Dear Reader:
Yasunori Mitsuda discusses creating music for the DS
A portion of an RPGFan interview with famous Japanese game composer, Yasunori Mitsuda…
RPGFan: We have read that there are different mixes of Soma Bringer’s soundtrack depending on whether the player selects the speakers or headphones as an output. In technical terms, why was it necessary to create two unique settings for the game score and what engineering techniques were employed in making the music right for each setting?
Yasunori Mitsuda: The Nintendo DS Speakers are capable of playing sounds between the range of 300Hz to 8KHz, but the headphones are capable of a range of about 80Hz to 16Khz. As you can tell from just looking at the numbers, it is impossible to maintain the same quality with both outputs. I found that I needed to think about this carefully while composing in order to write music that is in synch, not just with the bass on the DS speakers or the bass on the headphones, but both varieties. However, this would have been impossible to implement on most schedules, so it was really a good thing having twice the normal time for the project.