Rayman Pirate-Community

I've been listening to the Jaguar version of the Rayman soundtrack over the past few days when I noticed something interesting, as I listened the Pirate Mama and Space Mama themes I noticed both use a similar beat to each other almost like both tracks were originally together as a single song and were then separated in order to create two individual tracks to correspond to each individual boss, to test this idea out I decided to try lining up both tracks together in Audacity and play them back to see how it sounded, while they both started at the same time I quickly noticed that the Space Mama theme was playing at a slightly slower speed compared to the Pirate Mama theme which made them go out of sync, so the next thing I decided to do was to try increasing the speed of Space Mama to match Pirate Mama and see how that would sound, to my surprise when I did this and played it back, both tracks fit together and sounded even better than I expected (it sound almost like completing a puzzle), so with this in mind I have to wonder, were these two songs originally one and then split to create two (I wish I knew who composed these two so I could ask them personally about it and see what they have to say)?

You can hear the results here: https://www.mediafire.com/?5dip38kg83ybddp

I don't think there's a big secret behind the spacemama theme. I bet they just made two tracks that sound like each other on purpose.

Raymanni wrote:I don't think there's a big secret behind the spacemama theme. I bet they just made two tracks that sound like each other on purpose.

That's highly possible, but at the same time can we really say that's the case with certainty since we don't really know a whole lot about the history behind the production of Raymans music (especially when it comes to the original Jaguar version) outside of the identities of the main composers (Rémi Gazel, Nathalie Drouet, Frédéric Louvre, Frédéric Prados and Olaf Zalcman), so for all we know my theory could have some merit to it, but for now we'll have to wait till the one who composed these pieces either confirms or denies this.

It's common practice in video game music to export multiple loops of the same track, each with some modifications - both Rayman 2 and 3 have a lot of these. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the project file, they weren't separate, they simply muted different instruments and set a slightly different BPM on export. However, I don't really see why this is worth pondering, because 1) It's obvious they were either the same thing or were largely copy-pasted, and 2) I don't find that to be a remotely interesting concept given how commonplace it is.

Adsolution wrote:It's common practice in video game music to export multiple loops of the same track, each with some modifications - both Rayman 2 and 3 have a lot of these. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the project file, they weren't separate, they simply muted different instruments and set a slightly different BPM on export.

That's what I was thinking they did here that these tracks were originally 1 and then mixed different ways to create two tracks (at least that's what I think they did).

Adsolution wrote:However, I don't really see why this is worth pondering, because 1) It's obvious they were either the same thing or were largely copy-pasted, and 2) I don't find that to be a remotely interesting concept given how commonplace it is.

Here's a question was reusing music like that very commonplace for cartridge based games in the 90's (with the advent of CD based I can see your point and will concede but I don't really know of many cartridge based games that do something like this) and it's interesting (at least it is to me) because it gives us a look at interesting and creative ways composers can take a single song and rework it to give it a different feeling and experience.

superrayman3 wrote:Here's a question: was reusing music like that very commonplace for cartridge based games in the 90's? (with the advent of CD based I can see your point and will concede but I don't really know of many cartridge based games that do something like this) and it's interesting (at least it is to me) because it gives us a look at interesting and creative ways composers can take a single song and rework it to give it a different feeling and experience.

Yes, Rayman 2 for N64 did this and I believe a few other N64 games did this aswell.

It's actually very beneficial to reuse music like that on cartridge-based games. Most (or almost all) cartridge-based games from back in the 90s didn't store full audio mixdowns on their cartridges. Instead, they used small fragments of instruments (a.k.a. samples) and used MIDI (or some other proprietary format) to control the pitch, duration and volume of those samples.

These samples were usually around a few kilobytes. Do the math: say, a song has about 10 different instruments.. and every sample is about 30 kilobytes .. 30 kilobytes * 10 = 300 kilobytes
And of course, if you reused the same instruments in a different track, you wouldn't have to store the same sample again.

edit: sorry I didn't read the title, I didn't know you were talking about the Jaguar version. I don't know much about the Jaguar's soundchip, but it sounds like the Jaguar's version of Rayman is using some kind of FM synthesis (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Yeah, it does. My guess is the reason it was done here was either that the composer for whatever reason wanted the track to be aesthetically similar, or (more likely) just got lazy.

Adsolution wrote:Yeah, it does. My guess is the reason it was done here was either that the composer for whatever reason wanted the track to be aesthetically similar, or (more likely) just got lazy.

I just had another thought that might explain why the songs were split into two, is it possible that early on both the Pirate Mama and Space mama fights were originally going to be a single boss fight at the end of Picture City in a similar vein to the Mr Dark fight where after taking a certain amount of hits Pirate mama would leave the screen to re-strategise and then re-enter the fight as Space mama but the bosses were later split into two separate fights because of the increase in difficulty between Parate mama and Space mama because let's be honest the Pirate mama fight is a cakewalk compared to the Space mama fight, just a thought.

That seems very unlikely, as that wouldn't follow the already-established pattern (encountering the boss earlier in the world to prepare you for the boss at the end), and it doesn't really make sense to have an easy boss directly followed by a much harder, completely different boss. The Mister Dark fight is effectively only one fight with an introduction sequence.

Adsolution wrote:That seems very unlikely, as that wouldn't follow the already-established pattern (encountering the boss earlier in the world to prepare you for the boss at the end), and it doesn't really make sense to have an easy boss directly followed by a much harder, completely different boss. The Mister Dark fight is effectively only one fight with an introduction sequence.

To be fair aside from Picture city you don't really encounter two boss fights with the same boss in any given world with the only other world to have two boss fights in that vein being the Dream forest with the Bizzit and Moskito fights, and even then that's a bit of a stretch since Bizzit and Moskito are considered two separate characters so there's that.

There was never any confirmation that they're two separate characters, or that the first one is even Bzzit. That was an extrapolation made by the community, though one that seems reasonable. Also, the pattern was that the boss would be encountered early on, not fought, since the encounter is different in every world (aside from the Caves where it actually is absent).

I enjoy headcanons, but so far no valid reasoning has been given to make this anything more than baseless speculation about the game's development, especially when a much more logical reason is available.