Irregular meter in video games
[Part one | Part two]
6/4 — One On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness piece added. (Hi, Brainy Gamer readers!)
5/20 — Two Road Rash 3 pieces added.
5/15 — Two Jet Force Gemini pieces added.
Most music theory nerds I know have a certain musical feature that really gets them excited — an unusual harmonic progression, a favorite chord, a particular rhythmic figure. For me, that feature is irregular meter. In my experience irregular meter is fairly uncommon in video game soundtracks, so I thought I’d collect what few examples I’ve come across here.
Remember the race results screen in Mario Kart 64? Most likely you skipped past it with barely a glance at the scoreboard, but if you stuck around for a moment you’d have heard this gem from composer Kenta Nagata:
Despite being in 11/8, I think this rhythm feels pretty natural. Kudos to Nagata for smoothing over the strange time signature.
Here’s something neat — take a look at this bass part from the Grammy-winning “Almost 12,” a piece by modern jazz quartet Béla Fleck and the Flecktones:
Notice anything? Aside from the halved time values, it’s metrically identical to the Kart 64 bassline — an eleven-beat pattern subdivided as 2+2+3+2+2. Even the rhythm is the same. (”Almost 12,” incidentally, was released about a year after Mario Kart 64. Maybe the Flecktones are Nintendo fans.)
The earliest example I could find of irregular meter in a video game is the final battle music from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, composed by Koji Kondo:
Nothing too complicated here. The bass arpeggio is fast and perhaps a bit hard to follow, but the percussion and the chords of stacked fourths reinforce the time signature pretty strongly.
In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Kondo wrote a similar piece for the game’s penultimate battle (Link versus Ganondorf):
While this piece uses many of the same musical ideas as the Link to the Past one — the fast bass arpeggio, the descending melodic contour, the quartal harmonization — the rhythm has changed from merely “quirky” to “murderously complicated.” I had to slow down the tempo in an audio editor just to figure out what was going on.
In a nutshell, the bass’s 3+3+3+3+2 pattern has been replaced by the decidedly spicier 3+3+3+2+2+3+3+2+2. I’ve notated that as alternating 13- and 10-beat measures. Even better, the chords sometimes cut across those subdivisions (m. 3, 7), and the chorus’s part (m. 10ff.) seems to ignore the meter altogether. Good luck trying to perform this one!
My final example, also from Ocarina of Time, is the “fairy flying” theme from the beginning of the game:
The two main sections are a 13/16 part (subdivided as 3+3+3+2+2) and a 10/16 part (subdivided as 2+3+2+3). Thankfully the bass and string parts actually reinforce the meter here, so it’s pretty easy to hear where the beats fall. Heck, compared to that Ganondorf battle theme it’s downright elementary.
That’s all I’ve got for now. If you know more of video game pieces with irregular meter, I’d love to hear from you.
5/15 update: Thanks to a tip from Daniel in the comments, I’ve got two more irregular meter pieces for you. Both are from the Jet Force Gemini soundtrack, composed by Robin Beanland and Graeme Norgate.
Here’s a snip from the Water Ruins theme:
Since the rhythmic pattern is so long (30 beats), the metric subdivision isn’t particularly instructive here. (It’s 2+2+2+3+2+2+2+3+2+2+2+3+2, if you’re curious.) I think the easiest way to understand it is “7/8 with a 2+2+3 subdivision, and every fourth measure has an extra two beats tacked on.” (Tacking on extra beats every so often, incidentally, is another one of my favorite musical features.) For what it’s worth, this piece is big on mixing meters; immediately following the part I transcribed is a section in plain 7/8 (3+2+2, no funny business), and shortly thereafter is standard 4/4.
The boss battle theme has a similar case of rhythmic schizophrenia. This chunk falls between a duple 6/4 section and a triple 9/16 section (whose beginning I included; see mm. 13-14).
Yeesh. I slowed that one down in the audio editor too, if you were wondering.
Here we have a 24-beat pattern which subdivides as (deep breath) 2+2+2+3+2+2+2+3+2+2+2. More simply, we might call it “9/16 with a 2-2-2-3 subdivision, and every third measure loses the last three beats.” Even that’s a bit of a mess, but if you drum your fingers along with the piece you should be able to get the hang of it. At least the melodic line has the decency to use a reasonable rhythm, unlike the Ocarina of Time Ganondorf battle theme.
5/20 update: Two more quick examples for you, from the 1995 Genesis title Road Rash 3. The game’s distinctive heavy metal soundtrack was composed by Don Veca.
Here’s a snip from the Italy race background music:
It’s fast, but fairly simple. Note that the pattern can also be written in 21/8 without triplets if that’s your thing.
Here’s a snip the title screen track, which doubles as the Australia race background music:
This one is mostly in straight 4/4, actually, but every so often it skips a beat and briefly feels like 7/4 instead. This effect is most pronounced in measures 11-14 of the transcription.
6/4 update: Below is a snip from the splash screen menu music for Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, composed by Jeff Tymoschuk:
A five-beat pattern subdivided as 3+2 is pretty standard fare; in fact, that’s the metric basis for Paul Desmond’s “Take Five,” perhaps the most famous irregularly metered piece of all time. So why does this one sound a bit odd?
It’s because of the quarter note pulse in the middle staff. It stretches over the barlines and also shifts its position halfway through the transcription. (Look at where the quarter notes land in measures 1-4, as opposed to in measures 5-8.) The upshot is that the meter is ever so slightly concealed, giving the piece a layer of rhythmic ambiguity.
Fascinating. I’ve always felt that the Ganon battle from Ocarina was a bit rhythmically ‘off’, but never considered that it would be so oddly metered.
Unfortunately, I think that such uniqueness in videogame music is being replaced and superseded by more ‘filmic’ (read: Hans Zimmer-ic) scores like you’ll find in Call of Duty, Mass Effect (though don’t get me wrong - the Vangelis-like electronic sections were great, but the orchestral scoring was reasonably unimaginative, save a few sections), and even to an extent Mario Galaxy (though that was a great, great score).
If you can get hold of Robin Beanland’s soundtrack for Jet Force Gemini you might find some irregular meter, from memory. The music on the whole is very good, and to go back on what I’ve just said, very good in a filmic manner (though it was a little more surprising, back in the N64 days to get a filmic score). Nonetheless, there is definitely some interesting rhythm in there, though I’d have to give it another listen to really see if it’s the meter or just the rhythms…
I don’t think there’s necessarily a correlation between “filmic” scores and uniqueness — nor, as you point out, between filmic scores and quality, as there are plenty of great orchestral scores. Irregular meter is just rare across the board, so it’s tough to find outside of specialized genres like math rock or contemporary jazz.
Thanks for the Jet Force Gemini recommendation. I’ll check out the soundtrack and report back in a day or two with any findings. :)
I agree, but I do think that there is something about MIDI that enables, or perhaps forces a composer to be more adventurous. Would an orchestral composer really have written a calypso-tinged theme for an Italian Plumber, for instance?
On a baser level, I think the poor quality of MIDI simply means that composers have to work in different ways, one of which is finding interesting rhythms to make unexciting tones more interesting.
Well, there are two different issues here — music genre and sound technology.
I consider filmic music as a genre (roughly homologous to, say, popular classical music) that’s independent of the technology used to generate the sound. I’ve been listening to the Jet Force Gemini soundtrack, for example, and it’s certainly in filmic even though the music is sequenced. On the other hand, a game like Sonic Adventure uses (some) real instruments, but I would never think of it as having a filmic score. The Super Mario Galaxy score, meanwhile, is a mix of genres and sound technologies. In short, you can have a filmic score with real instruments or fake instruments, just as with any other genre of music.
With that said, there is definitely a point to be made about restriction breeding creativity — I argued the same thing in my Ocarina of Time music series. I haven’t thought much about whether MIDI encourages rhythmic ingenuity, but it might be an interesting avenue of inquiry.
PS: By my ear, Jet Force Gemini has at least three pieces in irregular meter. Your musical memory is impressive! I’ll work up some transcriptions and sound clips when I get the chance.
The issue of realness and fakeness is of course becoming more and more diluted as technology gets better at pretending to be real - I suspect that a large amount of Hans Zimmer and other Media Ventures expatriates’ scores in recent years have contained large electronic ‘augmentations’ that your average listener wouldn’t pick up on as not being the real thing. Hell, I can re-orchestrate something here, in my bedroom and have it sound like a close cousin to the actual recording, and I don’t have the resources or funds that they do.
Mario Galaxy is definitely an interesting one. I would call it primarily an orchestral score, simply because in contrast to almost all other Nintendo scores (or is it just plain out *all* previous Nintendo scores?) it’s actually got the real deal in there somewhere. But nonetheless, you’re quite correct that it strongly features some electronics and the occasional non-orchestral instrument, like the Sitar in ‘Dusty Dune Galaxy’ or the all-round unusual instrumentation of ‘Honeyhive Galaxy’. Nonetheless I would have paid an extraordinary sum to simply be able to listen to ‘Gusty Garden Galaxy’ and ‘Battlerock Galaxy’ whenever I needed to. Great pieces.
Well, that was quite a tangent. Glad to hear Jet Force Gemini worked out, I was worried I might have misremembered! Very interested to hear what you have to say on the topic.
You’re right - everyone does have a favourite musical feature. ^_^ I can’t decide if mine’s mixed metres, a la The Pyramid Song by Radiohead, or chromatic excursions in a generally diatonic piece. Can I have 2 please? =P
The mid boggles at how you could transcribe that ganondorf battle track - truly a heroic effort, sir.
I can’t think of any games that use irregular metre, however a number of themes from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica uses irregular metre - the prologue theme is either Complex or Mixed, and the music that plays over the credits has something similar, however that might actually be a 3-against-4 pattern, as I can definitely feel the 3 beats to a bar grouping in that one.
Daniel: To be clear, I don’t have any problem with so-called “fake” instruments like MIDI and synth sounds, and I don’t consider Galaxy’s score “orchestral” just because it’s performed by an actual orchestra — it’s the style of the pieces (some of them, anyway) that earns that designation. I certainly like the sound of the live instruments, but the important thing for me is always the quality of the composition. If Galaxy had the same music but with synthesized sounds — like those found in Twilight Princess, for example — I’d still call it orchestral, and I’d still enjoy the score.
Ben: Yeah, there are a bunch of other musical features I enjoy too. For example, I get a kick out of minor subdominant chords for some reason. I point them out to people when they go by on the radio. :)
The Ganondorf track was pretty annoying. Slowing the track down helped, but the chorus part is so disconnected from the bassline that it sounds metrically independent. Also the attack on that choral sound is so soft that it’s difficult to tell exactly when the notes start (especially at slower speeds), but I think I got pretty close. (I see that I forgot to do my snazzy custom beaming in a couple of measures, though — I’ll fix that up in a bit. [fixed now -- ed.])
Re: the “Australian” Race Theme - yyeeeap. That’s what it sounds like when I drive down the M4 Motorway on a motorbike, swingin’ a chain, just swingin’ a chain.
Good work on digging up these old Road Rash Fossils - I have #2 I believe, and if I had to remember *anything* about the chiptune music form it, I’d probably come up empty handed. It’s pretty awesome what they could do with a few oscillators, some white noise and a filter.
Very interesting! Great transcriptions too. I don’t have the soundtracks with me to verify, but I think most of the PSX-era Final Fantasy games have odd-metered battle themes.
The Mario Kart example is particularly interesting. I always thought of irregular meter in games as a device for increasing tension, but that track is both musically and “functionally” one of the least tense things in the game. Huh.
Thanks for the tip, Peter. I’ll scrounge up some Final Fantasy soundtracks and see if there’s anything worth transcribing.
You’re right that irregular meter is often used to evoke tension, whether it’s in the Zelda battle themes I transcribed above or in Stravinsky. On the other hand, it’s possible to avoid that connotation if the composer “smooths out” the time signature to make it sound less irregular. The Mario Kart 64 and Béla Fleck pieces in the post are good examples, as are “Take Five” from the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible theme. While an attentive listener will recognize the irregularity in those pieces, many people won’t notice anything unusual.
…of course, while the Mission: Impossible theme is a good example of smoothing out a time signature, it is intended to evoke tension. :)
If you haven’t had the chance to try it yet, the indie title ‘Immortal Defense’ has some very interesting breaks in music and themes. Plus it was composed by the designers Dad, which makes the whole thing all the more surprising. Here’s a link to the game where you can get the free demo:
http://studioeres.com/immortal/
The soundtrack is also free and can be downloaded entirely here:
http://studioeres.com/forums/index.php?topic=210.msg1172;topicseen
It’s really worth a play. It’s one of the best plots I’ve seen in a video game, period.
Thanks for the recommendation, L.B. I’ve heard good things about Immortal Defense from a bunch of people now, so I’ll be sure to give it a shot.
I just combed through the soundtrack, and while it’s certainly interesting there’s unfortunately no irregular meter to be found. Thus, for our immediate purposes it will require no further analysis. :) I’m keeping it around, though. Perhaps one day!