SEGA Japan and Tomoya Ohtani have revealed that the #SonicFrontiers OST, Stillness & Motion, has passed over 100 MILLION streams as of Sep 2023. 🙌

We're off to give it another listen to celebrate. Congratulations, Ohtani-san! #SonicNews #SonicTheHedgehog

Tomoya Ohtani - Sonic Frontiers: The Music Of Starfall Islands | Data Discs | 2023 | Clear with Green Splatter + Clear with Orange Splatter + Clear with Red Splatter + Clear with Blue Splatter

I WON'T give up 'til the END of me.

Hatsune Miku × Rhythm Thief Livestream Has Been Found!

I am proud to announce that the "Hatsune Miku and Future Stars Project Mirai × Rhythm Thief: Sega's Super Popular Rhythm Games Special Collaboration Party!" live stream, once considered as lost media, has now been FOUND, courtesy of @latslain! It was broadcasted on Nico Nico Douga on March 7th, 2012, to promote both Sega games, with Project Mirai to release the following day and Rhythm Thief having been recently released. Subs will be added when I find the time to make them.

MC: Hyakka Ryouran Guests: Saki Fujita, Yoshimasa Hosoya, Itokutora & Maamu (DANCEROID), Miume, Melochin, KoRocK, Shun Nakamura, Tomoya Ohtani, Naofumi Hataya, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi

Todays rip: 07/05/2024

Rooftop Bop

Season 4 Episode 1 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume AI

Ripped by Mitchell

Requested by InitialDDD! (Request Form)

Man, Scatman John...what an interesting relation he has to the internet, huh? For whatever reason back in the early days of YouTube, his titular hit song Scatman became really prevalent to use in amateur comedy videos, most notably with the "Super Mario 64 Bloopers!"-genre of video. These are actually videos that I have memory of watching - people just playing around in their childhood 3D game and making up their own little stories and sketches to the tune of silly music. But Scatman, and its less-viral sibling Scatman's World, are more than just nonsense, there's an emotion to John's two legendary songs, a distillation of raw nostalgia - one that the internet suddenly rediscovered back in 2019, and one that SiIvaGunner itself celebrated in bursts throughout the whole year, with Rooftop Bop being an absolute standout example.

Like with most memes, its hard to really trace down a logistical reason for their upbringing - check any KnowYourMeme page, and its bound to just say something along the lines of "on this date, this video/image was posted, and gained tons of attention". The Scatman-posting of 2019 was a pretty interesting case on top of that - the "AWESOME - HE FINALLY" memes that initiated it all were like a big mishmash of memes old and new. Part of the joke was in using nostalgic pieces from the old internet, the music and the "black border" template, over clips from Vine or elsewhere edited to have a positive, borderline innocent outcome, as if to intentionally turn the "Loud equals funny" format that so much of Vine fell under on its head. It's like three layers deep into irony, to where it loops around into finding sincere happiness funny - but it is genuinely still just a really good bit, the perfect kind of stupid comedy that's at once unexpected yet also brings its audience together over the nostalgia it evokes - nostalgia for two different eras of the internet, even! Despite being so core to the old internet days, Scatman wasn't very prominent on the Unregistered Hypercam 2 takeover of 2018, taking a backseat to other internet anthems like Never Gonna Give You Up in Never Gonna Give Up Mahjong and Dreamscape in How 2 Do Anything. But, as if it was fated to be, just a few months later in 2019 Scatman John would once again be made relevant - and the SiIva team was right on top of things.

A lot of Scatman John's prominence on SiIva in 2019 was, of course, on the legendary Not Funny Didn't Laugh day - on the 10th of September (whats 9 plus 10?), a series of shitposts intentionally drenched in as much irony as possible were featured on the channel, the depths of which I explored back in Sex - Steve Harvey. But beyond giving us all brain damage, the event was like a huge shot in the arm for Scatman Stocks - and just two weeks later, we would receive perhaps the best Scatman rip yet. The guy had been lurking as a meme on SiIva before, notably being in some Season 1 rips here and there - and so his return on Not Funny Didn't Laugh day felt like just one more piece of internet history to be nostalgic for. Early YouTube, Vine, and the very first months of SiIvaGunner - all rolled into two songs filled with such whimsy, yet also filled with pure emotion. Now: Does that ring a bell to anyone else?

I feel like Rooftop Bop is the definition of a "more than the sum of its parts" rip, if that makes any sense. It's an excellent melody swap/mashup no doubt, the kind that almost makes you wonder how it was even done with how authentic the violin's lead melody sounds, and the chorus returning to the original Rooftop Run: Act 1 theme with Scatman John's vocals hits oh-so-hard - its an amazingly paced out rip throughout, ping-ponging between melody swap, mashup and both at once throughout - but like I said, the rip is so much more than all of that. It feels almost like a universal experience (at least, for my generation) to have an attachment to Scatman John - but more than that, we all have an attachment to the very thing his two hits represented. Because his balance of silliness and genuine heartfelt emotion is the exact thing that made SiIvaGunner so special all the way back in Season 1, the kind of balance that has made us all smile, laugh, empathize and outright cry, althewhile never losing its core of pure whimsy. Be it The Paragoomba and the Wiggler, Aphex, Planet Wisp Mashup Medley, Turnabout Fishters, or indeed Rooftop Bop - SiIvaGunner, very much like Scatman John, has gotten so many emotions out of us, and made us all too attached to an entity others may consider naught but a silly gimmick.

It's a fantastic listen - but more than that, it's an incredible experience. The latter half of Season 4 Episode 1 of SiIvaGunner was perhaps the most exciting period to ever follow the channel during, and Rooftop Bop's unprecedented ability to unite us all through a raw dosage of nostalgic memories couldn't have come at a better time.

As someone who I know is intricately familiar with Genesis music and the FM synth it uses; why is it that many people (including myself) enjoy the Genesis era Sonic music but when Jin Senoue tries to emulate that sound using Genesis synth samples (Sonic Superstars being the most recent example) it just doesn't sound very good? I know it's literally become a running joke in the community that Senoue uses the Genesis synth too much but it's not like Sonic 1 or 2 had bad soundtracks even though they used the same instrumentation, and Senoue is obviously a very talented composer, so I don't really understand why his attempts to emulate the Genesis soundtracks always turn out so mid.

The general theory I subscribe to is that with the soundtracks to Sonic 1, 2, and presumably even Sonic 3, those games were composed by people who were just writing "real" music. They would pick out real world instruments and write for that sound.

If you've never heard it before, for the 20th Anniversary, Sega put out a compilation soundtrack for Sonic 1 and 2, which included the original demo tracks Masato Nakamura wrote for those games.

Now these are basically just MIDI files, because they didn't need to be anything more than that. But you can tell he was thinking in terms of horn sections, bass guitar, and so on.

Nakamura would submit these MIDI songs on cassette to Sega, and Sega's sound engineers would transcribe those instruments into something that sounded appropriate for the Genesis hardware.

Now, Jun Senoue did the same thing, to a degree. Jun's first major Sonic soundtrack was Sonic 3D Blast on the Sega Genesis, and Jon Burton (of Traveler's Tales) revealed Jun's own demo cassette. If you listen to Jun's tracks, they're all done on the Honky Tonk/Rhodes piano. There's no attempt to utilize real world instruments or have any kind of sound diversity. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Instead of writing music for a band, he wrote music for an individual playing a keyboard.

Worse still, it has eventually been revealed as of Sonic Origins that Jun Senoue had very little awareness of how to make Genesis sounding music. Again, he only submitted his songs on cassette. He was not responsible for the FM Synthesis conversion, just the raw notes, which were all written on, and for, a keyboard.

(throwing the rest of this ask under a "read more" tag because it embeds a lot more videos and even some images)

So when it came time for Sonic 4, and they had Jun Senoue do the retro style soundtracks for those games, he was probably pretty out of his depth. He was writing for style of music he did not really have a nuanced understanding of.

So we get this crunchy, grating, disassociated "this is what the Genesis sounded like, right?" sort of sound. The musical equivalent of one of those early 2000's "How to Draw Manga" books: somebody who thinks they know what they're doing, has actual talent in other adjacent areas, but doesn't actually get this particular niche.

This is one of the reasons why I'm actually a little warmer towards Classic Sonic's music in Sonic Forces -- it's not Jun Senoue. Somebody on that project understood enough and had Naofumi Hataya handle a lot of Classic Sonic's music. He has actual experience with chiptunes and wrote something that feels like it belongs in a Sega System 32 arcade game or something.

Not every single one of Classic Sonic's songs are stone cold bangers in Forces, but at least they sound more authentically retro than Jun's attempts, because they were written by someone who knew what they were doing.

Beyond that, I don't know why Jun doesn't just, like... do better, in a sense. I suppose I don't know his composing environment and how easy or hard it is to slot in what he'd need to sound more "authentic." I just know from my own perspective how easy it is to grab a VST or a soundfont for common Genesis/Yamaha instruments.

But even then, more authentic instruments aren't going to solve the problem that this style of music doesn't seem to be his strong suit, even if somebody at Sega keeps pushing him to do it. Thankfully, I think somebody finally realized it, given how Sonic Superstars seemed to be full of his Sonic 4 style fake-retro music and most of it got replaced at the last second.

The soundtrack for Sonic Adventure 2 is Transgender!

Tomoya Ohtani and Jun Senoue literally have written the battle hymns of the coming revolution, i'm gonna be singing I'm Here and Never Turn Back til the end of me

One Way Dream Credits Song for the True Ending of the game

Tomoya Ohtani: "Sonic Frontiers is a massive game, but we put a lot of thought into the soundtrack from start to finish. We want you to play the game all the way to the end and listen to the true ending song “One Way Dream”. It contains a message from the Sonic Team."

Enjoy a special message from Jun Senoue and Tomoya Ohtani about their appearances at the #SonicSymphony shows.

Hi Senoue-san! Hi Ohtani-san! 👋

Tomoya Ohtani - Sonic Frontiers: The Music Of Starfall Islands | Data Discs | 2022 | Blue Translucent

&& you can throw me to the WOLVES — 'cause I am UNDEFEATABLE.

One of the main composers of Rhythm Thief, @tomoya-ohtani mentions that he wishes to visit the locations featured in Rhythm Thief during the upcoming Sonic Symphony Paris show!

Todays rip: 15/09/2023

THIS. IS. SOLEANNA.

Season 4 Episode 2 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume for Wii U

Ripped by Mitchell

I've made no secret that I have a very particular affection for the various old-internet jokes that Unregistered Hypercam 2 brought to the channel through his KFAD1 win. Be it Paralyzer as featured in YACKER TOILET, or Dreamscape as featured in Unregistered CyberSpace 4-5: Arrow of 2009 - these anthems of a time far gone resonate a lot with me as someone who was near the perfect age to have grown up with these anthems. Yet, amidst the Caramelldansens and Numa Numa's, there's one more piece of old internet history that's brought up almost as frequently as the two aforementioned anthems.

The "Sparta Remix" is a trend I feel like I kind of missed as a kid. It started off with a guy in 2007, using audio from the movie "300", mainly with the iconic "THIS IS SPARTA!"-shout, to create a high-tempo remix song simply titled 300 This is Sparta. It, somehow, awoke something in the internet of the time, and a trend began to recreate the song as used in the remix but using audio other than that from 300, such as from well-known cartoons or video games. And while its a fascinating phenomenon and kind of a crucially important piece of audio shitposting history, it...was never a song I liked all that much. But today, we have an exception on our hands!

THIS. IS. SOLEANNA., even despite my lack of affection for the meme used, is pure brilliance. The sound of the Sparta Remix is an uncannily perfect fit for the instrumentation and overall sound of Crisis City ~The Flame~ ~Skyscraper~, a song that in general uses a lot of electronic music and occasional intentional stuttering and glitch effects in the music itself. The voice and synth samples merge perfectly with everything on offer in the original track, and real effort was put in to ensure it all syncs up perfectly - this is no drag-and-drop mashup! The vocal sample of the "THIS IS SPARTA" shout is used in so many different ways as the track escalates, either as a repeating chant, a parroting back-and-forth, or even as a kind of percussion underscoring the main melody. Its nuts, I find it hard to find the true words for just how much is done with this three-word voiceline. And Crisis City ~The Flame~ ~Skyscraper~ is a pretty long track - for the entire 3-and-a-half minute runtime the song never settles into a groove, and constantly changes into different segments of the song. Yet Mitchell keeps up with all of it in absolutely spectacular fashion - its given me affection for a meme I otherwise kind of just disregarded.