Smooth64 — Original music

Smooth64 — Original music

Four original tracks now play quietly in the background, in the spirit of late-'90s console soundtracks.

Play

Download Smooth64-Browser.zip, extract it, and open Smooth64-Play.html.
Or download the HTML file directly. Both work offline, with no setup or ROM. Sound and music start after your first click, tap, or key press (a browser rule).

What's new

• Four tracks, each with its own key, tempo and instruments:
  • Basalt Tide: electric piano, strings and vibraphone, drifting through major ninths.
  • Hush of the Spire: a harp and music-box lullaby in three.
  • Lantern Trail: marimba, soft brushes and an ocarina on an easy, swung walk.
  • Skyline Drift: a choir pad, a deep bass and a few bells.
• One track blends into the next. Tracks shuffle so that all four play before any repeats, never the same one twice in a row. Each opens and closes sparsely and ends on a ringing chord. The next track starts under that chord, in whichever nearby key shares the most notes with it.
• Quiet by design. At the default 50% the music sits well under the sound effects. Menus muffle it, the shard and star jingles briefly duck it, and it pauses while the tab is hidden. Menu → Settings → Music sets the volume; 0% turns it off.
• Performed live, not recorded. The scores are note data, played by a small Web Audio synthesizer: FM electric piano, mallets, bells, an ocarina, string and choir pads, basses and brushes, in a hall reverb. The whole soundtrack adds about 20 KB to the download.
• This replaces the v0.5.0 soundtrack. If you turned its music off, it stays off.

Music sources

Everything is original: composed for Smooth64 and synthesized in the browser. It uses no samples, recordings, third-party music, or Nintendo audio. The sound effects are still Kenney's CC0 samples; see THIRD_PARTY.md. docs/SOUNDTRACK.md describes the tracks and how to edit and render them.

Verification

All 15 native and 61 Node tests pass. New tests cover:

• the scores: every melody fills its form, no clashing melody notes, every note in range, and sparse starts and ends;
• the shuffle order, and hand-overs with no silence;
• scheduling ahead without late bursts;
• pausing, ducking, stopping and restarting, volume and muting;
• keeping a v0.5.0 mute.

The browser check confirms that the music starts with play, stops at 0%, keeps its setting across reloads, and plays from the offline file with no network requests or console errors. Offline renders put every track within 0.7 LU of the others. At the default volume a track averages about −34 LUFS, with footsteps around −26. These are measurements, not a listening test on speakers.