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!

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.

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.

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.

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.])

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.

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.

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.