Music in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, part four
[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four]
This post, the last in the current series, comes in two parts.
First, some trends I’ve found while analyzing the twelve ocarina songs, along with a few miscellaneous observations that didn’t fit in anywhere else:
- Seven of the twelve songs use D as their tonic — “Epona’s Song” and “Prelude of Light” are in D major, while “Song of Storms,” “Song of Time,” “Serenade of Water,” “Requiem of Spirit,” and “Bolero of Fire” are all in D minor or D Dorian.
- Three songs use tonics that are not part of the five-note trigger motive palette (D, F, A, B, D): “Zelda’s Lullaby” (G major), “Saria’s Song” (C major), and “Minuet of Forest” (E minor).
- The other two songs are special cases. “Nocturne of Shadow” has no functional triadic harmony until the end, when it suddenly cadences in D♭ major. “Sun’s Song” is never harmonized and has no obvious tonic.
- All six of the warp songs end on major chords, despite the fact that only one of them (”Prelude of Light”) is actually in a major key. The others use what’s called a Picardy third to create a major ending to a minor piece.
- “Prelude of Light” is the only song that doesn’t end on a triad. (It ends on a major seventh chord.)
- Five songs have trigger motives consisting entirely of the pitches in a D minor triad (D-F-A): “Sun’s Song,” “Song of Storms,” “Song of Time,” “Requiem of Spirit,” and “Bolero of Fire.” Of these, “Sun’s Song” is the only one that isn’t actually harmonized in a D minor mode (owing to the fact that it’s not harmonized at all).
- The Lon Lon Ranch theme and the Hyrule Castle Courtyard theme, based on “Epona’s Song” and “Zelda’s Lullaby” respectively, are the only pieces of the twelve that modulate.
- The guitar part in the Lon Lon Ranch theme is swung but the vocal part is not, so the two don’t quite match up. This sort of rhythmic clash has occasionally been exploited in popular music; see, for example, “Girl” by The Beatles. Also, the Lon Lon Ranch theme is the only place swung eighth notes are found in the entire game.
- Even though it’s in the key of G major, the Hyrule Castle Courtyard theme only actually has one G major chord — and even then it’s during the modulatory C major section, so it’s functioning as a dominant. The piece therefore has the odd distinction of never using its tonic chord “normally.”
Second, a bit about the in-game ocarina as an instrument.
As you’ve probably noticed, the music in Ocarina of Time is all synthesized, meaning that the sounds are all generated by the game and not recordings of actual musicians. (If you haven’t noticed, go back and listen to the “voice” in the Lon Lon Ranch theme again.) As it turns out, whoever designed the in-game ocarina had a little fun blurring the line between electronic and real instruments.
Below is a picture of the joystick on my Korg DW-6000 analog snythesizer:
Moving this joystick left or right bends the pitch of the note(s) you’re playing; moving it up triggers an oscillator, and moving it down triggers a filter.
Flip the x and y axes and you’re pretty close to the in-game ocarina’s “secret” controls. While playing the ocarina, up and down gives you pitch bend, while side to side gives you a vibrato-like oscillator. Both, to my ear, sound hilariously exaggerated and inappropriate for an ocarina. It’s a great Easter egg, and even better when one considers the software synthesizer that’s actually creating the sound.
The addition of pitch bend, of course, has another implication — even though I’ve made a big deal out of the five notes that correspond to the controller buttons, it’s actually possible to play other ones. The joystick can raise or lower the pitch by a whole step;1 similarly, the Z and R buttons, respectively, will raise or lower the pitch by a half step. Combining these two features gives you all the notes in between the five default ones, for a total of one and a half octaves:
There’s not any practical use for this, of course. To be honest, it’s tedious enough that there’s barely an impractical use for it either, but that hasn’t stopped anyone…
I hope you’ve all enjoyed this series. I’ll be back with more music analysis soon.
- Actually, it doesn’t quite go a full whole step, so the pitch bend will always put you slightly out of tune. C’est la vie.
Wow, that link to instructions on playing full songs on the Ocarina is pretty handy.
All I ever used to use the “secret controls” for were impromptu remixes of the original tunes - I seem to recall that you could apply them to the trigger motifs and even though horribly out of tune it would recognise the song (unless I am mistaken.)
I also seem to recall that you could program the Scarecrows song to include these note modifiers, which was always fun for a laugh - composing like Schoenberg before I’d ever heard any of his music. ;-)
Are you going to talk about the scarecrows song? Just the fact that you *could* write your own (very basic) song was/is pretty amazing - I’m a huge fan of in game music performance, and I’ve been meaning to check out LotR Online for a long time because one of the few things I heard about it when it first came out was that you could (apparently) just break out the musical instruments and jam some. Online ‘jamming’ is kinda the ‘holy grail’ for a lot of people, and I’ve seen quite a few poor implementations of the idea.
*sigh* So that’s all the music theory and stuff then? It was fun while it lasted *unsubscribes from CruiseElroy.net* j/k
Keep up the excellent standard, Mr Bruno.
Fascinating discussion here. One of my less musical friends linked me to this place. I don’t yes understand half of what the notation you are using means! I will eventually be able to come back and give a comment other than just saying how wonderful what you have done is!
Keep up the great work.
Ben: As you might have noticed, a bunch of commenters have asked if I’ll continue with the Ocarina music analysis. So no, nothing on Scarecrow for now, but don’t be surprised to see a part five pop up in the future. ;) Thanks again for all your comments throughout this project.
Rose: Thanks! I appreciate the comment, and I’m glad that musical people are finding the posts. The intersection of gamers and music theorists is larger than I had anticipated!
I’ve been following your series with great interest. Thanks a lot for putting the time in - it’s been fascinating.
I do have something interesting to add on the Lon Lon Ranch swung/straight issue, though. I’m actually not convinced that the vocal in ‘Girl’ isn’t swung, or at least, that Lennon makes heavy use of triplets and quite slurred phrasing to cover it over to the point of irrelevancy. Second, while the vocal in the game version of Lon Lon Ranch is clearly straight, the recording of it on the Hyrule Symphony release (which Kondo participated in, I believe) is swung. That begs the question - perhaps the primitive ‘voice’ synth wasn’t capable of swinging it?
Hi Daniel. Thanks for your kind words, and for stopping by the site.
I should have gone into more detail about “Girl.” You’re right that the vocals are swung for most of the song. I was thinking specifically about the bridge, where the swing in John’s lead vocal part (”She’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there…”) clashes with the straight eighths in the background vocals (”tit tit tit tit…”). To my ear, that part has the same “swung eighths vs straight eighths” clash as the Lon Lon Ranch theme.
As for your second point, I hadn’t thought to consider the live symphonic versions of the pieces and it’s interesting that they decided to change the part. I doubt there was a technical issue involved, though — the game is almost certainly controlling the music through MIDI or something similar, so it shouldn’t be any harder to trigger a note-on message for one patch over another. I don’t have any other ideas, though…it could be that Kondo just decided later on it sounded better without the rhythmic clash. He’s made that sort of adjustment before — I’ve noticed, for example, that many live versions of the Super Mario Bros. theme have slightly altered rhythms. I might go more deeply into that someday.
Thanks again for your comments!
Wow! Very nice! I am not much of a video game fan, but I am a classical oboist, and bassoonist. My nephew was playing the game and I heard the backround music for the Gerudo Valley, it was great! I hope you post something about that in the future!
Hi Matthew! Glad you enjoyed the posts. I’ve gotten a lot of requests for analysis of other Ocarina of Time music, especially the Gerudo Valley theme, so there will probably be more of this in the future. In the meantime, there are a bunch of other music posts on the site that you might enjoy.
Thanks for coming by!
Dan,
I’ve been playing piano and OoT for about the same period of time, and all these years later I’m still doing both. Your posts (which I found whilst scouring the internet for a good version of the Windmill/Song of Storms theme) have sparked my interest in music theory after having not payed much attention to the field in some time. I’ve nothing that important to add that hasn’t already been touched upon by you or others, so cheers!
That’s awesome, Frankie. It’s incredibly rewarding to hear that these posts have not just been enjoyable, but actually gotten people interested in music theory. I’m kicking around ideas in my head for how to capitalize on that interest — maybe with pseudo-lessons based on music from video games, or something like that. I hope you’ll stick around and give me your feedback!