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Arcade Ambience
I am of the belief that one's home should always have sound and music playing in it, 24/7/365. It can be music meant for direct listening, music for getting the dishes done or cleaning your toilet, music to listen to while you're making other music, or any sort of ambient or noise-masking sound designed to break the silence and occupy the mind's-ear in an effort to block out the voices of the neighbors, or even the voices in your head telling you what you ought to do to the neighbors. In any event, it should always be there. It's education. It's exercise. It helps circulate the air.
Arcade Ambiance has recently been added to my collection of about twelve hours of sound and music I play when I simply want to stop the silence without necessarily distracting myself. It's the "Russian Ark" of video game noise music.
The arcade ambience project is an attempt of mine to simulate the audio ambience of a crowded arcade room during the golden age of arcades in the 1980s. This is a sound I think that has been lost over the years and does not exist in today's pitiful arcades in my opinion. My main motivation for this project was to create some ambience in my basement arcade, having a somewhat authentic arcade background hum while I or my guests play on my MAME arcade cabinet. I thought that maybe others who have cabinets (or just miss real arcade nostalgia) could also benefit from my work.
About the first 1981 track, it is about 65 minutes long and took many many hours to master. Most of the samples were created with MAME. I used a program to record myself playing each of the games all the way through (until the game was over). Some games have more than one recording. I also recorded a few games in attract mode (like Gorf and Astroblaster, which have attract sounds). A few games I had to take samples from elsewhere, for example asteroids in MAME sounds terrible. Also, the coin changers (there are 3 distinct sounds) and background hum (kind of hard to pick up) I took from a local arcade. Once I had a big collection of wavs, I created a multitrack project in my sequencer/audio program. I basically made a separate track for each game/sound effect. I then randomly panned each track to the left or right to give the illusion of the games and coin changers being placed all around you. I also randomly adjusted the volumes for each track. I then placed several instances of the game recordings spaced out randomly. For example, there are about 6 identical plays of defender, randomly positioned on the CD. But there are so many games going at once, you cannot tell that the defender track is being repeated 6 times. Same goes for the other tracks. So basically I made sure that there is no repeating or looping in this sound (other than the repeat of each game wav, but that is almost impossible to notice since these games basically sound the same each time they are played).
There are three pieces derived from the early 80's, and revisiting the site, there is now a piece derived from 1992!
More download info: http://arcade.hofle.com/downloads.htm
