Why is kikuchi bgm called MXXX M2XXXX?

[genjosanzo8]

Hello i have a question.
Why kikuchi BGM are called MXXX M2XXX M7XXX etc like in the kei unreleased soundtrack or on few release on the web?

is there a listing? or things like it? where can i see it if it exist?
thanks

[kenisu3000]

Well, first off, the M-numbers are basically the production codes for each music cue. The number directly after the M indicates which recording session it came from. The movie music is numbered, for the most part, by the order in which each cue appears in the film, so most of the time it's easy enough to speculate on numbers by counting how many cues there are between the numbers we know; but then you also have the library cues, which are more difficult to play fill-in-the-blanks with. Usually the best you can do with those is say, "Well, it obviously came from this session", and leave it at that, though there are some tricks, like assuming two cues that use the same leitmotif are likely to be right next to each other in the numbers.

We only have solid information on as many M-numbers as they're willing to tell us about in the CD booklets (thus, we don't even know the numbers of some released cues), and can only use deductive reasoning to figure out the rest. As far as unreleased music is concerned, naturally, we're not going to have much information about those.

So when you see something like M9XX etc., that means kei wasn't able to reasonably deduce where it fits in the numbers. The XX is a placeholder.

[genjosanzo8]

ok thanks a lot for these information....i was thinking that shunsuke kikuchi had made a list of his work somewhere....thanks a lot

[Bagginses]

I believe I read somewhere a long time ago that Kikuchi himself was the person responsible for ''coming up'' with the M-numbers. Or at least someone very close to him (professionally, that is). Can anyone confirm this? Do we have any idea who actually came up with/invented this alphanumeric nomenclature?

[DB1984]

Bagginses, I think it was a Japan thing. The composer for the second entry in the Urusei Yatsura series, Katsu Hoshi, also numbered the cues the same way (M1-M31). The second entry was called Beautiful Dreamer, and the Urusei Yatsura series was produced by Studio Pierrot early on.

[kenisu3000]

I don't know who invented the practice of labeling music with M-numbers, but I'm sure I'd have to go way far back, probably to the beginnings of talkie/audio cinema. Maybe even earlier. It's not just a Japanese thing, though numbering conventions vary depending on the production.

Film music cues - and I don't know if this was an international thing or just a U.S. thing - are traditionally numbered like this: 2m6, with 2 being the number of the film reel the cue is meant for, "m" of course standing for "music", and 6 being the sixth cue on that reel. (Movies were traditionally made up of several different film reels, each lasting about 10 minutes.) Since everything's gone digital and there's no more need for separation of reels, I don't know how cues are typically numbered nowadays.

But TV music in the U.S. is/was handled a bit more similarly to what we're familiar with. (Well... sort of.) For instance, the Ron Jones Project, a 14-CD release of nearly everything Jones composed for Star Trek: The Next Generation, reveals that his cues were numbered like so: M34, M51, etc. Of course, at first glance this looks like it's the exact convention used in DragonBall, but M34 is probably never the 34th cue in that episode. The first number represents Act III, the act the cue occurs in (acts being separated by commercial breaks), and the second number means it's the fourth cue in that act.

[Bagginses]

Thanks for the answers. Wish I could remember where I read that Kikuchi was the one who came up with the M-numbers (or at least the numbers themselves, but not the ''M''), but I can't... of course, now I know it's almost certainly not true anyway.

[kei17]

It's Shigeru Miyashita who numbered all the cues. He was the one who's responsible for the music placement in the TV series. As for the ones originally from movies, the directors first numbered them in a manner like M1, M2, and then Miyashita added greater digits to them afterward to define what movies they're coming from. So, for example, Daisuke Nishio named a certain cue M14, and Miyashita re-named it M814 for TV series use.

[Bagginses]

Thanks for the info, kei.