• No words?
• No miles?
• No news?

I realise I usually update a lot more regularly than I have been doing recently, which is down to a few things. Granted, I was never much into quantity over quality (apart from the early MSN Space days, perhaps), but I’d still like to make some excuses for your approval.

What a way to make a living!

If you’re a friend, a sleuth or a games shopper in the York area, you’ll already know one of the main reasons: I got a job. It’s not full-time so I can’t claim that’s eating up all my time, but it does mean I’m not the one in complete charge of my time any more. Fine with me – I love doing what I do.

Maestro!

I’m currently working on a soundtrack to a film called Tanner (official website), written, directed and produced by my mate Oliver Crocker, with some edits by Hannah. Far from being your typical student film, Tanner has some experienced professionals involved:

• Frank Williams (Dad’s Army)
• Tony Osoba (Porridge) and
• Bernard Wrigley (Phoenix Nights).
• It’s even got a “guest director” – Mervyn Cumming, whose CV includes EastEnders, Coronation St and Emmerdale.

The music is done by a man at home with a keyboard and a cheap version of Logic.

The film itself is well over an hour long, which is quite long to score, but so far I’ve got a good idea of what needs doing and how it’s going to sound. The best piece so far is probably Tanner’s theme, which you can listen to by clicking this link. Leave a comment on this post telling me what you think, or across in the Music page!

The tour

I honestly intended to get back on with this after returning home, but so far I haven’t done as much as I’d like for one reason or another. I did pop on the other day for 20k, and I’ll finish that off today (when I find my trainers!)

What all this comes down to, really, is this.

Since the start of October I have:

• Written over 25,000 words of my first novel, taking it from 6 pages to 71. It’s still some way short of being finished, but it’s a damn sight nearer than it was.
• Scored almost ten minutes of music for a feature film. This doesn’t sound like a lot admittedly, but it’s spread out throughout the film, rather than a continuous tune, so it’s more in reality.
• Cycled over 600 kilometres, or almost 400 miles. That’s a lot of exercise, yet I’m still quite unfit.

So, on the whole, this has become one of those blog posts in which I apologise for not posting and explain why. The site might be named after me, but it’s rare for it to be about me. That’s a bit strange really, because when I thought about it I realised I’m the unique point of this site: you can get reviews and game news in any number of other places online, and there are much better places for photos.

I never wanted the focus of this site to be me: I wanted it to be what I do and what I love, probably because I fail to believe people – other than my friends and hostages – would keep visiting a site just because it’s connected to me. However, as long as you keep coming back, I’m happy!

In other news…

Sodaware blog has just launched a weekly newsletter, which I thoroughly recommend you sign up to. You can read about it here.

Michael Jackson will perform on a UK stage tonight for the first time in almost ten years. He’ll be doing Thriller LIVE at the World Music Awards. Sadly it’s not on telly until next week (Channel Four, Thursday, probably about 9pm), but it will be.

Wii launches in the US in just four days. We have to wait almost another month, although I should get to play it before launch day with any luck. My first impressions here, of course!

Very old updates from my old MSN Space coming soon, including ramblings about Magical Sound Shower, how much a lungful of oxygen weighs and my awesome Animal Crossing diary.

Don’t forget you can subscribe using RSS or via email so you’ll never miss a thrilling post. Come back soon!

As regular readers and fans of important video game composers everywhere are aware, today was the day of Richard Jacques’s SEGA: A Retrospective concert in Nottingham’s St Mary’s Church. How was it? I’ll tell you!

SE-GA!

Sitting at the piano a little after two, Mr Jacques began with his specially-arranged version of the medley to the end credits of Sonic the Hedgehog. He played piano whilst his laptop and some very nice kit provided the rest of the orchestration, and it sounded awesome. I would have loved to have heard what he could have done with more Sonic music, but perhaps that’s next year!

Second up was Shenmue: Improvisations, another medley of all the main themes from AM2’s Shenmue. During this particular piece I was struck by how identifiable and yet versatile these themes are, as Richard transposed and intertwined them expertly.

Richard Jacques: Defender of the Future (of video game music)

After these two undeniably “big” tracks we had two perhaps lesser-known tunes: the main theme from Ecco: Defender of the Future and a very playful rendition of Diamond Dust zone from Sonic 3D: Flickies Island on the Saturn. The latter was the first Richard Jacques soundtrack I ever heard, and I learnt today he composed, recorded and mixed it all in just two weeks, which is frankly incredible considering its quality and the number of strong themes and melodies it possesses.

Following this Richard had a special guest join him on stage, long-time collaborator and voice of many Jacques tracks (this doesn’t work now I know how his name is really pronounced, but never mind), T.J. Davis! I was glad she made the concert as I don’t think any other singer would be able to do the tracks justice, but she proved she’s as good live as on record with two great versions of Sonic R’s all-time classic “Can You Feel the Sunshine?” and Metropolis Street Racer’s most poppy tune, “I Can Still Believe”. Neither of these are easy tracks to sing with lots of high parts, modulations and so on, but they did a great job between them and seemed to enjoy revisiting tracks that they recorded almost five or ten years ago! The arrangements for these tracks were also great, with a lovely crisp acoustic guitar in the background and a little gentle percussion; perfect.

A one-man Anti Music-Crime Network

Okay, so the references are a little laboured, but Richard’s performance is going from strength to strength. Of all the impressive themes from his rightly celebrated Headhunter soundtracks, he chose to perform the gentle yet evocative “Jack’s Dream”, wisely avoiding the bombast of Jack’s Theme for a more atmospheric track that sounded great again. All the main Headhunter themes were there, and again I was struck by how clearly he creates and states his themes, yet how versatile they are too. People sometimes assume classical music and video game music are closer than people would like to admit, but I find video game music tends to be more overtly emblematic and thematic than classical music; in that regard it certainly has more in common with film scoring. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

Had I not snuck a look at the next track in the – very nice – programme, I would have been very shocked and possibly even taken to hospital. The brushes, the piano, the drums… it’s Dreams Dreams! I was sincerely hoping T.J. would join him for this one, but it was an instrumental rendition instead; a little disappointing, but Richard did a great job of capturing the nuances and flavour of the original vocals. As with Sonic, I would have loved to have heard more NiGHTs music – as complex as it is, I’m sure Richard would have done an awesome job. I hereby make an extremely request for more NiGHTS music at GameCity 2007!

Last Wave

Had it been that kind of concert I would have been up and dancing like a madman to the next two tunes, a seamless medley between Richard’s Euro remixes of Magical Sound Shower and Passing Breeze. The tunes themselves are a joy to listen to in any form, but the Euro remixes are exemplary, with wonderful Latin percussion, bold brassy colours and
huge amounts of sheer fun and joy. Seeing and hearing them played live was a similar joy, and demonstrated Mr Jacques’s amazing piano skills, both tracks involving very fast modulations and fingerwork. Perhaps the best part was the awesome jazzy breakdown between the two tracks that absolutely stunned me. Tremendous.

Crikey

I haven’t even got to the best part yet. Before leaving the church I spotted T.J. Davis at the front signing an autograph for a young gentleman (who lent us his pen; much obliged!), and so Phil and I both strode forward and received lovely personalised autographs on our very nice programmes. Thanks, T.J.!

The piece de (UK) resistance

A little way away from the venue, Lee Rosie’s Tea Rooms hosted Sonic’s birthday party. The birthday boy himself attended – and gave me a hug, cheers Sonic! – as did Mr Jacques at 4pm. He was quite happy to sit and chat to anyone who came up to him, not getting near his coffee for a good half hour or so! Of course, about twenty of those minutes were taken up by Phil and I as we – mostly Phil, actually – engaged Mr Jacques in topics such as prepared pianos, who had the best Sonic shirt and how often people mispronounce his name. For years I assumed it was “Jaxx”, but recently found – thanks to UK:Resistance – that it is in fact “Jakes”. Many blushes spared there.

I can’t remember the entire conversation we had, but I do know that he was a very interesting and friendly man who seemed interested in what we had to say, gave his thoughts on various matters – we discussed how I might achieve a moody Max Payne sound for my soundtrack – and shook our hands and said perhaps we’ll catch up at GameCity next year.

Thank you

Well, with a day such as today it’s only right I make a long, detailed post. The concert itself was wonderfully arranged and performed and I would have been very happy just with that, but actually getting to talk to someone whose music I have listened to and been inspired by for years was an honour, especially as he was a really nice bloke.

Mr Jacques, thank you for the concert and taking the time to meet and talk to us. Also, if you don’t want that “spare” t-shirt, I’m sure I could find a home for it!

LINKS:

Richard Jacques’s homepage
GameCity
UK:Resistance – fuelled with Jacques love.

Canny TCW subscribers will have noticed I didn’t update my Virtual Tour yesterday. Having cycled over 300km in just over a week I thought I deserved a break, so only did half my distance yesterday. I should be back to full speed today or tomorrow, so don’t think I’ve given up!

As for what I’m doing (or not!) at the moment, surprisingly it’s not playing lots of games. As usual I’m getting on with projects, both new and old, and trying to fit in doing the things I want to whilst I can. That said, I am very much enjoying Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon (GBA) and Animal Crossing: Wild World‘s Acorn Festival. I hope you AC fans are all enjoying the company of the mighty Cornimer!

Useful links

On the subject of AC, I get a lot of hits from people searching for design ideas, catchphrases and information. Unfortunately I don’t have that kind of information here, but I can recommend to you two tremendous websites that can meet all your AC needs. Links at the bottom!

Similarly, lots of hits come from people searching for info about NiGHTS into Dreams. I hope you guys enjoyed my article on it – I must write another one soon! There are good NiGHTS links at the bottom, so make sure you check them out too.

Subscribing

Aside from that, the website is doing great. I very rarely talk about how well it does, but in the past two months alone I’ve had over 60,000 hits, which is tremendous, and 130,000 since I switched servers in June. My subscribers have doubled in about a month, so if you’re one of them I thank you most sincerely. If you haven’t subscribed yet, don’t worry – it’s easy! Click one of these links and you’ll never miss an update:

Click here to subscribe
Receive posts in your email!

Thanks to everyone for visiting, reading, commenting and hopefully enjoying what you find here!

NiGHTS into Dreams:

Scoreattack.net – brilliant repository of videos, scores and tips for getting amazing scores on NiGHTS. What quality that, over ten years after its release, NiGHTS can still open your eyes like this.

NiGHTS into Dreams.com – just about everything on NiGHTS ever. Run with the same fervour and passion that Moogie used to have at Shining Force Central (not a dig, by the way).

Animal Crossing:

Animal Crossing Community – enormous messageboards and community. Allows you to keep a diary, share your town’s layout and villagers and more!

Animal Crossing Ahead – The place to go for information, tunes, patterns and designs. Lots of goodies here!

Other cool things I’m into at the moment:

Toribash – very strange but interesting turns-based fighting game, where you control muscles and joints. Hard to describe but genuinely fascinating.

JapanCast – it’s been a long time since I studied Japanese, so this informal and enjoyable set of free podcasts is helping me recover my lost knowledge!

JapanesePod101 – more free podcasts with the option to pay a subscription fee. Currently over 200 free lessons!

That’s just about it. I know it’s not the usual content I post but it was about time I did a little housekeeping. I’m sure there’ll be interesting content before the week is out!

I’m listening to Criticize, from Hearsay by Alexander O’Neal

I get a lot of hits from people wondering what the heck prosody is. Well, here’s the answer!

Prosody is the study of poetic and linguistic techniques and patterns.

As I’m an English graduate, I know most about poetic prosody, the sum total of which follows.

Before we go on, if anyone is unsure about the correct pronunciation, I had a famous (in England at least) singer record this handy guide.

If you’re more interested in who Prosody is – i.e. what my website is, who I am – you can learn more about me in the about page.

Poetic prosody

Poetic prosody is concerned with the meter and rhythm of poetry – how the line runs and scans. It’s sometimes easy to forget that poetry is meant to be heard; it has an aural tradition that stresses the importance of… well… stresses, really.

What’s a stress?

When we speak or read aloud, we naturally emphasise certain syllables. The word emphasise, for example, has the first syllable stressed – em-pha-sise; the rest is unstressed.

The way these stresses and unstresses combine creates rhythm, which isn’t the same as meter. Rhythm is the rising and falling sound that all speech naturally possesses. In fact, if you read that last sentence out, it’ll be clearer. Go on, try it.

Rhythm is the rising and falling sound that all speech naturally possesses.

Do you hear the way you stress certain parts and leave others unstressed? Well, that’s how poetic rhythm works! There’s even a special system for denoting it using / and U, but I can’t mimic it online so I won’t.

From meter you

So if rhythm is the up and down sound, what’s meter? This is the poem’s beat, and is a bit more complicated than rhythm, but let’s try to boil it down anyway.

In most English poetry, lines are divided into feet, which are groups of syllables. As we’ve seen with rhythm, syllables can be stressed or unstressed, and combinations of these create feet.

• Stress-unstress is one foot, called a trochee. Keyboard is a trochee.
• Unstress-stress is one foot, called an iamb. Sustain is an iamb.

There are more, but these are the two most common in poetry and the English language.

Lines are divided into feet, and the way these feet combine makes meter.

Remember how I said unstress-stress is called an iamb? Well, if you have five iambs in a line, that’s called iambic pentameter:

• Iamb is the type of foot;
• Pent is the number of feet: five;
• Meter lets us know this is about the measure or beat of the line.

Iambic pentameter is very common in all aspects of writing, not just poetry. William Shakespeare was particularly fond of iambic pentameter for his big speeches; it’s said to mimic the natural beat of our speech, although I’m not sure its other poetic devices are especially common in everyday chat!

Recap

• RHYTHM is the up-and-down sound that speech and poetry possesses.
• FEET are combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables.
• METER is the length of a line expressed in feet.
• PROSODY is the study of these and more poetic techniques!

I realise this isn’t exactly University-level stuff here, but as a basic introduction to prosody it serves its purpose. If you have any suggestions, corrections or other comments, do leave a comment by clicking here. I’d love to hear your feedback!

Useful prosody-related links:

Tinablue’s in-depth but accessible page
The best numberplate ever
Wikipedia’s prosody disambiguation page – useful for more on linguistic prosody

I’m listening to Orpheus [Live], from Meltdown [Bonus CD] Disc 2 by Ash

Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway!

I’ve been using this exercise bike we have at home for a couple of months, doing between ten and twenty kilometres a day in order to improve my fitness. In total I’ve done over 560km, quite a distance when you think about it. Not half as far as I’m going now, though…

I am using my exercise bike to cycle – virtually – from Land’s End to John O’ Groats.

In total this is about 1200km, more than twice what I’ve done in the past two months. I also want to finish it within about thirty-five days!

Not only is this a great way to improve my fitness, I’m also going to be writing about the places I virtually visit on my website, so I can also include some worthwhile educational and tourist aspects as well.

All in all I’m really looking forward to this challenge, improving my fitness and discovering lots of fascinating facts about the places I will be virtually staying!

The I have created a new page for this challenge, “Virtual Tour”. RSS readers will need a new feed – http://www.prosody.co.uk/virtual-tour/feed will work.

I’ll be updating every day, so come back to see where I am!

I am now in St Columb Major, Cornwall, where it is cloudy.

About James

I’m twenty-three years old and I live in York. I run this site as a place to share my photos, articles, music, thoughts and other aspects of my life. If you’d like me to write something for you, ask a question or just say hello, you can email me with that link. Don’t worry, I write very nice emails.

About the site

I opened prosody.co.uk to the public way back in 2004 as a website to share music from my album “Long Distance”, out in 2005. After a few years in this form it changed to the website you see now in September 2006. The site is constantly changing to incorporate new ideas and designs, the most recent being a massively updated “Music” section featuring my vocal and instrumental music, and my “Diaries” page, where you can read about my exploits in Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing or Pro Evolution Soccer 4.

The Collected Writings of James Newton will continue to go from strength to strength over the coming weeks, months and years, and I hope you will continue to visit, be inspired and respond to the content here in your own way. You can subscribe with http://www.prosody.co.uk/feed, or bookmark the main page with Control + D. Come back soon!

I love Richard Jacques. I’ve said before that I think “Jack’s Theme” from Headhunter is probably the best piece of videogame music ever composed – and GameFAQs agree – and although he got a lot of stick for it at the time, I love his Sonic R soundtrack. In fact, on Tuesday I walked to the train station to pick up my brother whilst having a good sing-song to “Back in Time”. Love those harmonies, Richard!

Anyway, apart from telling you how cool Richard Jacques is, and how intelligent and melodically distinctive his work is, this entry is actually just to say that Phil and I are going to see him live in concert at the end of next month. Yes, this very cool-looking bloke will soon be providing some “ripping sounds” live in concert in Nottingham as part of their “GameCity 2006” dealy bob.

Richard Jacques is a legend, and getting to see him play Sega tunes live on the piano in a church gets me quite frothingly excited. As you can see, though, Richard is still totally cool about it all.

There are some excellent samples of his music available on his official website, Richard Jacques.com. If you’d like to hear Richard live, you can buy tickets online at SeeTickets.com, or find out more about “GameCity” at GameCity.org.

I’m listening to Jack’s Theme, from Headhunter by Richard Jacques

This is something that’s always fascinated me. I’m sure I’ve written before about how frustrating it is that we can’t fly unaided. The closest I get is NiGHTS, which to be honest is probably better than flying.

Anyway, this isn’t a long post, I just wanted to bring to your attention a short film that Hannah and I have directed and produced over on YouTube. It’s for an Embrace competition for their single “Target”, and is available for viewing by clicking this link.

I hope you enjoy it, and come back again soon. Don’t forget to subscribe by clicking the “subscribe to entries” link in the left hand side, and keep all your wonderful emails coming in – it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who reads this!

I’m listening to Purple Rain, from The Hits 2 by Prince

There’s a piece of music that has such a strong memory for me that every time it comes on I can’t think of anything else.

It’s “By the Source of the Protective Flame” from Sega’s Panzer Dragoon Saga soundtrack, and every time I listen to it, I am right back in a very specific time and place, but it’s not connected to the game.

Whilst writing my dissertation, I decided that creating a CD of music to relax to would be a very good idea. Naturally, being the geek I am I began to work on possible playlists, themes, movements and so on (the final result was actually called “Game Music: Relaxing to Jiving”!).

Every time I hear this song now, I am instantly back in my room during the spring of 2005. Everything is very white and clean, which lets me know what a specific time this memory belongs to! There’s a cleansing breeze through the room, and I can see the foot of my bed and my stereo. I take a deep breath and totally relax. There’s a feeling of being completely serene, and everything is very still and peaceful.

I realise now that this memory is actually probably many memories blurred together, but no matter where I hear this song it lifts me out of my surroundings, and once again I am sitting on my bed, looking at the stereo, breathing air of a beautiful clarity.

Do you have any memories that are interwoven with songs, pictures, sounds, films or anything else? What transports you back when you meet it again?

Phrases and arguments like this really irritate me:

It has been well established that playing violent video games aggression in players.

(Nicholas L. Carnagey, “In Video Games, Not All Mayhem Is Created Equal“)

I’m sure you know the argument by now; playing violent games increases aggression in players, and there’s a theory that increased exposure to these games can permanently program someone to behave more aggressively. That’s certainly what this “well-established” – though typically anonymous – data proves, isn’t it? Well, no, not really.

Having played – and lost! – more than my fair share of games, I’ll testify that I experience a rise in aggression when playing certain kinds of games; mostly Pro Evolution actually, when my LAZY DONKEY PLAYERS won’t do what they’re told. Aggression probably does rise whilst playing games, but then it goes away.

The study itself spectacularly fails to take into account the way game players’ brains are already programmed. The study gave three different versions of a racing game – one where all violence was punished, one where it was rewarded, and a non-violent one. To nobody’s surprise, the version that rewarded punishment led to “increased hostile emotion, aggressive thinking and aggressive behaviour” in the players. No details of what this “aggressive behaviour” entailed are given, other than gamers following the words “K I” with “L L” or “S S  O F F, P U N K”.*

The study

All this study has proven is that gamers respond to rewards, which isn’t any surprise to anyone. If we get more points for driving around a track backwards, we’ll drive around a track backwards. If it’s hitting someone over the head with a baseball bat, we’ll do that. Hardly a breakthrough, even Pavlov got that far.

The worst part about all this is that I haven’t been this angry in a very long time, and I’m not even playing a game! I’d like to think this could be the final word on the topic, but I live on Planet Earth, so it’s not going to be. However, here goes anyway:

People who have trouble controlling anger in any situation will have trouble controlling anger arising from playing games. Those of us who are well-adjusted, with clearly-set moral boundaries and ethical guides from our parents and friends will be just fine.

* – super-points for anyone who can tell me what game this is from!