Minecraft - Volume Alpha

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 "title": "''Minecraft - Volume Alpha''",
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 "field": "March 4, 2011",
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Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the first Minecraft soundtrack album by C418, first released on Bandcamp on March 4, 2011. It features all 14 of the tracks that have been in the game since Alpha, plus 10 bonus tracks, for a total of 24 tracks and a length of nearly an hour. The second soundtrack album, Minecraft - Volume Beta, was released on November 9, 2013.

• The game’s soundtrack subtly uses repeated motifs.
  • For example, part of “Key” (at 0:08) appears to share a melody – in particular, a phrase that varies between 5 and 6 notes – with “Subwoofer Lullaby” (at 0:28 and 0:31), “Living Mice” (the 5-note pattern that repeats throughout the track, starting at the beginning, as well as the main melody of the track), “Danny” (at 0:03, 2:30 and 2:41, and 3:15), and most subtly, “Dry Hands” (It appears between 0:10 to 0:17, and it is really subtle, but those few notes are there, and they’re also at 0:28, 0:37, and 0:45).
  • At 0:26 of “Oxygène”, a distant piano plays four notes, which can also be heard near the end of “Haggstrom” (during the part with the echoing reverse chimes, at about 2:21).
  • The bouncing, descending melody being played by the chime instrument in the second half of “Mice on Venus” (at about 2:49) is also in the ending of “Haggstrom” (during the part with the echoing reverse chimes, at about 2:18).
  • At 0:55 of “Dry Hands”, there is a 5-note phrase that “Mice on Venus” also has (first appearing at 1:06).
  • At 1:46 of “Cat”, what sounds like an interpolation of part of the melody from the track “Minecraft” plays. The main melody throughout “Cat” also sounds like “Key”.
  • These are only a few examples of the likely many uses of motifs throughout Minecraft’s soundtrack.
  • The use of reoccurring musical ideas is a very common concept in musical composition. As with any soundtrack that uses reoccurring musical ideas, it’s unknown how many of these apparent instances of motifs are intentional, because some of them are so subtle that they can’t be discerned from coincidental uses of the same notes.
  • Tracks from Minecraft - Volume Beta also use musical ideas from this album.​^{[more information needed]}
• The versions of the game’s background music tracks that are on this album are actually slightly different from the original, in-game versions.
  • Multiple tracks have been given transitions between them, such as the one between “Living Mice” and “Moog City”, and the one between “Clark” and “Chris”.
    • The first three tracks are connected together, and so are tracks 5 and 6, 8 through 10, 14 through 18, and 19 through 21.
  • All of the in-game tracks were apparently remastered for this album, as certain instruments and sounds are louder or quieter or different in timbre than they were before and the overall sound has a lot more clarity.
    • The music disc tracks are in stereo, as opposed to their in-game versions, which are in mono. It is likely that the in-game versions are in mono so as to make it seem as if the sound is coming from one single source (a jukebox) instead of from all around the listener.
      • It is equally possible that either the stereo versions or the mono versions of the music disc tracks were created first. The soundtrack versions are either the original tracks from before they were mixed down to mono for the game, or remasters of the original mono tracks that intended to provide a more “complete” listening experience outside of the game. Which version came first could also vary from track to track.
  • “Key” has an added note at the end that wasn’t in the original as a way to transition into Door (the original version simply looped the last few notes as it faded out).
  • “Subwoofer Lullaby” has less reverb, resulting in a noticeably more staccato sound, and a glitchy ambient noise in the background at 1:03 is much louder in the album version.
  • “Dry Hands” begins the same way as the original and then fades into a new version that uses a noticeably different, much less reverbed piano sound.
  • “Haggstrom” is missing an ambient background sound that it originally had at 2:03, and it also has a slightly longer fade-out.
  • “Oxygène” has an added echoing, whistling sound at 0:26 that wasn’t there before.
• Some of the songs in C418’s album 148 are remixes of songs found in this album.
• While not proven definitively, the titles of the tracks “Oxygène” and “Équinoxe” were likely chosen in reference to the two most popular albums of the French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre of the same name, as the tracks are both in similar musical style to Jarre's works and use French titles instead of the English equivalent words “Oxygen” and “Equinox”.
• This album was nominated for Top Dance/Electronic Album in the 2022 Billboard Music Awards.^[3]
• This album was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the United States Library of Congress.^[4]

• 👁 Cover for Minecraft - Volume Alpha
  
  Cover for Minecraft - Volume Alpha
• 👁 Cover used on physical releases of Minecraft - Volume Alpha
  
  Cover used on physical releases of Minecraft - Volume Alpha

• The C418 Wiki’s article on Minecraft - Volume Alpha
• The Wikipedia article on Minecraft - Volume Alpha