dump trucks or something. I would not, you know, people, if people had paid money to go here four minutes and thirty-three seconds, would So, humanly organized sound, that definition might be most relevant to that. Any others? Any machines? Like any other? Yeah.

high confidence · Dr. Lerner on game sound innovation; states 'Flash does that just a few months after Space Invaders had introduced this into the video game world.'

Very little academic work has been published on pinball music despite its cultural significance and the existence of dedicated pinball composers.

high confidence · Dr. Lerner opening remarks; notes musicology field colleagues were 'shocked' to learn pinball has music and composers, and states 'I was surprised to find out how little has really been written about and said about music in pinball so far.'

Space Invaders' speed-up audio effect was an unintended byproduct of processor slowdown rather than intentional design, where fewer on-screen objects caused the CPU to run faster and loop the four descending notes more quickly.

high confidence · Dr. Lerner citing video game history; states 'This was not something that the designer and programmer had actually planned. They just discovered it because the processor was so slow.'

“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.”

Dr. Neil Lerner@ 37:48 — Applies musicological theory to video game and pinball sound design, connecting to centuries of musical tradition.

“The 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.”

Dr. Neil Lerner@ 16:25 — Clarifies the subjective boundary between music and noise, central to his definitional framework.

Steven Dahlfeldperson

Flashpoint (game)game

Knight Rider (game)game

Fireball (Home Model)game

[name withheld pending review]game

Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Soundproduct

community_signal: Pinball music is emerging as a legitimate field of academic musicological study, with Dr. Lerner presenting at traditional academic conferences and publishing in peer-reviewed Oxford Handbooks, signaling growing institutional recognition.

high · Dr. Lerner's publications in Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound; mentions giving 'a few talks now at academic musicology conferences on pinball' where colleagues express shock at pinball as a research subject.

historical_signal: Space Invaders' iconic audio effect—descending notes accelerating with fewer invaders—was discovered accidentally due to processor slowdown rather than intentional design, becoming a brilliant gameplay feedback mechanism.

high · Dr. Lerner: '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.'

historical_signal: Space Invaders' descending perfect fourth follows the Renaissance lament tetrachord pattern used in opera and Requiem music, connecting video game design to centuries of Western musical tradition despite likely being unintentional.

medium · Dr. Lerner notes the four descending notes form a 'lament tetrachord' connected to 'Dido's Lament' and Requiems, but acknowledges 'I doubt the Japanese programmer was thinking Lament Tetrachord out of the European Renaissance.'

content_signal: Dr. Lerner has an essay on electromechanical to solid-state transition appearing in academic press (August publication), but recent video discoveries weeks before publication deadline may render some conclusions obsolete.

high · Dr. Lerner states: 'I hated that this article that's going to appear in August might already have errors in it' regarding attribution of first pinball melody to Freedom vs. Knight Rider.

research_signal: Multiple documented gaps in pinball sound design history remain unresolved, including: who designed Gottlieb's three-chime system and why those specific pitches were chosen; exact timeline of first programmed melodic machines; origins of specific musical choices.

high · Dr. Lerner repeatedly acknowledges unanswered questions: 'I've not been able to document who came up with this idea' regarding Gottlieb chimes; revised conclusions on Freedom/Knight Rider timeline after discovering contradictory evidence.

design_philosophy: Pinball game designers aligned opening music with theme context—Hot Tip using William Tell Overture for horse racing, Kiss using 'Rock and Roll All Night'—establishing conventions for narrative music integration in gameplay.

high · Dr. Lerner documents Hot Tip's deliberate use of William Tell with 'galloping rhythm' for horse racing theme; notes Kiss, Playboy, Harlem Globetrotters, and Dolly all leveraged licensed IP music matching game themes.

historical_signal: Film music conventions from early 20th century (celebration, achievement, failure cues) were filtered through cartoons and then adopted by early video game and pinball composers, creating a lineage of musical practice.

medium · Dr. Lerner: '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 into pinball/video games.