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[kylydian]

I have been working very hard on a youtube video essay series on video game music! Here's my first video on Animal Crossing! https://youtu.be/ddjg21tlaoM It would mean a ton to me if you checked it out, gave a like or even subscribed to help me cut through the YouTube algorithms! I'm approaching the series from a musicology perspective rather than a technical side, as many other people already do that. And I'm trying to make the series accessible to people who don't know anything about music as well. There's definitely issues as it's my first video I've EVER done, but it's only up from here! #animalcrossing #animalcrossingnewhorizons #acnh #gamemusic #nintendoswitch #nintendo #vgm #videogamemusic #videogames #music #musicology #gamecomposer #composer #youtube #videoessay #kkslider #indiemusic #indiedev #indiedeveloper #animalcrossingnewleaf #gameaudio #kylydian https://www.instagram.com/p/B-AOW5mJZtD/?igshid=i9iw8j7szcg

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Music Analysis: Folk Music and Kass’s Theme

Breaking into one of the deepest tracks (Characters?) in the game! There’s quite a bit of historical context to unpack here, so let’s get to it.

Track 13: Kass’s Theme

Genre: Folk, Waltz    

Featured Instruments: Accordion

Compositional Techniques: Historical Context

Truthfully, this track isn’t too complicated composition wise, so rather than covering the composition in depth, let’s delve a bit into ethnomusicology and how it’s implemented into Kass’s theme, and by extension the role of Kass himself. The applications are pretty neat and are very easy to gloss over. In identifying exactly what this track does let’s first set a preface, because this is an info rich post.

An accordion being performed is significant, the fact that Kass is a traveling musician is important, and lyrics play a role in understanding how Kass’s music works. All of these actually interact behind the scenes to create something awesome! So, let’s start by briefly talking about the style of music, because that’s what I’ve been doing. Best to knock it out now.

This track is a Viennese Waltz, or for all intents and purposes a waltz. If you’re even somewhat familiar with basic musical forms or dance, you’ll likely know what a waltz is. Waltzes are marked by a 3 beat pattern, often played at a tempo fast enough to make you feel only one beat at a time. The fact that we can trace this form of music historically to Austria’s capital Vienna will play a little bit of a role later on, but just keep that in the back of your mind for now. You’ll likely recollect that you can hear similar sounding accordion music in a lot of other media, and when you do, it’s often to accompany the performer singing. These vocals are generally easy to understand and will either explain part of a story, or describe a scene that’s going on. Vocals and accordion go pretty hand in hand in many types of music. Again, save that for later!

The melody is very memorable, and obviously is associated with Kass, which keeps us in the realm of more traditional Zelda music. But it’s important to realize that the waltz itself isn’t necessarily overly significant in this case. Waltzes exist in all forms of instrumentation. In fact, if you remember, I explained how the music in the large guardian battles is actually a waltz. Because of this, let’s look to how we could actually tie in the accordion to aspects in Breath of the Wild other than the music itself.

Accordion is often associated with a very wide, sweeping genre of music called folk music. Folk music in many ways might be the widest genre of music possible, as it simply refers to “traditional” music in the confines of western music history. By this association, every nationality has traditional folk music. Because of this, folk music can sometimes be associated with “World Music.” This is not an absolute generalization however, as world music definitely does exist outside of the realm of folk. The easiest way to think of traditional folk music, is as a type of music that is usually transmitted orally, across generations, and performed over long periods of time. Naturally because of this, having a good recognizable melody is everything.

However, transmitted orally is one of the most important things to understand in relation to traditional folk music. In general, the idea behind folk music is it’s a music representative of a traditional culture, music of the past if you would. It’s music that had no way to be recorded other than to be passed down with the intention of future generations remembering it. These are often songs associated with religion, custom, holidays or spirituality, but they’re all passed down by the idea of tradition. The interesting thing about where traditional folk music occurs today is in towns or areas that might be…let’s call it “Old fashioned.” Small, isolated villages are prime targets to find traditional folk music. The thing about Breath of the Wild though, is every village is pretty isolated and each one has a very strong visual and cultural representation in someway or another. Without the influence of many outside sources, this would make each village prime material for cultural folk music. And remember, the accordion is our symbol that relates to folk music itself. Which brings us to its performer Kass.

Kass is a Rito and a traveling minstrel, or musician. His purpose in the game is to learn the songs of the various lands in Hyrule, the songs that have been passed down over generations. Believe it or not, this is actually very similar to a profession called ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologists generally study the traditional music of cultures or people, doing things like residencies, interviews, or recordings of performances. They’re people who are trying to retain a musical past, one that’s often only translated in person. They hold onto the music we don’t know about, so that one day we can hear it too. It’s often a behind the scenes job, and one that can go easily forgotten.

The neat thing is, because Kass travels to different lands, tribes, and locations to learn about their music, documenting them for future generations, he’s a sort of in game ethnomusicologist.

Kass’s songs tell stories, or provide riddles that help you solve puzzles, but the important thing is that they’re direct lore for Breath of the Wild because they contain lyrics, even if they’re only through text. If we think back to when I talked about Nier: Automata, I said lyrics allow us to provide literary meaning to music, something that you’ll often hear in folk music.

In addition to this, Kass plays a ton of music over the course of the game. You can hear a bunch of different versions of both new and familiar Zelda music. Which…since Nintendo says that Breath of the Wild takes place at the “end” of the Zelda timeline (Don’t get me started on this), it’s very evident that the music in question would also have been passed down through the ages similar to folk music. And for the songs that relate to the regions, those would be direct representations of the tribes’ folk music, passed down over time.

Because of the way he presents the music, both past, old and present. You could stretch it and say all of his renditions of music could be considered folk music. So naturally, let’s stretch this to the breaking point.

One of the songs that can be heard is the main Breath of the Wild theme. This is significant in a way, and although it can be chalked up to the fact that “it’s a different arrangement of the main theme end of story,” this places the song in the game’s world itself. You could then infer that the theme of the wild is actually music that has the potential to be passed down in game as well. It has a strong, memorable melody, and has important association for the game. It’s a direct representation of the soundtrack by our traveling Rito musicologist.

Again, more than likely this wasn’t intended, it most likely was simply “Man wouldn’t it be cool to have him play the main theme as well?” That doesn’t make it any less important though. The best ideas to find are the ones that might not be there.

However, something that does hold great significance is the ending to Kass’s storyline. If you complete all of his challenges, you can find him completing his wish in performing in front of his siblings in Rito village. He starts by playing his theme (with a few variations on articulation,) and eventually goes through some changes before he ends up on the familiar main theme for The Legend of Zelda

Historical contexts are important, and despite what Nintendo says about any timeline,  music has always held kind of a historical Easter egg worth of information if you will. And honestly, this is the biggest, brightest egg of them all. We’ve known the main theme for the Legend of Zelda from the very beginning of the series, and it’s made an appearance at some point throughout all of the games. It’s a very important theme, but as you’ll notice it only plays at a few places in the soundtrack. Sometimes for seemingly no reason (Riding the horse,) and others for important locations (Hyrule Castle.)

Throughout our personal histories with the Zelda series, we’ve come to associate this track as one that transcends the games, the timelines etc. We’ve likely made assumptions (even if subconscious) that the theme is present in the world of Hyrule itself, even if it doesn’t always appear that way. But with Kass performing it, you could infer that this is now transmitted music of Hyrule, much like the music of the tribes, legends and history of the now broken Hyrule.    

That’s cool.

This has been an overly long exposition, so let’s get into some quick meat of how we can apply this information to our own work.

Essentially what’s being done with Kass is creating lore through music. The songs Kass performs, whether shrine, divine beast, champion, city or whatever related, in someway or another build lore. If we think about the way the story is structured this makes complete sense. If you like, you can actually skip all of the story other than “The kingdom is broken Link. You must stop Ganon.” Or you can take the time to experience as much about about the world and the story as you choose to. Kass’s music is also a direct reflection of this. His purpose is to transmit the music to those that listen, allowing Link, you the player to learn more about the lore of the world. This is a unique way to not only provide more story, but also music that is relevant to the in-game world. Making the music itself a part of the lore.

So why not find ways to incorporate music into lore in our own projects? Admittedly, this isn’t easy, nor should it always be done. There are many ways that it could distract from player experience depending on the project, but if able to be accomplished it can provide a new way for music to be heard, experienced, and appreciated, even if not explicitly noticed. Breath of the Wild does it through a traveling character that develops overtime, but why not find other ways?

Truthfully, Zelda music has always done very well in incorporating music into lore. Playing music in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask are the two most obvious ones, but you can find instances in Wind Waker, Twlight Princess, and the often forgotten Ballad of the Wind Fish in Link’s Awakening.

In these cases, playable music, music association, and direct story implications are three ways to accomplish this. But honestly the possibilities on how to include music into lore are endless. After all, what is music other than retelling a story?

Let’s break it down.

Summary: Kass’s theme is representative of his character who present a unique take on the idea of traditional folk music in the land of Hyrule. Our clues include his instrument of choice, his status as a traveling musician, and that he collects songs to pass on to future generations. This act of passing on songs is a direct representation of lore, as it interacts with gameplay, and can add key story segments to the overall plot. Kass’s theme itself is reflective musically of traditional folk music.

Takeaways for Developers: Consider possible ways that you can build lore through music. There are many ways to do this, and many ways to do this incorrectly. Think about ways that you could place music inside the game’s world itself, and how the music could be representative of your setting, characters or ideas.

Takeaways for Composers: Using influences of folk music is a powerful way to build lore through music. Find ways that music might be able to be directly representative of a group of people, kingdoms, or countries when applicable. Remember the connotations that are carried with folk music. To effectively translate lore through music, it might be easiest to include lyrics, even if only in text.

I’ll come out and say that this has been one of my favorite tracks to listen, research and write on. To be honest, I could unpack even more here if I really wanted to. But I don’t want to make this more of a novel than it already is. Please feel free to reach out with any questions to my DMs, or at Kyle@KyldianMusic.com. I’d love to chat with you!

I’ll be back soon with the next entry in this series~

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis: Day 10

Oh man. A Breath of the Wild track without Impressionism? Yes! They exist!

Track 12: Stables

Genre: Instrumental

Featured Instruments: Guitar, Recorder, Bongo (or similar type drum), Rattle

Compositional Techniques: Call and Response

Like I said, no Impressionism! What!?

So before we dive into the track, let’s talk briefly about why Impressionism would not work for the stable music. Stables are physical locations, that while different to towns, are indeed landmarks in Hyrule Field. They’re large buildings with things to do around them. This is a focal point, therefore our music needs to be a focal point. The music in this case does not describe what the player is doing or where they are, but is heightening player experience through music that can be associated with “Life on the Range.”

The chords are approachable, the melodies are easy to understand, no use of sound effects, 20th century techniques, or excessive repetition. We’re back home in traditional Zelda music!!!!! And you’ll notice throughout the soundtrack that there is more music that follows conventional Zelda themes, but they’re all location or character based. It’s important to note that distinction because it’s important for understanding how the soundtrack (and to a greater extent Impressionism) can work in game music as a whole.

So, let’s dive into this track. There’s not a ton of info to cover, but the stuff that is here is pretty cool.

In the stable music, we have four primary instruments which exist in a hierarchy of importance. From most to least important: Guitar, recorder, bongos, rattle. And when first listening to this track you might think that the recorder to be the most important instrument, and at times it is! However, in the grand scheme of things, the guitar serves a constant purpose and carries the melody most of the time. Let’s map this track.

We start with guitar, bongos and an occasional rattle for accents. The guitar immediately brings in our main melody, and really the only primary melody of this track. It plays this melody on repeat a few times. This is a really well written melody which I find reflects the feeling of horse stables. If you’re familiar with western or ranch style music, you’ll notice that guitar is a frequently occurring instrument.

Eventually after many statements of this melody, a recorder comes in and plays the melody along with the guitar. At this point our focus is drawn to the recorder as our ear recognizes it as the newest change. The recorder eventually drops out leaving the guitar as the primary instrument. But because our mind is focused on recorder carrying the melody at this point, the guitar melody can drop to the back of our mind. And to accent this fact, the guitar starts playing chords instead of the single note melody! The melody is still definitely present in this texture, but the chords help to mask it.

This is where the interesting thing happens though. After the guitar plays the melody, the recorder enters immediately after and plays the melody without a chance for break. Then once the flute finishes the guitar comes back in and plays it again. They then proceed to trade the melody quickly for a while before the recorder breaks into a closing line, accompanied by a counter melody in the guitar.

This is a pretty traditional music composition technique called call and response. There’s a couple ways to do this. You could write the call as a statement, then make the response be a conclusion to that statement, creating contrasting material. The second way is to use different instruments but the same line for the call and response, making the melodies identical. This track generally chooses the latter of these two ways, although it does break into a conclusion statement in the recorder.

The neat thing though is this type of music writing was pretty popular during the years we often associate with this type of music. It gave people a way to easily associate with music, as they didn’t have a way to listen to music on repeat like we do today.

The instrumentation is also pretty important as recorder isn’t an instrument that you might normally associate with calm western music. But whistling is. Whistling and recorder have a similar type of sound, but they exist in different spectrums. If we think about the soundscape of Breath of the Wild, a whistle type sound wouldn’t necessarily make sense, but a flute would. Flute is used in other tracks, so we’re already used to it! A recorder is technically a type of flute (Some whistles are as well!), but a recorder would be more in line with the soundscape. This allows for a little bit of blending with other styles of music, but for it to not sound alienating when compared to the rest of the soundtrack.

Finally, in addition, most western/ranch music you could not call complex by many standards. It uses a lot of chords that we’re familiar with, and melodies are generally easy to sing or understand. This track does not step into any unknown territory, playing to the strengths of what its genre does best.

This music is definitely evocative of a calm western ranch type track, and the way it achieves this is pretty subtle. But instrument selection, stylistic choices and choosing simplicity can make all the difference when setting the mood.

Takeaways for Developers: The past or trends in others genres of music can transition to games with a little bit of thinking, creativity and application.

Takeaways for Composers: Call and response is a useful technique, especially when creating tracks that have a delicate texture. It allows you to get more mileage out of your melodies.

Next up, Kass’s theme! One of my personal favorites.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis: Day 9

I AM SO SORRY FOR ALL OF THE DELAYS!

Basically, one thing led to another over the summer, and I had written so much throughout my day job and my break that I had kinda gotten burned out on writing.

A couple updates before we get start, just so you know where I’ve been and such.

I was selected as a speaker for this year’s PAX Dev! It was an absolutely amazing experience, and I got some pretty awesome contacts out of it. The talk was a cohesive version of many blog posts I’ve written in the past, focusing on how to listen for ideas in music to come to your own conclusions. I might upload a summary of the talk eventually, but for right now I want to take a step back from it and focus on some games. 

In addition, I’m continuing on a sound design project that hopefully I’ll be able to share with you in the near future! I’m also in consideration for a couple projects, but we’ll see how those go...

Anyway, time to get back to this series. I’ll do my best to finish it up this time. It should be a shorter post today.

Track 11: Hinox Battle

Genre: Minimalism? I guess?

Featured Instruments: Marimba, Brass, Strings, Synths, Clarinet

Compositional Techniques: Musical Cells

Takeaways at the end!

Honestly there’s not a lot to say about this track that hasn’t been said already in previous posts. Mimicking movement, sound effects, synths, impressionist styles, minimalism etc etc. We’re all pretty familiar with it. So let’s focus on something a bit different, musical cells.

Musical cells are a way to include a particular melody at any one point. They’re often used in minimalism, or experimental work. Cells by themselves can be complete ideas, but not always. It’s the way they work together or evolve overtime that makes them unique.

While the “cells” in this track might sound like complete ideas, I don’t necessarily think they work that way. This is evidenced in the fact that there’s very little changed in their presentation or composition, even when they’re heard multiple times in the track, but this doesn’t appear to be a direct loop either. To me, it sounds as if each cell was written independently, while keeping all of the others in mind. They can all work by themselves in the track, or be added on top of each other to create more intensity.

These cells are not to be confused with layers, or different lines of music that are added to a track overtime in relation to gameplay.

In looking at this track, we’re not going to timeline this one, but talk briefly about the overall structure. And in looking at this structure, it’s best to start with the glue for this: The marimba. The marimba repeats throughout the entire track, the same notes, the same rhythm. It honestly would sound monotonous if it was present in the mix at all times. After the marimba, we get some percussion added in, which is our other sound that’s always present. This creates our basic soundscape for the cells to be layered on top of.

Some of these cells are melodic, some rhythmic, others climatic, and others (Like the clarinet line that’s super hard to miss) are sort of countermelodies. But throughout the piece, to add or decrease intensity these cells are added at various points. This allows for a unique composition that can be used in a variety of flexible ways. And because the marimba is ever present, just repeating, all of the cells will function regardless of key in this case.

This strategy won’t always work, but does easily in this case because the music is meant to fall quickly to the background as pseudo boss music. This again is describing the fight of a Hinox. For instance, the low brass generally is associated with bumbling characters in media. Try to think of other ways that this track might describe the act of fighting a Hinox yourself. I’m not going to give you all of the answers!

Like I said, short post! Let’s do some takeaways.

Takeaways for Developers: The repetitive nature of some music can be circumnavigated by the addition or subtraction of material.

Takeaways for Composers: For tracks that might need to be repetitive, try writing cells that can be used either by themselves, or all together.

We’re approaching some more traditional Zelda music! Stay tuned for some more write ups in the near future!

[kylydian]

Listen to the Music You Want to Write, Write the Music You Want to Listen to.

Maybe it’s because I’m preparing for my first major talk, or maybe it’s because I’m stuck in a composers block right now, chasing that ever alluding idea we call “innovation,” or maybe it’s because I just can’t stop thinking. But whatever it is, right now I’ve been obsessed with the idea of our own original voice as composers.

There’s a mindset I hear frequently that states “Nothing is truly original anymore. Everything artistically is just an extension of what came before. If you think you’ve done something new, there’s someone somewhere who has already done it before.” Now, I don’t know if I agree with this in its purest form, but it’s important to recognize that there is some truth to this. I do believe that as composers we are a sum of those who came before us, and more importantly a sum of the music that we like.

If you’ve followed me on Tumblr, Twitter, or anywhere else, you probably know that I somewhat see video game music falling a bit flat right now, especially at the entry level. This is a product of oversaturation in my opinion since we see so many composers at all levels competing with each other for literally every job, paid or not. With this environment, there’s a ton of people who are playing to what the industry wants, and are losing their own voice because they’re forgetting about what music means to them. And this somewhat creates an issue of I need my music to be the best.

The music we remember is the music that we associate with, it’s not necessarily the best music, but it’s the music that sticks out to us the most. These are the OSTs that we often remember as soundtracks of the year. And the thing is, most of these did something just a tad different. Each one is almost like a window into the psyche of the game, or even the composer.

And the thing is, you could say that each of these soundtracks is representative of the composer’s voice.

People throw this term around a lot, we have our voice, our style, our…entire musical being. But what does that truly mean, how do we find it, and if we have our own voice, how do we develop it? Let’s explore that a bit.

In our individual voice, I find it best if we divide the voice into what I call (And other people too probably) your passive voice, and your active voice. Both of these are important, and both of them should not be overlooked in deciding what it is you want to write.

Our passive voice is our biggest influencer of our musical self, whether it be performance, composition, stylistic preferences or almost any factor, and is a direct result of passive listening. Passive listening is listening to music as a secondary activity, which…most likely is the way we listen to music most of the time. If you’re listening to music while studying, working, or cooking, these would all be examples of passive listening. And naturally, while you’re doing something else, you’re going to be listening to music that you want to listen to!

The thing though, is that our passive listening has direct results on our musical selves, and naturally will be representative of what we like to listen to. If you’re looking at a composer’s website, there’s probably a good chance their “musical inspirations” on their bio is going to be pretty representative of their passive voice.

Within the realm of passive voice though, I’ve heard the complaint that so many game composers sound the same, (again especially at the entry level), and you can see part of the reason for this if you were to compare “musical inspirations” between composers. You’re probably going to find a lot of the same names. Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, and Manami Matsume, one of these is likely to appear. And you should see that! They’re masters for a reason! They’re at the top of our world for a reason!

More of the issue lies in the fact that people often ignore their active voice, and the neat thing about our active voice? Well, it’s easier to change that.

For the record, I consider my passive voice to be representative of Koji Kondo, Grant Kirkhope, and a classical composer by the name of David Maslanka.

If a passive voice is representative of passive listening, an active voice is representative of active listening, or listening to music as a primary activity. Going to a concert of any type, studying music, or  playing music with friends all being examples. But honestly, in developing an active voice it’s important to go a bit deeper than that. Within active listening do we gain the ability to take ideas from others.

Within composition, the easiest way to explain this would be if you’re trying to learn a new genre. When you’re writing a genre you don’t know, you’re likely to spend a lot of time immersing yourself in the genre, listening passively and actively to try to pick up the nuances of said genre. What makes it tick, how you can write that genre yourself. This is active listening. But you can do it in almost any circumstance or for any reason as well.

Austin Kleon’s book “Steal Like an Artist” talks about this much more accurately than my garbled talking ever could. He states that in developing an artform, it’s important to put your own spin on what came before. Take ideas from others,transform ideas into something new, so that one day people can steal from you too. If you’ve read any of my previous posts (mostly on Tumblr) you’ll likely notice that this is how I’ve approached most of my soundtrack analyses. It’s always neat to read material that echoes what you’ve been doing for a short while!

But one of my favorite quotes from the book that’s somewhat hidden in the pages says “Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style.”

And even before reading this book this is how I’ve looked at active listening. Get behind their psyche, pick ideas that you want, and think of why they work. How they work, why the composer chose these things. Do research on them, find the implications they held to the original artist. And take those ideas and think of ways that you could make them a bit different. Maybe it’s blending genres, maybe it’s instrument selection, experimental sound design music, mode mixture, anything. Take ideas and find ways that you can make something stand out just a little differently.

Listen for things in music that you actively want to pursue, that you think can make your game music better. Really dive in, spend some time with the music until you know it like the back of your hand. And then think: What’s special about this? Why does it shine in a way nothing else can shine? And this can be done by developers too, find things that you think sound good, that your composer could improve on, it’s a two way street after all.

Most importantly though, remember:

Listen to the music you want to write. Write the music you want to listen to.

My revision process for music some have called intense. If I don’t like something I’ll change it. At any point. Once I’m completely happy with a track, I’ll loop it for an hour and if I get annoyed or something sticks out to me, I change it. Once I’m not annoyed for an hour, I don’t listen to it for 24 hours. Then I loop it again. If I get annoyed, I change it. Once I’m not annoyed after the 24 hour period, I throw it in my car and listen to it on loop while I’m driving over the course of several days. I get annoyed? I’ll change it.

Writing the music that you want to listen to is so important. If you truly like what you write, there’s a good chance that someone else will like it too.

This is the mentality that I wish more people approached music with starting out. If you’re writing music that you love and listening actively on how to improve, you’re using your voice to its fullest.

Use your passive voice, develop your active one, and love what you write.

[kylydian]

Hollow Knight: Making Music Better with Ambience

Hey all! Sorry I’ve been absent from the blogging thing lately. Let’s just say one thing led to another and that other thing led to another and damn it built up fast. In fact, I’m not going to lie, I probably still won’t be posting consistently for a few months yet. I know many of you followed me for some Zelda stuff, and that’s still coming I promise, but I have a few new priorities right now!

Please understand!

I’ve got some really really exciting things in the works right now! One of them I can share with you!

I was selected to speak at PAX Dev this year! My talk will be “The Voice of Our Games: Novel Ideas in Game Music.” I’ll talk a bit about the contents of this soon!

In the meantime though, let’s explore some new music. Today we’re going to be talking about last year’s indie hit Hollow Knight.

Hollow Knight and I have had kind of a weird relationship. So often will I actually play a game now after listening to the music, and with Hollow Knight, I definitely knew the soundtrack inside and out before even playing it. I had always heard about how great the music is in Hollow Knight, how it was a game changer, how it did things that are just incredible. And upon listening to the soundtrack I remember thinking, “Wow. This is really good.” And that was about it. I didn’t have my jaw on the floor like I did for Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Nier: Automata, Cuphead, Stardew Valley, Undertale or a lot of other recent hits.

So, I kept wondering if maybe I was missing something. I had to be…right? I took a look at what the soundtrack does really well by itself:

·        Setting a mood.

·        Lietmotifs.

·        Use of Instruments/Orchestration

These are all goddamn good, and the skill here rivals so much music today. So then, if these are all really good and don’t really need too much explanation, what was missing?

Then I decided to finally play Hollow Knight. Almost 6 months after first listening to the entire sound track. I actually just beat the game a few days ago. Don’t judge….

The first time dived in I noticed something weird.

The music was an entirely different experience.

100%. It had completely changed. Why did it change. This thought nagged at my mind constantly. And once I came to Greenpath all the pieces fell together. The ambience in this game is fucking incredible.

Let’s break off for a second right there.  I’ll be dating myself a bit right now, but I remember like ten years ago, I saw on Myspace, GameFAQs, or somewhere a post/topic that read “Oh my god you need to listen to this track with rain in the background.”

So let’s throw both of those right here.

rainymood.com

I recommend adding Rainy Mood after playing the track to fully get what I’m talking about. Make sure to adjust the volume of rainy mood so it’s just a bit quieter as well.

This was an experience that almost enlightened me or something. Listening to music with rain? What? You can do that?

After entering Greenpath I was struck with how the quiet animal sounds and forest drone accentuated the music that was on screen. As I went to the other areas I noticed it too. The music took on new life, almost like the ambience was part of the soundtrack. Later I went back to check on the track by itself on the OST, and I instantly wanted the ambience back again.

Another one that I really dig is the City of Tears, in fact, just slap rainy mood on top of City of Tears and you’ll get a pretty similar effect as to what was in game.

Here. Try it yourself. Again, play the track first, then add Rainy Mood. I think this works even better than the previous example.

So what’s happening here? I’m not going to lie, I don’t exactly know best how to explain this either. But if I were to take a guess, I think that by itself the tracks are missing a subconscious focal point a lot of the time. And this is okay! Perfectly okay, you definitely don’t need one all the time, but for gameplay they’re often very useful. Often in music these focus points can be pedal orchestration or inner orchestration or however you want to label it. But basically, I’m talking about a line or notes that aren’t meant to be heard in the conscious, but give the listener some kind of background focus that fills in the gaps of music.

Using Greenpath, you eventually get some of these focus near the end of the track, but at the beginning you don’t really have it.

That’s where the ambience comes in. The ambience works as that focal point, allowing the music to do what it’s supposed to do. As mentioned earlier the music in Hollow Knight does a really good job of allowing music to set the mood of literally everything. I can only imagine the love and care that went into each track, and even before seeing the areas, I could associate the type of area each track was for. That’s some masterful work.

But if you’ve been following my analysis of music and soundtracks, you probably know that I don’t stop at scratching the surface of these things. So deeper we go, down to the Deepnest. In the Deepnest, you can kind of liken it to the darkest depths of the real ocean. There’s very freakish enemies down here, many of which don’t conform with what you’ve seen up to now. But what music plays? It’s just an ambience. It has some synth sounds in the back, but it creates this air of horror, something very different up until now. All along the way, insects scratch all around you (Listen to this part with headphones on. Just trust me) and it’s almost like the sound of your enemies adds to the ambience. The thing though is this makes sense. There’s still a very small semblance of music right here, just a bit. There’s still life after all, but it’s weird. It’s foreign.

The thing though, is you can go deeper. If you go past the Deepnest, you come to an area simply called The Abyss. And this is where things fully clicked for me regarding ambience and music. Let’s take a listen to what this area sounds like.

Notice this ambience? For the most part, The Abyss is completely devoid of life. There’s nothing present. Just like this ambience. You’ve got a slowly swelling deep drone, and a higher one. And really…that’s about it. There’s not much life in sound, music or visuals. It’s…just dead.

So, what if we symbolized areas in Hollow Knight by their ambience, and we symbolized life as music?

I can’t necessarily test it myself, but I’d be willing to bet that the game would still make sense if we just heard the ambience in gameplay. The areas would still make sense, they would have the basics of life around them, but they’d be lacking. And this is where you add the music, the life back into the soundtrack. By adding the music on top of the ambience you get the full package of what an area is supposed to sound like.

And that’s why this soundtrack accomplishes what it does so well and is so great. It’s truly genius.  

But let’s check something else, let’s hammer this in farther. During the boss fights the ambience is either brought way down or completely cut out. And if you listen to a lot of the boss fight music, you know what’s a lot more present? Some form of pedal orchestration. There’s that subconscious glue for us to subconsciously focus on music.

And I’m not even touching the general sound design in Hollow Knight past ambience. I love the sound design in this game. I found myself smiling so often at the sounds bosses or enemies made upon attacking, noticing you or dying. So many awesome creature sounds just made with the voice. It definitely brought to the forefront some of the charm that this game has in the sound department outside of ambience too.

So, here’s a suggestion. If you’re wanting to really nail a musical feel of a certain location in your game, maybe create a custom ambience for that location first, and write the music to that ambience. Then you have a ton of ways that you can use the ambience and music together, with music fading in and out, the ambience fading in and out, location based, or however you see fit. This can be a unique way of writing music that could make your process a bit different, therefore potentially changing the outcome.

But let’s keep this a shorter post. This topic I think is super important, so I don’t want to bore you with too many details and instead keep it big picture oriented. Let’s break it down as normal with some takeaways.

Takeaways for Developers: Think about how you want your game to sound. What does it need to thrive in the space of audio? Does it need to have a little extra bit of life? If so, maybe talk to your composer/sound designer about creating an ambience to be featured to make your music stand out a bit more.

Takeaways for Composers: Think about writing ambience first and music second in a case like this. What we hear impacts what we write in many ways, and music can be all around us. Musical soundscapes exist outside the realm of music. If we wrote music to an ambience, then took the ambience away…would our music still be a musical soundscape? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. Just something to think on.

Again, I’m sorry for being absent. I hope all of you have been doing awesome things.

Stay great guys!

[kylydian]

Here’s a new track I just finished! I promise I haven’t forgotten about my blog posts, just still been insanely busy! Also might have some exciting things to talk about in the nearish future! :)

[kylydian]

For the past few months, I've had the absolute privilege to be working closely with my good friend Gavin Knowles and the Marysville Pilchuck High School wind ensemble on an original piece they commissioned me to write, titled "Music for a World Now Divided." The other night they performed the premiere, to outstanding success. The piece has become deeply personal for me, and I could not be more proud of the students and Gavin for the dedication, work and musicality they put into the preparation and performance. They had a very tough program that night, and they absolutely rose to the challenge. Congrats guys! And thank you for an incredible premiere!! #newmusic #composer #windensemble #band #classicalmusic #windband #music #teaching

[kylydian]

Quick Note on Music Blogging Progress

Hey guys! 

This is more of a quick note to the people who follow me for my music posts. I know there’s a few of you who are following my Zelda series right now. I haven’t forgotten about it or you!

I’ve been crazy busy right now in trying to figure a lot of stuff out. A quick list of what I’ve been doing.

-Wrapping up rehearsals for a commissioned wind ensemble piece. Performance is on June 4th! -Working on a part time sound design project. -Working on an EDM style track for a game. -Talking with several devs on securing some soundtracks. -Writing a talk that I’ll be pitching for PAX DEV Right now I’ve got a lot on my plate, and my normal writing time is being taken up with chatting to devs and the talk. I promise I’ll be back in the next few weeks! In the meantime, it’d be dope if you checked out some of my music. You can find it here. https://soundcloud.com/kylydian Stay awesome guys.

[kylydian]

Music: To Theory, or Not to Theory?

Taking a post or two break from my Zelda series! 

Disclaimer: Normally my posts are for musicians and developers, but this post is centered on those with music knowledge.

For those of you joining me for the first time, a lot of this is going to focus around music theory in a video game music setting. This is a different story when dealing with a lot of strictly classical performance music.

Something I hear a lot among game developers is how “Well I do everything except music and sound.”

Something I hear a lot among composers is “Well I do everything except music theory.”

Sticking my nose up in the air a bit, to a college trained classical musician such as myself, my first reaction is always “Well of course you do.” So I should provide a little bit of background on where this initial reaction comes from.

I had a really strong theory background in college. And I mean really strong. Other than counterpoint (which I was never good at…still working on it…) I more or less have theory down. This is because at my state college, the theory courses that were offered were equivalent to master’s level theory at some conservatories. No joke. I often ask people who went to other colleges for reference, and often I hear they never learned about how to resolve Neopolitan 6th chords correctly, or never had to think about writing fugues, or write correctly formatted 12 tone pieces using Babbitt Squares. We really went all out in my program.

So here I am and I’m like “Pssssssshhhh game music needs theory duh.”

But really, this probably isn’t true.

Well, it is. But it..more so isn’t.

Let me explain.

The common complaint I hear against music theory is that it stifles creativity. Which I do understand that complaint. You can find arguments for this throughout music history, especially as we head into modernism. But the interesting thing is, very little music actually does completely away with music theory. Overtime people who had a problem with theory never really abandoned it, rather they pushed it. They extended out chords, the increased the frequency of borrowed chords, they found new ways to tonicize notes. But this still all within the confines of traditional music theory, and honestly it expanded our concept of music theory today.

So, theory didn’t really stifle creativity in this case, rather they adapted theory to fit their creativity. Which in and of itself is a creative process.

That’s some meta-creating.

But still, this complaint is said frequently. And I do understand it. There’s something to be said about playing whatever you want on your instrument while not having to worry about voice leading, or augmented seconds, or making sure that you’re doubling correctly in second inversion. This can lead to more “natural” music.

I argue this though It cannot be denied that music theory is based in the science of understanding why things sound good. This means that a knowledge of music theory can help you. So why would you ignore something that can help you? Many famous composers don’t know music theory, and they take pride in it sometimes! But why? To me it almost seems as if it’s kind of a “I made it without doing it the traditional way type of thing.”

However, again let’s focus on the argument that it stifles musical creativity. Because of this argument, oftentimes I will ignore traditional music theory. I’ll sometimes forget about using inversions simply because I love that solid feel you get from root position chords. I love parallel fourths and fifths. I’m of the weird mindset that they provide a unique otherworldly sound to music frequently, so often when I write and I accidently put in parallel fifths, I’ll leave them in. I’ll write melodies not worried about major or minor, or I’ll mix modes frequently, or even throw in seemingly random notes just to add a bit of variety to my music. This though naturally will lead to some issues in writing music.

I don’t write this sporadically at all times, and it does depend on what I’m writing for. Oftentimes I follow theory conventions from the start. But in these cases of seeming randomness, here’s where theory can come in for me.

If something doesn’t sound right, go through and do a roman numeral analysis. This will show you your progression, your non chord tones, and give you a visual representation of your music.  A clearer picture of what sounds wrong and how to fix it. Just the other day when I was chaining secondary chords together which isn’t too common, and found that something sounded off, so I analyzed my progression and saw that I had accidently written a V/vi when I meant to have a V/iii. It’s a simple mistake, that I was able to correct and fix easily because of my knowledge of theory.

I think when writing video game music especially, this retroactive use of music theory really shines. It allows us to not be “stifled by creativity”, but allows us to ensure things sound good from a theoretical music perspective.

Other than this, another common complain I hear frequently is learning theory is too difficult. And I promise it isn’t that bad, especially with a basic knowledge of music already. It’s just applying information you know in a different way. And honestly, I do think there is a stopping point. You don’t need a huge knowledge of theory, but even a little can go a long way.

If anything, learn to read notation. This can help you in so many ways we would be in this post for the rest of my lifetime.

But in writing music, a basic understanding of music theory will allow you to subconsciously use it while not stifling your creativity. And if it does stifle it for some reason, feel free to expand your concept of what theory is. Sure you might not be Debussy or Wagner, but you too are a creative.

To sum, no I don’t think music theory is necessary. There are soooooooo many better musicians out there than me who can’t even read music. But again, I raise the question, why would you avoid something that can only help you? It’s a handy reference guide for when things aren’t going your way, and the time put into studying theory will help rise you to greater heights than you could have otherwise.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis: Day 8

Big stone monster music go!

Track 10: Talus Battle

Genre: A little bit of everything…?

Featured Instruments: Piano, marimba, various sound effects, various percussion

Compositional Techniques: Minimalism, Sound Design

Takeaways at the end today!

Lowkey this is one of my favorite tracks in the game. Many of the techniques used in this track we’ve already talked about in the daytime battle music, so I’ll only be spending a short time with you again today. But there’s something about this track that I just really love: Connecting minor ideas to each other. But music wise? This is definitely one of the most fun tracks on the OST.

This track…much like all of the others in the game is about setting a feel. This track starts off with a few hits of a pickaxe, and it quickly rises up to a climatic point that’s accentuated by a quick choir note. This riser gives us an instant feeling of grandeur, as…well…it’s pretty grand that we’re fighting a huge stone monster (How does it even see!?) Something something a pickaxe references rocks, sound effects being in music. Blahblahblah. There’s a bit more to it this time.

So after this, we get to a small minimalistic section. We get this hard hitting, repeating marimba line. In fact, all of the percussion hits hard in this piece! Brass and percussion blast their way through playing quick lines of melody that accentuate what’s happening around them. It has an overall lumbering feeling. We could talk about how this sound is mimicking the movement of the Talus, but we’ve already talked about mirroring movement already with the guardians. And we’re looking for new connections. Not old ones.

Anyway, after this short section, we get led into a full, exciting, and honestly fun section. It’s like all instruments then join in in a harmony of working together. It’s a really cool sound, and almost reminiscent of a party to me. This lasts for only a few seconds until we get to a section of where different instruments trade sections with each other again.

There’s a lot happening the music, but let’s just go to the overall picture of what we’re going for today.

This track shares a lot in common with the Goron City track. Not necessarily in construction, but in instrumentation. This is intentional. Let’s find out why.

What are some instruments we get in this track? TONS of percussion instruments for one. Marimba, Steel Drums, Bass Drum, Timpani, etc. And then we also get some low brass such as trombones. Strings, and of course, piano. If we listen to the Goron City track, you’ll see that a lot of these instruments are used in that track as well.

The Gorons have always been known as rock eaters, and the Talus…well…is a rock monster. So naturally there’s some stuff thematically in common between the concept of Gorons and the Talus.

Imagine a Goron eating a Talus…..

Finally, you can encounter a different type of Talus around Death Mountain, you can find one that’s completely on fire. Which you could say further associates the boss with the concept of Gorons. There’s even fighting a giant one in lava as part of the Champion’s Ballad quest line.

This little connection is where the instrumentation plays in. We can further accentuate this based directly on the opening. Again, as a reminder, we start with a pickaxe, which has long been associated with working or breaking rock, and at the top of that initial riser, it’s accented by a choir. Singing…in case people have forgotten, has also long been associated with mining work.

…And what’s near Goron City?

A mine.

…What are Gorons doing?

…Mining.

What are you doing to the Talus? Mining the shit out of him. Chipping away at his health like a pickaxe would with rock.

See where I’m going with this? The sound effects from the pickaxe and choir are so minor, but they add so much to this piece.

With that said, the instrumentation again directly references Goron City because there’s a similar idea between the two. I’m not going so far as to say that the Talus is directly connected to the Gorons, but rather just a thematic connection.

Low brass often is used to depict slow movement and stumbling around. Even the show Family Guy had a cutaway gag on this. Both Gorons and the Talus have this kind of stumbling music. Percussion is used in a way to accentuate both tracks being in a mountainous region. We can tell this because all of the percussion hits are pretty hard. Most percussion instruments can be played with a wide variety of mallets or sticks. The hits in this track are all very striking, making an impact. It’s very clear that we’re looking at instrumentation that like a pickaxe, is looking to chip away.

Overall, this track is really cool, and really fun. I love this one, and it’s one of the ones I think might go unnoticed in the game in the grand scheme of things. With that said though, there’s only so much it does that’s different from like tracks. But the idea of connecting like ideas through music is one that simply can’t be ignored. Even though we might not notice it upfront, our subconscious matters.

Takeaways for Developers: Finding ways to connect subjects together, even if it’s only super subtly can be a way to provide a little bit of subconscious connection.

Takeaways for Composers: Reusing instrumentation for like areas/events can be good ways to make tracks that aren’t similar have just a little connection. This can provide just a little bit more meaning in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for joining me guys. Next time, we move to a different fight.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis: Day 7

*insert crazy piano solo*

“RUN IT’S A GUARDIAN!!!!!”

Yeah…if you’ve been reading these posts for a while now…you already know that’s the part I’m least impressed with. Let’s talk about dance music today. Specifically waltzes.

I’m not kidding. It takes two to waltz, so join me on this journey. Let’s go!

Track 9: Guardian Battle

Genre: Waltz

Featured Instruments: Piano, Strings, Synths, A lot of other stuff

Compositional Techniques: Minimalism

Takeaways for Developers: All music within a certain context does not need to be what people expect for them to like it.

Takeaways for Composers: There’s room for all styles of music for any situation. Finding these unique opportunities allows for new musical experiences.

In my very first post about Breath of the Wild back when I first started this blog, I talked really briefly about this track, and it all definitely applies still. But today we’re gonna go much deeper.

Originally, we talked about the piano solo, a sense of fear and the staying power of the music in relation to battle. So really quickly, let’s review.

The piano solo that everyone always talks about is truly a good piano solo and is brilliant writing, but it’s only around for a couple seconds then it disappears. This first solo I described as “skittish” and establishing a sense of fear. This still holds true. The skittishness mirrors the movement of these large guardians, which in contrast to their smaller counterparts, is very sporadic and unpredictable. The piano brings to mind instantly that these are enemies that can kill us with one hit, maybe two if we’re geared well. And after this, you get a lot of repetition, which we’ve come to know as minimalism in certain settings.

If you’re joining us for the first time now, Minimalism is a technique that features repetition in music with incredibly minor changes overtime. But I wouldn’t label this piece minimalist in genre necessarily. Rather it uses minimalist ideas instead of building a minimalist piece. I don’t think it features enough variation to warrant the genre being minimalism.

Regardless, this repetition gives us staying power, and overtime it begins to sound a little hopeful. As this unsettling rhythm begins to fall to the back of your mind it’s likely to instill a sense of bravery.

Okay review done!

So, how does the music accomplish this? This track is pretty different in structure to other battle music in Breath of the Wild, even when compared to the shrine battle music. Again, we need to focus on the visuals to start our discussion.

This has a much thicker sound to it. The natural reason for this would be because this guardian is bigger….? Right?

Nah, it has more to do with the strength and fear factor of the enemy, and the fact that it’s much harder to fight fairly. You’re likely to have your shield up, hoping to get that laser reflection. The two of you will probably be circling around each other, looking for an opening. You’ll be doing this dance for a while, especially if you don’t know how to fight them.

And there we are. To me this fight is a bit like a dance. And the music? Well, as I’ve said a few times now, the music is a traditional waltz, although it doesn’t sound like it at first pass.

So, lets break away a bit from Zelda to talk about exactly what a waltz is. If you have a broad knowledge of music, you’ll likely know that a waltz is a piece of music with a feeling of three. Specifically, this is 3/4 time, meaning that for every bar (segment) of music, there’s three beats. Normally you feel this time in three beats (duh), but waltzes are generally felt in one because they’re usually at a pretty brisk pace. You’ll feel a very strong beat first, where the notes that come after feel more relaxed, or maybe floating away. Then right away you’ll feel that strong beat again. If you were to say, “One two three one two three one two three.” Putting a small emphasis on the bolded “one” you would now be saying a basic waltz feel. The dance is marked by this strong initial beat.

So, let’s look back over to the track in question. Immediately after the piano solo, this really synth heavy rhythm enters that’s honestly a bit hard to figure out. It might be tough to grasp hold of the rhythm or feel of it, but we do know one thing immediately. There’s a strong accented beat from a kick drum. If we focus in on this, we can find the primary beat pretty easily.

Boom..Boom..Boom.

And in between these strong beats, we get two more notes that feel lighter, that are harder to notice.

Bah dah. Bah dah. Bah dah.

Occasionally the dah part has an extra note in it, but never makes the rhythm feel longer.

Bah dah. Bah dah. Bah dahdaht.  

Let’s put it all together.

Boom bah dah. Boom bah dah. Boom bah dah. Boom bah dahdaht. Boom bah dah…….

Remember, that each bolded word gets a bit of emphasis, and the others feel a bit lighter.

This is the basic feel right after the piano solo, and is the staying rhythm of the entire piece. This is a waltz feel, and it’s incredibly easy to miss not only in gameplay, but listening to the track as well. The music is very hectic, and honestly this rhythm does not have a lot of time to get established before your attention is yanked away. But no matter what enters, this “Boom bah dah” is what has the staying power previously mentioned.

As a waltz, this feeling directly mimics the idea of a human squaring off against a huge mechanical monster dancing together in combat. Waltzes take two to dance. The instrumentation used as well as rhythmic variance makes it hard to notice the waltz, almost like it’s lopsided. It mirrors the movement of the guardian, but not necessarily Link. Overtime though, this rhythm falls to the back of your mind, and it becomes not as noticeable. Now you’re likely feeling like you’ve got a chance.

Now you’re dancing in battle together.

With that said, this isn’t all that’s happening. Over this waltz feeling we’ve got a melody on solo violin. This is an agitated melody, one that feels skittish just like the piano solo, but has a bit more reason. This feels as if it’s in a different time in comparison to the waltz, and it almost feels like a melody that you would hear in a tango, a different type of dance. However, it fits perfectly into the time if you listen closely, and there are many things that this melody could be considered to represent.

Me? Well, I think it’s neat to think of it as Link. Dancing to a different beat, but still within the boundaries set by his opponent.

Overtime, this staying power turns into something entirely different. Here we get remnants of the piano solo, the waltz beat, different rhythms, and honestly a lot of different ideas all coming at once. It’s like all of the ideas are coming together for a brief moment. And just like that…it’s gone. You’re back to the death waltz again. But this time the waltz isn’t a thing of fear. I find it more a waltz of courage.

You’ve survived this long. Maybe you’ve got a shot.

So, what does this talk of dances, movement, music, sound, and melodies all mean?

It’s about establishing a unique, appropriate, yet contrasting feel to music. Guardian fights are different from every other encounter in the game. And they’re drastically different. They were made to be different from the very first footage of Breath of the Wild. If you were watching the game awards like I was, seeing a huge robotic, futuristic enemy come out of nowhere randomly shooting lasers was one of the coolest yet most jarring things I’ve ever seen in Zelda. From the beginning, guardians were made to be different. The music has to accompany this. As we’ve already talked about, the other battle music in the game does things differently as well, but they all share similar ideas (As we’ll talk about in the next post.) Generally, you’re fighting one enemy in guardian fights. In a game where most enemies move in groups, that singular enemy is a variance.

That enemy is your dance partner. Let the music accentuate that.  

Let’s break it down.

…did that turn into a dance pun this time?

Takeaways for Developers: Find moments in your game that you want to have a distinct feel, and let composers know when you need sections to have a different sound. Music impacts gameplay and player emotions even if we don’t notice it.

Takeaways for Composers: All musical styles have a purpose in games. Keep in mind situations and differences in gameplay and characters. Capitalize on these ideas to not only provide fitting music, but variance in your score as well as gameplay.

All music has a place in games at some point or another. Break expectations, smash boundaries and find ways to make something new, especially if we’re wanting to stand out.

Next time, we fight a different battle.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis: Day 6

Hey! Listen! Did you know that the Song of Time is in Breath of the Wild? Did you? Did you? Did you!?

Track 8: The Temple of Time

Genre: Impressionism

Featured Instruments: Piano

Compositional Techniques: Reharmonization, Use of thematic material

Takeaways: This is going to be a pretty short post, so there will just be a debrief at the end this time.

And here we have another track I hear brought up pretty commonly, especially among the “haters” of the BotW soundtrack. The Song of Time is one that has obviously held a lot of importance throughout the Zelda universe. Featured heavily in Ocarina of Time and again in Majora’s Mask, this is a piece of music that Zelda veterans hopefully know like the back of their hand.

Diving straight in…

So get this. One of the first places in Breath of the Wild that you go to is the Temple of Time. This is the location in the series that’s always been associated with the Song of Time, and rightfully so! They share “Time” in the name! But unlike other games in the series, the Temple of Time has been destroyed. Gutted. Only a shell of its former self. In Twilight Princess it was hidden. Mysterious. But still existed in all of its glory.

Here we see a temple that ironically has been forgotten by time.

Its time is over. It plays no significance in this plot right when you see it…or really even in the grand scheme of things.

The Temple of Time really has been synonymous with Zelda to this point, but Breath of the Wild is breaking away from the formula. Maybe it was placed so early in the game as a really fast way to tell the player “Hey. This isn’t what you knew. Hyrule is already broken.”

There’s no way to know.

So you enter the Temple of Time, exploring what once was, and you’re greeted by no sound. Until slowly music begins to enter. But it’s foreign.

It’s unfamiliar.

This is one of the first instances of Impressionist music in Breath of the Wild. But the more you listen to it, the more it might sound slightly familiar.

Turns out that you’re listening to the Song of Time. But it too is unfamiliar.

In my previous post, I talked about how using melodies people are familiar with is a really good way to get people acquainted with a style of music. This is the first example of this in the game, but it might be the best one.

This is mainly going to be for developers or people who don’t know music, but the technique being used here is called reharmonization. In music, harmony could be generalized as the background noise. If you were to go to a piano, and play three notes at a time, you would now be playing a harmony. It doesn’t matter which three, or it could even be many more notes, or even two notes! As long as you’re playing more than one note, you’ve got yourself a harmony of some sort.

Harmony is what we put behind melody to make it make sense. It’s kind of a musical glue that keeps us subconsciously tied to our music. The two most basic forms of harmony are major or minor. Generally people describe major as being happy, and minor as being sad. Again, an overgeneralization but it’s okay. I’m just trying to get the point across.

Generally, most music will have harmony, and in the case of the original Song of Time it’s a harmony that you likely already have ingrained subconsciously in your mind. With reharmonization though, we’re able to change the feel of music through simple means. For example, we could take songs that are generally happy sounding, and by switching the harmony from major to minor we could make them sad. Reharmonization is an incredibly popular technique when working with themes that appear throughout games, such as character themes or idee fixes (overarching musical themes/main themes.)

Here though, we have a reharmonization of the Song of Time, but this isn’t a case of happy or sad, or black and white. This is a reharmonization that stretches our ears as far as they can go in relation to the Song of Time. In fact, many people probably don’t even realize that the Song of Time plays here. And this is because the harmonization is very Impressionistic, a type of music that we already talked about as painting pictures or ideas rather accentuating what’s on screen.

The tempo isn’t strict either. It’s played very free, almost at what seems to be whenever the performer feels like moving. It’s doing all it can to give the most subtle hint at being the Song of Time.

This harmony isn’t what we’re used to, just like we aren’t used to seeing the Temple of Time like this.

Just like we’re not used to hearing this style of music in a Zelda game.

So what does this mean? We aren’t going to go directly into the harmony here, but placing this track at this point in the game is incredibly important to acquaint players with the rest of the soundtrack. Taking music that people are already familiar with and changing it into a new style is a very appropriate way to get listeners to more easily accept foreign music. This is a kind of testing grounds for the rest of the soundtrack. And what better melody to use than the Song of Time?

This has been a short post, but hopefully I’ve made the point clear. Let’s get some quick takeaways.

Takeaways for Composers: Reharmonization is an easy way to provide subtle yet drastic changes to existing melodies. You can use this to get your listeners into new styles of music easily.

Takeaways for Developers: Find new ways to use old music. If your composer is wanting to take things in a very different direction, find ways for them to blend old with new at first, that way you won’t alienate your players.

And with the next post, we’re going to be away from old melodies, and back to the new. It’s the large guardians next time, so get ready to learn about…waltzes.

What!?

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis: Day 5

Sorry for the break guys! I was off at Game Developers Conference for a week or so. Definitely was the time of my life! Shout out to my Conference Associate family! 

Here we go back on track!

TWO tracks in one day? Oh man, it’s time for a double dose of Minimalist Impressions of Zelda Music!

Tracks 6 & 7: Riding (Day and Night)

Genre: Impressionism, Minimalism

Featured Instruments: Piano, Strings

Compositional Techniques: Pointillism, Thematic Usage

Takeaways for Composers: Hiding famous melodies in the middle of new content is a great way to get listeners to associate with and accept new genres.

Takeaways for Developers: Blending new and old within the context of music allows for easy, natural progression in game music.

I have to say, riding a horse is incredibly satisfying in Breath of the Wild. There’s something really awesome about finding a horse in the wild, taming it and finally riding off into the distance. You also get to name it.

What did I name mine?

Chad.

His name is Chad.

I hear these tracks talked about pretty frequently whenever conversation arises about Breath of the Wild’s music. And there’s definitely good reason for it. I mentioned previously in my Undertale post that people naturally associate with thematic material, and these two tracks are some of the only ones in the game to use traditional Zelda themes. But what’s really great about them is how they’re presented. Truly, it’s just a glimpse of the past.

We’re talking about both at once because the two tracks use the same ideas and don’t really deviate from each other. In fact, they’re kind of an extension of themselves. So rather than break them up, let’s keep them together.

In starting, let’s take a look at the instrumentation. We’ve only got two instruments, piano and strings. The piano plays pretty quick lines that are very Impressionistic in nature. The notes echo the style of intervals and feel used in the daytime field track covered in the past, just much quicker, providing a feeling of motion because…well…you’re riding a horse. However, this is also done through a pointillistic nature as well. The notes seem as if they’re picked at random, but in actuality they’re likely picked for timbre as well as melody. This is especially evident at the end of every piano line, where the notes jump around between different octave. It sounds random, but it’s very methodical.

Along with this though, we also have an element of heavy minimalism. If you remember from my post about the daytime battle music, Minimalism is a style of music that features heavy repetition with minor changes over time. The Battle theme used the entrances of various instruments to create the minimalist effect, but with these two tracks minimalism is used in a more traditional sense. Most phrases of the piano line repeat itself a few times, until finally only one or two notes change. 

The changes are incredibly small, and probably wouldn’t be easily noticed, especially in game. Overtime it changes more and more, until finally you have lines that are fairly different from the beginning but maintain the same feel overall.

However, the violin does something that is completely in opposition to this, but gels incredibly well. It plays a known melody from the Zelda series. It enters after many repetitions around halfway through the track, and it truly enters pretty quietly, and it’s gone as quickly as it entered. The melody used in the daytime track is Zelda’s Lullaby, and in the nighttime track it’s the main theme. It seems as if each melody is played much slower than that of the piano, but we’ll touch on that in a little bit. Once the melody is gone, the original piano lines continue until finally there’s a short closing segment to close out the piece.

Strings are used in this case probably for the fact that strings often carry melody in this soundtrack, and that piano and strings are known to be complimentary instruments.

Keep in mind that this is true across both tracks. Both tracks use the exact same ideas of Impressionism, Minimalism, thematic material. Both are structured the same way as well.

So, let’s talk about tempo, or speed of the pieces. Both are also around the same tempo, and in both it sounds like the strings are quite a bit slower than that of the piano. However, this isn’t entirely accurate. The tracks themselves aren’t that fast really. They’re hovering around 100 beats per minute. The reason for the discrepancy in feeling the tempo is in relation to the fact that there’s only two instruments. The piano is playing primarily sixteenth notes (Meaning that there’s four notes per beat) and eighth notes (Two notes per beat.) This means that the line feels as if it has more motion, even though the beat itself is only at a moderate pace. Normally we wouldn’t associate this line as being “fast” but we do because we only had one context for tempo at the beginning. This is marked even further by the fact that when the melody comes in it’s being played in longer held notes. These are at the same tempo, but feel as if it’s moving slower. This is augmented by the fact that these held notes are really held. Again, we wouldn’t really notice this to this extent if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s only two instruments and the one before it was only moving with quicker notes.

These two instruments and singular tempo in general provide us with two feelings. One is the feeling of riding a horse, and the other is exploring Hyrule, something that I’m sure most of us are already familiar with. But the small instrumentation again reflects the open yet sparse world, entirely different from everything we’ve come to know.

But the night time track does something different, something markedly different than the other track.

“But Kyle, the two sound identical!?!!”

Oh man. You’re right! And that’s why these two need to be looked at together. The opening line of the night time track is a different rhythm from what came in the daytime track. It’s an incredibly small change and you have to be listening for it. The notes and intervals are almost the same too. It’s really like they’re the same piece, but there’s just a small difference between how the first one ends (before the outro), and the second one begins.

That’s because the beginning of the second track is a minimalist change to the ending of the first track. Minimalism is a small change that should barely be noticed if even noticed at all. Same instrumentation, similar key, starting with a different rhythm and almost the same notes.

If these two tracks played back to back without stopping, this would be a post on only one track, and I wouldn’t be talking about a minimalist change between two tracks.

It’s really cool though. The fact that the composer used minimalism to continue the feeling of one track over to the next. Connecting similar ideas over two tracks to essentially make one cohesive track split in to two?

It’s absolutely brilliant.

One other thing. I want to bring up the fact that people seem to always bring up this track. In earlier posts, I had mentioned that there’s many people who don’t like the Breath of the Wild music. I think this has to do with the sparse scoring, and musical style somewhat, but I think it has more to do with the lack of thematic material. The fact that these tracks are some of the ones that people bring up first is evidence of that to me.

These tracks are more accessible because they have themes people already know. They aren’t necessarily the focal point, and in my opinion they’re background noise to the piano (I might be biased though because I’m a weird 20th century experimental music nut.) But regardless, I think tracks like these are important for this OST to make the other music approachable.

These two tracks are a good introduction to the type of music that the Breath of the Wild soundtrack is built around. Impressionism, Minimalism etc aren’t what I would call genres that are easily loved, so building themes and music that people already know and have emotional ties to is a great way to get the listeners’ ears wet to appreciate the rest of the soundtrack. In fact, it might have the effect of getting the player to listen more intently to the soundtrack to try to pick up other melodies they might hear.

And when writing game music that might not be as easily appreciated, finding ways to help people understand and appreciate the music is absolutely imperative. Blending old and new is a great way to do that.

What’s the break down? Are you asking what can I take away from all of this? It’s simple music, but there’s some great takeaways here.

For Composers: A lot of people might have a hard time adapting to new or unique musical styles. Find ways to blend the old and the new together to help people ease into musical change. Featuring lines that have different feelings of tempos is a great way to build motion and conflicting yet accentuating feelings.

For Developers: Push composers towards combining musical styles for a few tracks early in the game if you’re wanting to go with a progressive soundtrack. This will help players get acclimated to the newer style of music. “Fast” does not always mean fast when dealing with music. The quickness of individual lines does not necessarily indicate speed.

I love these tracks. They’re so simple yet hide great meaning for us as composers and developers. Next up is another personal favorite of mine. This one does some different stuff with traditional melodies, so we’ll talk reharmonization along with philosophy in the next installment.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis Day 4: Battle (Shrine)

Sometimes when you enter a shrine, you’re greeted by a lone, cute little guardian whose only goal is to stop you from getting your orb. Naturally to accompany this, the music is very different. It’s very jerky, structured through a lot of different sounds, and accentuates fights in ways you might not notice.

Track 4: Battle (Shrine)

Genre: Kind of a hybrid? Electronic, Impressionism, Sound Design

Featured Instruments: Piano, Synth

Compositional Techniques: Asymmetrical Time Signature, Mixed Meter, Sound Design, Pointillism

Takeaways for Composers: Asymmetrical time signatures and mixed meters are a good way to add specific feelings to situations. Sound design can be implemented into music in ways other than traditional tracks.

Takeaways for Developers: Music can say more about your characters than just their personalities. Understanding the basics of time signatures will help in talking with composers.

As I talked about in the first Breath of the Wild post, the general guardian elicits a feeling of fear. The shrine ones are pretty different encounters in every way however. These come in different difficulties, and are pretty different from the guardian fights out in the wild. Before we talk about this track though, we need to focus on a couple marked differences between the types of guardian encounters.

First of all, in shrines you’re locked into combat. There’s no chance of escape, it’s one on one combat with you and a guardian. In the wild you have this possibility of escape (Even though it probably doesn’t seem like it.) And also, the way the two of them move is very different. That’s important to the music I promise!  

In the wild, the larger guardians move sporadically, very quick, and often fire their lasers at seemingly random intervals. The music reflects this movement that you can’t really predict. Nothing is too telegraphed with these guardians. However, in shrines, guardians’ movement is very telegraphed. The way they move and attack almost seems like its set to a rhythm, so you can predict what they’re going to do. You can calculate how you’re going to fight against these guardians, unlike their larger brethren. But they still move very erratically, it’s almost like a type of stop motion.

It’s this movement that we’re going to be focusing on today. The shrine battle music directly reflects this visual. And it does so through a couple ways.

As always, let’s take a look at this through the eyes of composers and developers.

This music is structed is through something called asymmetrical time signature. Time signature in music is a way that the beat is divided overtime. A time signature of 4/4 is by far the most common and means that there’s four beats per measure (a measurement of music) and it’s divided evenly into a quarter note pulse. This is an incredibly simple definition, but hopefully it gets the idea across for those of you who need a background. Time signatures divided by 2 are generally easy for us to follow along and listen to. Our brains process this easily.

However, you can have other time signatures as well. 5/4 is similar to 4/4, but there’s five beats in a measure. It provides a kind of lopsided rhythm, that often seems kind of goofy, or can be used to add a bit of intensity. If you know the Mission Impossible theme, this would be an example of 5/4.

However, you can also have 5/8 or 7/8. This means that an eighth note would get the beat, which in general makes pieces have more movement than they would otherwise. It’s 7/8 we’re going to talk about here.

Because there’s 7 beats in a measure, we don’t feel this time evenly, even more so than 5/4 time. The way we feel this would actually be in beats of 3, with one beat being longer than the other two. This presents a very uneasy feeling because our brains don’t divide it evenly, and in listening to everyday music, we almost never encounter this. 7/8 time makes it very easy to provide seemingly random starting and stopping points in the music and rhythm.

However!

This isn’t the only thing that’s going on here. Another type of technique used in rhythm is known as mixed meter. Mixed meter is the act of changing the time signature to add to this uncertainty in rhythm. Something like 4/4-5/8-3/4-7/8-9/8 would be an example of mixed meter.

I’m probably hitting you with a lot of information all at once, so here’s a couple take aways right now for those of you who don’t know music.

·        Asymmetrical Time Signatures cause a feeling of irregularity

·        Mixed Meter causes even more feelings of irregularity

·        Combining the two can confuse your sense of rhythm

Now!

The time signature in this track can be pretty difficult to figure out. I spent a lot of time conducting through most of this piece, and it’s hard to find the beat. I finally settled on the first part being in 3/4 time, and the second half in 7/8, but there’s instances of mixed meter throughout in dealing with transitions. Throughout this though, the melody cuts in and out, transitions to other instruments and is accented by various sound effects constantly throughout this work. It’s very jerky music. It feels like it starts and stops a lot, even if ever so briefly. Because of this, you can’t really tell where the beat lies at all times unless you really really listen for it, but you can begin to predict the individual rhythms of the music. This rhythm directly mirrors the guardians in these fights. The jerky movements of the guardians directly correspond to the meticulously thought out rhythms of the music which mask the beat. It’s really incredible writing. But there’s more that’s done to accent this.

We previously talked a bit about sound design in the day time battle music. These were more traditional sound effects such as swords, birds and glitches. But we’re looking at different kinds of sounds this time.

One of the truly brilliant things about this track is how sound design is worked into the music, and it’s done so well it might be missed. You’ve got two main instruments playing the erratic melody. Piano, and then a synth. The piano is what we know, and still features our impressionistic lines.

You know, let’s just assume that piano is always going to represent Impressionism.

But the synth sounds…broken. It sounds sick. It sounds confused, and a little bit angry. It’s obviously a melodic synth sound, but I think that this synth is supposed to be a representation of what the guardians sound like themselves. Even though they’re machines, they’ve been made out to have somewhat of a personality to them through the lore. It would be weird if they didn’t make sounds outside of their high pitched laser whistles and scurrying feet. I’ve always assumed that the sound that accompanies the piano are the sounds the guardians make themselves. And let’s think about how these synths are presented. You hear a few sound effects, ones that we can assume the guardian to be making. And I’m sure they are! But the thing is, it’s not the guardian that’s making these sounds, the sounds are in the OST, away from the game, so they’re coming from the music itself. This instantly puts it in my mind that the noises from the guardians are built into the music itself.

But there’s more to this!

There’s one main melody that repeats throughout this track. It’s a very jerky melody, and one that has a complete melodic line. However, it’s broken up over the piano and the synth. It starts on the piano, and you hear two notes, right after this, the synth comes in with the next two notes almost echoing it. Sometimes the piano plays the following notes, other times the synth will continue. But the melody consistently trades off between piano and synth, even though the melodic line is one full idea by itself. Sometimes the synth sounds a bit different, somewhat muted. Almost like the guardians are speaking differently at times. These sounds further the idea to me that they’re being made by the guardians themselves as it adds a bit of variety to their voice.

This is some really cool stuff. Knowing that a lot of the sounds that you associate with the guardians are actually apart of the music, which are actually apart of the guardians.

That’s neat mumbo jumbo shit.

Along the way, there’s other sounds being made in the background, and various other instruments. A lot of these sounds to me simply add to the feel and keep the momentum up, while keeping the apprehensiveness alive. Eventually, there’s a second section that’s marked by a large rhythmic gesture in the rest of the instruments. This different section continues for a bit, before coming back to a similar albeit different melody to the beginning. The melody is being traded back and forth between the piano and guardian sounds. It’s important to note that this is in a way a different from of pointillism (See my first post in this series.) The trading of the melody between the piano and the sounds is a pointillistic technique dealing with instrument timbre and color.

So, in sum, the erratic movement of the guardians is directly reflected in the music. The feeling of the rhythm is created through asymmetrical asymmetrical time signatures, occasional mixed meter, and rhythm manipulation which never allows us to get an easy grasp of the beat even though we can know what’s coming next. Think of this in a similar way to how the guardians telegraph their attacks. There’s usually a couple stop motions before they attack, and all of their motions are in one solid direction. The sounds of the guardians are built into the music, which is a really cool way to build sound design into music.

While this track isn’t Impressionism inherently, I still think it holds Impressionistic values because this track is describing the battle rather than heightening the battle.

So, what can we gain from this?

For Composers: Using asymmetrical meters is a great way to introduce uncomfortable situations. I personally think this works really well for boss battles. You often want boss battles to feel uneasy or quirky. Think about ways to mix up the feeling of meter not only through mixed meter, but through manipulating the rhythm so your players can’t find the beat.  Find ways to work creative sound effects into your music. It adds a bit of depth and realism that others might not think about. Set yourselves apart from others!

For Developers: Think of ways that you’d like to accentuate characters or enemies through music. You don’t always have to play it normal or safe. Direct your composers towards asymmetrical or mixed meters to create a feeling of uneasiness. Remember that while sound design and music are different, music is composed of sounds. Find ways to make your game stand out!

Next up, we’re focusing on a pair of tracks that are pretty similar. It’s a two for one deal that’s dragging us back into the depths of Minimalism and Impressionism.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis Day 3: Shrine

From battle music to puzzle music. Let’s dive deep into the shrines today! Now with examples of the music we’re talking about. No idea why I wasn’t doing that earlier...

Track 4: Shrine

Genre: Chaconne

Featured Instruments: Synth, Strings, Organ, Bagpipes

Compositional Techniques: Repetition, Variation

Takeaways for Composers: Repetition can be used to either bring attention to ideas or remove attention. Experiment with unique instrument combinations to create sounds unique to the worlds you’re writing for.

Takeaways for Developers: Unique music can be created for the history or lore of your games’ world.

I’ve got thoughts ready to go for almost every post after this one, but to figure out what was really going on musically in the shrines, I had to listen a lot. This is one of the tracks in the game that I find to make sense in context but is hard to listen to on its own. So, before we do anything, let’s talk about how the piece is structured, starting with instrumentation.

We’ve got four main instruments in this piece: Synth, strings, organ and then bagpipes. These are the only four, and each one plays more or less a repeating line or idea.

In fact, there’s not much variation to this music at all. But it’s one of the longest on the OST, almost four minutes. Let’s talk about the structure of this piece.

We start with the synth, it plays one pattern in four different keys, shortly after this, strings come in playing a single held note. This quickly disappears, coming in again a couple repetitions later. Every so often the strings will come back in to accompany the synth, which…still hasn’t changed. It’s still doing the same thing.

The same thing as the beginning.

Just. Repeating.

Eventually the organ type instrument (I still don’t know exactly what it is) comes in as a bass instrument, providing some much-needed fullness to this sparse music. But then the same thing, it repeats similar figures, and isn’t always present. Finally, around a minute and a half or so, the final instrument enters. They’re a type of bagpipes, but they sing nicely above the repeating figures of the other instruments. The bagpipes also play very similar lines, but these ones will occasionally have slight differences. It’s clear from this that the bagpipes are our melody. Finally, near the end of the piece there’s a drastic change to the melody, and it’s like everything was released all at once before it transitions back to the beginning.

That’s the piece.

We did it.

Yay.

When I started looking for what to talk about for this post, that was my initial idea. I listened to it again and again, until I finally realized there’s a few facts that we need to focus on with this track.

1.      We’re in a shrine, solving puzzles.

2.      The music needs to be in the background.

3.      Shrines are historical locations in Hyrule.

Let’s talk about numbers 1 and 2 together. The sole purpose of the shrines is to provide dedicated locations for puzzles. Because of this, the music needs to fall to the subconscious so that the mind can focus on the puzzle at hand. Because of this, having something that repeats is a good way to get the music to the back of our mind. However, this is dangerous territory, because once we feature repetition, we risk auditory exhaustion. To do this effectively, a specific form of music is picked.

This is called a chaconne. Chaconnes are a form of music that feature a repeating harmonic figure overtime. If you listen to the very first four notes played by the synths, this stays uniform throughout the piece. It just repeats over and over again. They first introduce it by itself, then accent it with the held strings to keep our attention. By the time the organ comes in, our mind has been acclimated to this figure, and is able to shove the music to the background. All the while, the music is never invasive, it feels like it fits with the shrine perfectly. The piece reaches its height when the bagpipe enters, as there’s finally a bit more variation. But nothing really changes over time. It’s not until around minute 2 or so when all four instruments are constantly all in together. This is to give it a very gradual build up. If you think about the time it takes to complete a shrine, if you do it right, it should probably take about the length of the track. So, by the time you get near the end of the music, you should hopefully be near the end of the puzzle.

Unless you’re doing that spike one in DLC 2.

That one was awful. I died too many times, proving I’m bad.

But let’s take a closer look at number 3. This is something that might be ignored. Shrines are exactly what they’re named. Each is a shrine to an important Sheikah, who greets you when you come in. They’re historical places of a tribe who is now mostly gone. I think this is important to note. In listening to the sounds and the music in the shrines, they’re pretty different from the rest of the game. In fact, they’re very different.

Nothing changes enough for me to call it Minimalism, and we’re missing a lot of the defining factors of Impressionism. Also, the instrumentation is a little weird, not only for the soundtrack, but for music in general. Synths and strings are pretty normal for this sound track. But bagpipes? Bagpipes are an instrument that could be put in the world music category, or in the context of music history. And then I realized…

What if this is music that was written from a historical point of view? Not a musical history of heal life, but a musical history of Hyrule? Kakariko village, where we have the Shiekah is the one town where we get a strong world music influence, and the music is pretty different from the rest of the game, even the music from other towns. So, what if the shrine music was written to be the music of a lost culture?

Shrines are historical locations that obviously have a influence over Hyrule.

I’m not saying this as fact. I just find it something interesting to think about. There’s more ways to incorporate music history in our games than just reaching to older Earth civilizations.

Regardless, the point stands that the music in the shrines is repetitive because we’re solving puzzles. It’s music that’s meant to be accompany confusion, mental struggle and solution.

We achieve that in this case through instrumentation and through the form of chaconnes.

So, let’s break it down.

For Developers:

Think about how lore can be implemented into your games in new and different ways. Presenting originally composed “world” music in the context of your game’s unique cultures and history is something that can be explored much more.

For Composers:

Repetition is important. Learn how to bring attention of the player to the forefront or background through repetition. Experiment with different instrument combinations to create unique ensembles that could create a culturally appropriate style of music for the worlds that you’re working in.

Next up, we’re focusing on the other type of Shrine music. The guardian battles.

[kylydian]

Breath of the Wild Soundtrack Analysis Day 2: Battle (Day)

We started our journey into the Breath of the Wild soundtrack with music that was incredibly sparse, so moving on to the next track, we’re met with exactly the opposite.  

Time for Some battle music.

Track 3: Battle (Day)

Genre: Minimalism, Sound Design (WHAT?)

Featured Instruments: Piano, Orchestra, Marimba, Sound Effects

Compositional Techniques: Minimalism, Pointillism

Takeaways for Composers: Minimalism can be an effective style to draw music to the subconscious. Blending the worlds of Sound Design and Music can be more than just integrating sounds into music.

Takeaways for Developers: Music can be built in different ways than you might expect.

So. Battle music.

What would you normally think of for a Zelda game? Something huge? Something orchestral? Something upbeat? Exciting probably?

Check to all of these. We’ve got them all here. But instead of doing something similar, we’re presented with a breath (hah) of fresh air in the battle music style. I think it’s probably best to start our talk with minimalism. And to CLEAR UP SOME MISCONCEPTIONS AHHHHH!

One of the things I always hear about quiet background music is “I love it. It’s so minimalist.” The number of times I’ve heard this about Minecraft………

Let’s fix this. Minimalism in music is not equivalent to minimalism in the everyday world.

Minimalism is a 20th century classical music style that evolved after the more extreme expressionist and serialist movements. It started as a return to simplicity as certain composers thought the direction music was going in was much too complex.  Which…in my opinion…it was. The primary minimalist composers, Steve Reich, John Adams, Terry Riley and Philip Glass created a movement that many love but is defined by repetition.

In a nutshell, Minimalism is music that evolves from one thing into another overtime. Most minimalist music starts with a repeating figure, or an idea that doesn’t change after many repetitions. And eventually, just when you get tired of it, something changes. It’s an incredibly minor change, so small that the only reason you notice it is because it’s finally something different. This change will plug along until your mind says “kay got it” and something changes again. 

This happens again and again and eventually you end up with something entirely different from how it began. However, heavy repetition is always present in Minimalist music. The monotony can be broken up by melody changes, harmony changes, instrument additions/subtractions or through honestly any means as long as it’s a minimal change. Here’s a rather blurry example in sheet music.

Notice how there’s a very subtle change? It might look like a lot, but really one note was added to the rhythm, and the interval changes on the down beat in measure three. An extra beat in the second measure brings us to that point. It’s a very subtle change.

So, you probably see where I’m going with this. The battle music in BoTW uses Minimalist ideas throughout to heighten the experience for the player. If you think about it, the battles in BoTW don’t really change over time, meaning that the minimalist style accents this well. We’re first greeted to this in the Marimba part that repeats a few times before changing and continues to play similar figures throughout. But we know that video game music can’t get stale, so they add a quick sting in the strings to add a feeling of apprehension. 

Overtime more instruments are introduced into the music, but the weird thing about them is that they all repeat the same or similar figures. The added interest in Minimalism here isn’t from notes changing, it’s from the texture changing overtime. When you’re tired, something comes in to take your mind off it. 

You’ve got piano, a bird call, strings, trumpets, a glitch sound, horn, marimba, percussion.

Wait a few of those didn’t sound right.

In addition, this piece is structured in two sections, so binary form, AB, AA’BB’ or however you’d like to write it. So, we’ve got a start on how to think of this conceptually. We know a few things.

·        Repetition is featured

·        Entrances of new instruments are highlighted but fall to the back of the                 mind

·        The texture increases overtime through intensity

·        The second section is a drastic enough shift from the first

The sounds introduced overtime play off each other and create a unique rhythm that’s constantly pushing forward. They compliment each other in different ways, but nothing ever sounds out of place. 

The second section of the piece is quite a bit different. There’s a huge flourish, and the difference is immediately marked by the strings that feel as if they’re rocking back and forth while moving forward. This is the only line that the strings play in the second part, and it never changes keys, or changes notes. Just a simple moving line that has a rhythm that feels like it’s fighting itself. I would even say that it musically reminds me of two people in a sword fight, taking turns between attacking and guarding.

See where I’m about to go with this?

Let’s get meta.

So, for our second section we’ve got our repeating figure, meaning we’re obviously still in Minimalist style, and we still have instruments being introduced overtime, and repeating textures in the background. A lot of the instruments make sense, for instance the rip on the horns. Horns are instruments that have throughout history been associated with battle, and the bokoblins play a horn when they first see you to call everyone to battle.

So even the music knows that this is battle music. Granted the horn is played in the last part of the track, which will eventually loop back to the first section, but it too never changes, and is a minimalist addition to the strings, piano, singular sword scrape, and marimba and movement that’s happening around it.

Wait…sword scrape?

Oh yeah. Around the midway point through this track there’s a sword scrape sound. It sounds as if it was made by scraping two knives against each other, but it’s definitely meant to be a sword scrape. There’s only one of them, so that’s pretty cool.

This brings me to the next point. Sound design is extremely prevalent in this track. Instruments used are very traditional, except for the few sound effects. There’s a glitch sound effect used right from the beginning that gives it a feeling of uneasiness right from the get go. Overtime, a bird call is introduced as well, and these are part of the minimalist texture, but they’re pretty easy to miss or ignore because they aren’t prominent like the other instruments. 

In the middle section we get that one sword scrape. By the time you reach this point in the track, you should be well in the thick of battle, and the sword scrape sound is obviously meant to represent that. But it’s gone so fast that you may have never noticed it.

But honestly, I would even argue that the sound design in this track goes farther than traditional sound design.

In one of my first posts, I made the statement that sound possesses musical qualities, but is not in and of itself music.

You know how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares?

All music is sound, but all sounds are not music.

Obviously, all sounds can be included to be music, but I think you’re probably following me at this point.

So, I would argue that although this is a traditional music track, it could be considered a sound design track as well. If you think about the way minimalism is structured in this music with the addition of instruments over time, you’re changing the feel with sound. 

The instruments used are obviously carefully selected, proof of this being in the glitch, bird call and sword scrape. Glitch representing nervousness, bird representing the open world, and sword scrape representing battle.

Because of this, I think it’s safe to conclude that the other instruments were picked because of their sound. Marimba is a really common instrument in game music (Hey Kirkhope!) but I wouldn’t say that it’s normally an instrument that’s associated with battle. When you think of percussion instruments you’d think of other things first, and probably even other mallet percussion first. Meaning that right from the go, Marimba was selected because of the sound, register it can play in, and wood timbre. 

The sting of the orchestra also reflects this. It was used for the effect, not for the pitches. Strings are really good at stinging notes. They’re probably some of the best at doing it without being over bearing. Piano? Well, the whole OST features piano, and if you listen closely, the Piano lines are glimpses of our boy Impressionism.

Need more proof? The horn is a sound that’s associated with battle, and it only plays ripping glissandos. That’s used for the sound, not the notes.

Because of this, it could be argued that instruments and music are being used as both sound design and music.

As composers, we’re probably somewhat familiar with making music out of sound effects, but I’d bet that not many of us have thought about making sound design out of music.

This music does some awesome things.

Let’s break it down.

For Composers:

Minimalism is a style that’s often ignored in video games. Picking minimalism for scenes that are repetitive or feature action is probably a good choice, because minimalism can quickly fall to the back of the mind despite being repetitive. It shouldn’t be too overbearing.

We all know that music can be made from sound design, but in a similar sense, approaching music with the perspective of a sound designer can help us blend the worlds even further to create truly unique music.

For Developers:

Don’t always rely on what you know to be good. The best way to make something stand out is to use techniques that people might not be familiar with. This track illustrates this perfectly through the concept of battle music.

This is personally one of my favorite tracks on the OST. There’s a lot that can be gained from it, and I could probably talk about all the specifics of it in depth for hours. But there’s more to talk about, and I’m not publishing a novel here. I’m here to help you hear the difference.

As always, stay awesome guys. We’ll be looking at some shrine music next!