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Music In Pinball

Pintastic Pinball & Game Room Expo·video·51m 28s·analyzed·Mar 30, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (batch) · $0.014

TL;DR

Academic study of pinball music evolution from mechanical bells to synthesized sound.

Summary

Dr. Neil Lerner from Davidson College presents academic research on music and sound design in pinball machines, tracing the evolution from mechanical chimes in 1930s machines through early synthesized sound in solid-state games (late 1970s). He discusses how pinball composers use music to establish theme, signal achievements, and create player immersion, and explores definitional questions about what constitutes 'music' versus 'sound' in the context of pinball. The presentation includes audience participation and specific historical examples of early pinball games that pioneered melodic and dynamic audio.

Key Claims

  • Dr. Neil Lerner has published one essay on early pinball sound in the Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound (summer prior to this event), with another essay in press on the transition from electromechanical to solid-state sound (expected late August).

    high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, opening remarks of seminar

  • Gottlieb introduced a three-chime bar system in 1969 with consistent pitches of C sharp, E, G (forming a diminished triad), though the designer and reasoning for these specific pitches remains undocumented.

    high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, discussing Gottlieb's chime innovations

  • The home version of Fireball (fall 1976) featured seven different melodies programmed in, including Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and a funeral march.

    medium confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, referencing machine manual documentation

  • Freedom (late 1976) and Knight Rider are early examples of Bally solid-state machines that played 'Call to the Post' as an opening melody, predating the earliest arcade video game with a programmed melody (Circus, late 1977).

    medium confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, with audience confirmation and subsequent video corroboration

  • Williams' Hot Tip (first solid-state machine with promotion) featured the William Tell Overture as its signature sound, thematically appropriate for a horse-racing game.

    high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, discussing early Williams solid-state games

  • Bally's December 1978 games (Playboy, Kiss, Harlem Globetrotters, Dolly) were the first major attempts to use preexisting licensed music in pinball, with Kiss opening using a monophonic version of 'Rock and Roll All Nite.'

    high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, discussing licensing transitions

  • Flash pioneered dynamic audio in pinball (just after Space Invaders in 1978), using two tones with one static (high F) and another gradually ascending (starting at low E flat), creating gameplay-driven sound evolution.

    high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, discussing dynamic audio innovation

Notable Quotes

  • “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.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ early in presentation — Establishes Lerner's academic credibility and trajectory from studying undervalued musical forms to legitimizing pinball music scholarship

  • “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 — Articulates the academic case for studying pinball composers as legitimate subjects of musicological inquiry

  • “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, that I think is happening here.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ discussing EM-era machines — Positions pinball sound design within broader contemporary music history, linking mechanical chimes to minimalist compositional approaches

  • “So the film music practices from the 19-teens and 20s, those get filtered through cartoons and then I think that's the first thing that I'm going to talk about today.”

    Dr. Neil Lerner @ mid-presentation — Traces genealogy of musical codes (celebration, achievement, failure) from early film through cartoons into video games and pinball

  • “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 @ discussing Space Invaders musical structure — Demonstrates deep musicological analysis applied to video game/arcade sound, revealing hidden harmonic conventions with centuries of musical tradition

Entities

Dr. Neil LernerpersonDavidson CollegeorganizationGottliebcompanyWilliamscompanyBallycompanyStern PinballcompanyDeadpoolgameStar Warsgame

Signals

  • ?

    content_signal: Dr. Neil Lerner presenting formalized academic research on pinball music at industry event; represents emerging scholarly legitimacy of pinball as cultural artifact worthy of musicological study

    high · Published essay in Oxford Handbook; second essay in press; book in progress; presenting at academic musicology conferences

  • ?

    historical_signal: Detailed chronological mapping of sound design innovation from mechanical systems (1930s bells) through EM chimes (1960s-70s) to solid-state synthesis (mid-1970s) and dynamic audio (1978)

    high · Specific machine examples with dates: Contact (1933), Lightning (1934), Skipper with three-chime system (1969), Fireball home version (fall 1976), Freedom/Knight Rider (late 1976), Hot Tip, Kiss/Playboy/Harlem Globetrotters/Dolly (December 1978), Flash (post-Space Invaders 1978)

  • ?

    design_innovation: Transition from solenoid-triggered mechanical sound (bells, chimes) to programmed electronic synthesis enabled consistent melody playback rather than random melodic generation from ball physics

    high · Lerner's distinction between random melodies from Gottlieb chimes (dependent on ball path) vs. solid-state programmed melodies (predictable, repeatable); Fireball's seven documented melodies; Command Control's deliberate programming choices

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pinball designers adopting musical codes from film (19-teens-20s), cartoons, and early video games to signal achievements, mood, and narrative moments; same conventions reused across media

    high · Lerner traces film music practices → cartoons → video games → pinball; documents how celebration/achievement/failure musical codes propagate across industries

  • ?

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 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.

Very little has been written or researched about music in pinball historically, despite extensive scholarship on film, animation, television, and video game music.

high confidence · Dr. Neil Lerner, opening remarks on research gaps

Fireballgame
Freedomgame
Knight Ridergame
Hot Tipgame
Playboygame
Kissgame
Harlem Globetrottersgame
Dollygame
Flashgame
Space Invadersgame
Circusgame
Neptunegame
Steven Dahlfeldperson
Kevin Boydperson
Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Soundproduct
Pintastic Pinball & Game Room Expoevent

design_innovation: EM-era chime patterns (especially Gottlieb diminished triads and their aleatoric repetition) contemporaneous with and structurally similar to minimalist concert music (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley), suggesting shared cultural zeitgeist

medium · Lerner's observation that pinball chimes use 'repetitive music, indeterminate' patterns matching minimalist compositional approaches; temporal coincidence 1960s-70s

  • ?

    historical_signal: December 1978 Bally games (Kiss, Playboy, Harlem Globetrotters, Dolly) mark inflection point where pinball begins systematically incorporating preexisting licensed music rather than original compositions

    high · Four Bally titles in same month; Lerner emphasizes this as 'first attempts to try to use preexisting music'; Kiss example with monophonic 'Rock and Roll All Nite' rendering

  • ?

    design_innovation: Flash's introduction of continuously evolving sound (static high F + ascending low E flat) represents breakthrough where audio actively responds to game state rather than serving as static accompaniment

    high · Lerner notes Flash introduced dynamic sound 'just after Space Invaders,' itself a breakthrough where processor speed changes created unintended dynamic audio effect

  • ?

    research_signal: Multiple unresolved historical questions about pinball sound design remain: authorship of Gottlieb's three-chime pitch selection (C#-E-G), authenticity of Freedom's Call to the Post opening, specific melodic choices in early solid-state machines

    high · Lerner's explicit statements about undocumented designers, evolving certainty about Freedom vs. Knight Rider attribution, desire for community input on these questions

  • ?

    music_theory_signal: Certain harmonic choices (Space Invaders' perfect fourth/lament tetrachord, Gottlieb diminished triads) carry centuries of music-historical meaning (Renaissance lament, opera, Requiem tradition) potentially unconsciously embedded in arcade/pinball design

    medium · Lerner's musicological analysis of Space Invaders revealing lament associations; acknowledgment of uncertainty whether designers were conscious of these historical meanings

  • ?

    community_signal: Academic musicologist actively collaborating with pinball community (composers, collectors, venue operators) to fill research gaps; community providing primary source material (machine access, videos, technical knowledge)

    high · Lerner conducting Zoom interviews with composers, field recordings at collections/museums, audience Q&A at Pintastic, seeking community help identifying machines and resolving historical questions

    • 18:04
    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 That's when music starts in pinball. 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 wood and niecy Howe, Julie Marcus, The Fondue World Introduction, Bye Guy embraces The City of the Soundी Thanks for watching. Kevin Boyd, I've been interested in your work. I've been with you for a long time. You've said that you're a kind of electromechanical solenoid that affects the game play 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 of different origin stories to how the bell came in there. That's all in that first publication I've got. But I think I was the first guy I ever contacted, contact had an electric bell that was really blowing people's minds. Williams, 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 want the bell. That's the one they wanted to play. The other one just was deficient to them. So I recently, I've started to, you get the pinball box so I've bought a couple machines Now, the most recent one I got was a Lightning machine from 1934, which is the same design as Contact, 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, you know, a doorbell sound. It was essentially the same mechanism The game is a really typical sound in an EM machine. I don't know that I would go that far myself, but this is a really characteristic sound from pinball. 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 I was like, wow, there are a bunch of tritones in this. Why is that? And then I realized the middle tone, it was a minor third. I was like, 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 I'm not sure 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 I'm sure you've all heard of the new musical sound system, 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 This is what the Chime Box 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.
    23:57
    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, you know, triggers nostalgic good feelings for me because I'm of a certain age where I remember playing a lot of music. I'm not sure if you 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 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 more composers might just tell the 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. It's actually, 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, that I think is happening here. In my earlier work I noticed in the game Pong that the first video game that has pitches to it as far as anyone found And it only has three pitches a B flat at octaves duh duh duh duh and then a higher pitch duh whenever 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 think that's the first thing that I'm going to talk about today. 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 the call to the post. It's a TNT video. All to the post. It's a TNT video. I made a point of it in this essay that's in print and I marked this is 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 This early? I'll go on and play it. This has some of Todd Tucky talking about this. Of course this has the old fashioned chime. 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 I'm not sure if that's the right word. I think 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 of Circus from late 77, which has the ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta tararabunda-ay when you clear out a row of balloons, and whenever the clown face plants, it does the Chopin funeral march from the sonata that bum bum ba bum bum ba da da da da da.
    31:37
    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. But 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 So, you get that William Tell, which is, you know, decades, centuries, you know,
    33:04
    The 20th Century of association, with riding a horse and a chase and stuff from the opera William Tell, and then the Lone Ranger radio and tv stuff, really solidified that and the 20th Century as a horse riding galloping song, I mean da-da-da-it's got a galloping rhythm and Hot Tip is a game about horse racing so it all makes sense. It's a nice theme. Stern finally starts to open with melodies. So these are game start sounds. And today, 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 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 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 copyright infringement mess here, but just thinking about that period in time. 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 to trigger something on a chip instead of a solenoid to hit a chime. So World Cup in And so, the first game of the 1978 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 Globetrotters, Dolly. All of these are games that are really well known for those opening melodies, these first attempts to try to use preexisting music that could be used in connection to a license. Even though it's, you know, it's a rough rendition of it. So Kiss opens with Rock and Roll All Night.
    36:07
    Which gets reduced down monophonically to this. I agree. The most important change in pinball... 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 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 And 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 Requiem's use it. So it's actually a really interesting thing from a music historical point of view as well. Male Audience Member 2 Do you think that was the purely academic or long term part? The perfect fourth? Male Audience Member 2 Yeah. Or the speed up? Male Audience Member 2 Yeah. I mean, I know the speed up was. I don't know about... I doubt the Japanese 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 here for the game over music, and I transcribed it, and it's almost note for note from the 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. 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 The sound film is in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So the, the, this portion of it, sorry, just some of the opening of it, the 1931. 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. Let me do 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 I'm sorry if I'm being too grumpy and desperate. Also 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-N. 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 the punctuolata. 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
    I'm a Malcolm . 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 it's some I think that's the 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 doing stuff that's very similar to what a live player would have done accompanying a film in the 1920s. 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. But I don't think I didn't have a slide with who I've spoken to, I don't think. But no, that's a great I hadn't thought of like if I could ever, you know, 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... You need his number. You can get him here. 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. I'm trying to get as many as I can because they're just treasure troves of information.
    51:25
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