1-up jingles
June 10, 2008
First things first: a mission statement.
So far my music posts have been straight-up theoretical analysis. While I think there’s a lot to be learned from studying music on its own terms, context is important also. And since this is purportedly a blog about video games, I’d like to move beyond the self-indulgent theory posts and provide something more topical. In other words, I’ll keep doing the hardcore analysis, but I’d also like to talk about why game music matters.
All right. With that said, let’s look at that most important category of video game music: the 1-up jingle.
Here’s a brief audio sample of a Super Mario Bros. play session. The player earns a 1-up at the seven-second mark.
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Iconic as it is, the Mario 1-up jingle is pretty unremarkable. Its total length is only a second, and it’s not exactly attention-grabbing. Here, for example, it’s sandwiched between the “emerging power-up” noise (5.5 s) and the “Super Mario got hurt” noise (9.5 s), and none of the three sounds stands out as the most important one. Sonically speaking, earning a 1-up in Super Mario Bros. is a fairly pedestrian event.
Now listen to this sample of a Sonic the Hedgehog play session.
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The attentive listener may have noticed the player earning a 1-up at the five-second mark.
Not only does this jingle silence the rest of the game’s audio, but features a dramatic horn and timpani fanfare that lasts for three and a half seconds. Sonic doesn’t want to just draw your attention to the 1-up; it wants to herald a momentous occasion.
The cool thing is that the prominence of the 1-up sound is tied to the games’ design.
In Super Mario Bros., extra lives are relatively easy to come by. Your coins automatically carry over from one level to the next, so collecting 100 of them is almost an inevitability; green 1-up mushrooms are hidden, but frequent. This is balanced, of course, by the fact that it’s also relatively easy to get Mario killed. Each individual life is not so important, and the subdued 1-up jingle reflects this.
In Sonic the Hedgehog, the dynamic is reversed. Since Sonic won’t die if he’s holding rings, a smart player will effectively have infinite hit points. On the other hand, 1-up item boxes are rare, and collecting 100 rings is difficult because it’s so easy to lose them. Extra lives are therefore more precious than in Super Mario Bros., so the jubilant fanfare that accompanies a 1-up is somewhat deserved.
13 comments
Ha! Pretentious theory posts FTW! If something is only interesting to 3 people on the entire internet, then so be it!
Great idea for a comparison – I was a Sonic kid more than a Mario one, so the Sonic sounds took me back to the 16 bit era – and your observations on the enmeshed nature of the sound design and the wider game design is spot on. I think this is the kind of thing that I am trying to do in my musical analysis of the music of Halo 2 – draw lines of parallel between design elements and musical elements.
Thanks for the thoughtful post – got me thinking!
by Ben Abraham on June 10, 2008 at 1:13 am #
Very interesting! I never had Sonic — does the death music also function differently from that in Mario? My curiosity is both personal and professional, as I’m writing a Ph.D. dissertation about the music of death in video games.
Gotta play Sonic!!
by Peter on June 10, 2008 at 12:45 pm #
The death “music” in Sonic is actually just one note — a bassy “bonk” that could be a sound effect from a cartoon. To be honest, I didn’t put as much stock in the death noise — it doesn’t need to convey any information, since the player is going to notice if his character dies anyway.
I’m curious to hear your ideas here; if you’re writing a dissertation on the subject, there’s probably more to it than that. ;)
by Dan Bruno on June 11, 2008 at 12:32 am #
You say that the Mario sound is “not exactly attention-grabbing”, which understates it. I think it is deliberately put in the background. It has a fundamentally different quality to the other noises of the game; they are “fat” sounds, while the 1-up is “thin”. It’s trying to get out of your way, so that you can keep playing. It’s something that you might want to know about, but you don’t want it to distract you from the sequence of jumps you need to make.
by Red Mozzie on June 11, 2008 at 4:08 am #
I think the right words for what I’m trying to say are these:
Most of the sounds in Mario sound like they are part of the game world. This includes things like the background music, jumping, collecting a coin, or going down a tube. But the 1-up noise is a system sound. It signifies that an administrative change has been made that does not directly affect the game world.
This fits the distinction you’ve drawn between Mario and Sonic. In Mario, getting an extra life is a routine matter, whereas in Sonic it’s an achievement that deserves fanfare — but it’s still not part of the game world, which is why the other sounds are paused while the player is congratulated.
by Red Mozzie on June 11, 2008 at 4:13 am #
Interesting post, Red Mozzie. If I’m reading you correctly, your distinction is homologous to the one between diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in film.
The question for me then becomes: where should we draw the line? Are we to believe, for example, that grabbing a coin or descending a pipe actually makes a sound in the Mario universe, or are those noises also just to alert the player?
If you’ve got some free time, I recommend looking at Zach Whalen’s “Play Along — An Approach to Videogame Music” (thanks, Ben, for that link). Whalen talks about how video games employ “mickeymousing,” a synchronization between sound effects and actions/objects to emphasize kinesthetic motion and make the world feel more “alive.” Maybe a better way to understand your distinction is that the Sonic 1-up fanfare is not a mickeymoused sound effect, whereas the other sounds in the game are.
Thanks for the comments!
by Dan Bruno on June 11, 2008 at 11:06 am #
Yeah, that Zach Whalen article is great! It’s condensed from his master’s thesis, which is also worth a read.
I completely agree, Dan — diegesis in games is tricky, probably even more so than in film. Not only do you have the game’s world and the “system sounds” area, but it’s also worth considering the sounds created by the controller, the game system, and the player. (If this seems like pointless academicization, think about an analysis of Guitar Hero or DDR that ignored the sounds of the strum bar or the pad.)
The dissertation is trying to cover lots of interactions between death and music in games, the most obvious of which is the sort of “death jingle” you hear in Mario. Certainly conveying information is only a small part of its role, as you said. I think it’s more interesting for how it frames that information — the way Mario games have a sort of “Better luck next time!” lightness, and something like Resident Evil really lays it on thick: “YOU ARE DEAD.” One of the fundamental aspects of games is their replayability, and when player failure is represented as death, that creates interesting musical situations. And I think it’s fascinating that death jingles are so easily overlooked, when they’re right at the heart of what makes game music unusual. Part of the problem is that nobody wants to hear them: if you’re playing the game, you’re trying to avoid them! I think another part of the problem is that they come right at the moment when the player’s immersion in the game world breaks off, and (I suspect) at a moment of high emotional arousal. So they’re easily ignored.
So that’s the gist of the opening chapter (the written version has a lot more academic gibberish — I mean, rich context). Another chapter deals with what I’m provisionally calling “narrative death” in games, when a character dies as part of the story. Games have to try very hard to distinguish this kind of death from regular, reversible death, and I think this comes through in the musical strategies as well as the stories. I’m also going to talk about death of enemies and death in multiplayer games, but those parts are barely even sketched out at this point.
It may be tough to sell this to a crowd of music theorists, since it leans so much on interpretation. But I’ll back it up with analysis as much as possible, and at the very least, it will be an interesting read.
by Peter on June 11, 2008 at 12:31 pm #
I like that you’re concerned about having enough musical analysis to balance your interpretation, and I’m worried I have the opposite problem here. :) I guess that’s what happens when you write for theorists, though.
In any case, I’m hooked — that sounds like it’s going to be fascinating. I look forward to hearing more as you progress.
by Dan Bruno on June 11, 2008 at 1:14 pm #
I don’t think it’s quite the same as diegetic sounds — unless we think we’re listening along to Mario’s iPod, there’s no way to get the music into that framework.
The most similar sound in Mario to the 1-up is the “pause” sound. It’s another high-pitched chime that I think has the same “system sound” character.
I’ll have a look at the article you’ve referred to when I get a chance, but based on your nutshell summary I think that’s right.
by Red Mozzie on June 11, 2008 at 5:58 pm #
Oh Peter, dear, dear Peter! You mean to tell me there are *actually* other people out there writing in an academic context about music in games?! I thought we didn’t exist, let alone that I’d ever meet any… =P
Out of scholoarly interest, do you have a blog or any way for me to read that draft of your first chapter? I’m working on a slightly different Thesis, but I’d still love to read anything you’ve written so far.
Feel free to check out what I’m working on via my blog, clickable name link above. In short I’m only doing an undergraduate degree honours thesis, but I’m looking at the music of Halo 2 and trying to find cool things about how Marty O’Donnel, et al. use music in that game.
Cheers,
by Ben Abraham on June 11, 2008 at 7:56 pm #
Hi Dan,
Came this way through the VGC. Read this post, am already hooked. What a brilliant observation, I love it. I’ll be back for more, I’m sure!
by shoinan on January 25, 2009 at 11:25 pm #
What about the extended one-up sounds, though?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INkXVvi-7XQ
by Merdan on July 10, 2009 at 5:26 pm #
On the subject of death music, the death tune that stays with me the most is that from Shadow of the Beast II on the Amiga. After an interminable wait for it to load from floppy, possibly after a disc swap, you were greeted by a picture of your guy sprawled on the ground with a beam of pink light blazing out of him towards the heavens, and this mournful, wailing flute/guitar piece that almost justified the loadtime. (“Almost justified the loadtime” pretty much summed up the experience of the whole Beast trilogy, really.)
by Egypt Urnash on January 30, 2010 at 7:26 am #