Irregular meter in video games, part two
June 7, 2008
[Part one | Part two | Part three]
7/9 — Three Final Fantasy IX pieces and one Chrono Trigger piece added.
6/22 — Three Final Fantasy VIII pieces added.
The first irregular meter post has gotten so many updates that I’m starting a new one. Thanks for all your suggestions!
On a tip from Peter I checked out the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VII, composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Here’s a snip from “Hurry Up!”:
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There’s a nice mix of four- and three-beat patterns here, somewhat reminiscent of the Road Rash 3 Australia theme in the last post.
Here’s “Cinco de Chocobo:”
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The obvious influence here is the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five,” composed by Paul Desmond.
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See what I mean? Same rhythm, similar harmony, crappier melody!
The neat thing about “Cinco de Chocobo” is that when it switches into 6/4, it actually feels less natural because the 5/4 rhythm is so strong.
Finally, here’s a very brief snip from “One-Winged Angel”:
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Just a little bit of 7/8 in a primarily 4/4 piece. A tiny section of irregular meter is actually one of the less interesting features of “One-Winged Angel,” but what the heck, right?
6/22 update: Moving right along, here’s a quick update on the pieces I’ve culled from Uematsu’s Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack.
Here’s the beginning of “Don’t be Afraid,” the battle theme:
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The piece continues in 5/4 throughout, mostly with the 3+3+2+2 eighth note subdivision.
This is the beginning of “Dead End”:
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Though it starts in 7/8, after four bars “Dead End” drops into 4/4 and never looks back. In this case the irregular intro is just an attention grabber — though certainly an effective one.
Last up is “Premonition,” which I want to discuss in a bit more detail. The piece features a recurring rhythmic figure that goes like this:
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Notice how each bar begins with two notes in the space of three beats, and ends with a straight eighth note rhythm that allows for some variation.
After that pattern is established, the figure changes:
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Pretty neat, right? The “rules” are the same as before, but now every other bar now has an extra beat; if you were expecting the earlier figure, this sounds unbalanced.
Finally, a bit further into the piece, we get this:
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The rhythmic figure’s malleable ending has already been introduced; now Uematsu has room to play with it even more. Here the variation makes it difficult to predict how many beats any given measure will have.
7/9 update: All right, let’s close the door on Uematsu (for now) with some pieces from Final Fantasy IX.
Here’s a snip from “Ambush Attack”:
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This is an easy one. The metric subdivision is a very slow 2+2+2+3, and I’ve beamed the eighth notes accordingly.
Here’s the beginning of “Feel My Blade”:
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I wrote the introductory rhythm in 5/4 with a caesura to emphasize its similarity to another famous 5/4 piece, Gustav Holst’s “Mars, The Bringer of War” from The Planets. Have a listen:
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As you can hear, it’s very nearly identical; the only significant difference is that the last two beats are swapped. Even though it’s a bit slower, it retains the same martial (ahem) feel as Holst’s piece.
Later on in “Feel My Blade,” we hear this lively little section:
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This one touches on a discussion I had with Peter down in the comments on the nature of irregular meter. If you add up the beats in the first four bars, it’ll come out to an even sixteen quarter notes — meaning that I could have simply transcribed the thing in 4/4. (After that, though, it gets a bit more complicated.)
So why am I calling this irregular if it can be written in common time? I’m just using my judgement, to be honest. Whereas a relatively simple subdivision like the 3+3+2 in Coldplay’s “Clocks” is easily understood in 4/4, I think the complexity and unpredictability of this rhythm makes it well-suited to a mixed meter transcription. (My conflation of mixed meter with irregular meter is a topic for another day.)
Here’s a snip from “Run!”:
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If “Feel My Blade” was inspired by “Mars,” “Run!” owes a debt to Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible theme:
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Of course, the 5/4 theme isn’t all that’s going on here. See that random measure of 7/8 (bar 12)? That has the effect of sounding like half a beat is missing — as though we were moving along in 4/4 and then had a measure of 3.5/4. Try tapping your foot to that part and you’ll see what I mean.
Skipping fractions of a beat is one of my favorite rhythmic tricks, and Uematsu seems to like it too. Take a look at this later section of “Run!”:
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The alternation between 15/16 and 4/4 is effectively removing a quarter of a beat, which is even more difficult to wrap your head around. Then, after a brief bit of insanity in 15, we’re home free. Piece of cake, right?
To close out this little Uematsu extravaganza, here’s the one and only irregularly-metered piece from Chrono Trigger. Most of Chrono Trigger‘s music was scored by Yasunori Mitsuda, but Uematsu contributed a couple of pieces, including “Closed Door”:
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Nothing too mind-bending here, but it’s neat how the arpeggios seem to move in double time.
Well, it seems that Nobuo Uematsu is the reigning kind of irregular meter in video game music, at least so far. As always, if you have other soundtracks you think I ought to look at, drop me a line. Thanks again to Peter for tipping me off to the PSX-era Final Fantasy games. See you all in part three!
24 comments
Well, now I know where my habit of using irregular meter comes from…
by the daniel on June 7, 2008 at 3:30 pm #
* sniff *
I miss FFVII… It basically *was* my gaming childhood for about 5 years. Thanks for pickin it up and running with the series.
FFVIII Has a song called ‘Don’t look back’ which I think might have had some irregular sections. Even if it didn’t, it’s still spine tingling if you’ve ever heard it in context. Fleeing from a giant Galbadian spider-robot that’s coming to kill you on your first ever SEED mission… one of the defining moments in the FF series, and only made better by the panic inducing score. =P
by Ben Abraham on June 7, 2008 at 9:50 pm #
I completely missed the Jet Force Gemini updates to your other post. Thanks, that was very interesting indeed.
Also, for the record, there are way too many Daniel/Dan’s on this blog. :p
by Daniel on June 8, 2008 at 1:06 am #
Hey, if it means more readers, I’ll take a whole town full of Dans. :)
Ben, I’ll be tackling Final Fantasy VIII and IX in updates, so stay tuned. If I remember correctly there’s a piece with irregular meter in Chrono Trigger too, so maybe I’ll just make this post the Nobuo Uematsu extravaganza.
by Dan Bruno on June 10, 2008 at 1:08 am #
Some of these Uematsu pieces raise the question of what makes meter “irregular.” Is it the time signature itself, or the rapid fluctuation among time signatures?
Some theorists (e.g., Richard Cohn) would say meter is irregular if it doesn’t factor evenly into twos and threes. For them, 5/4 is an irregular meter. If you break it into 2 3 or 3 2, that’s a pattern of rhythmic accent, not a meter by Cohn’s definition.
But there are lots of musicial traditions, particularly in West Africa and Central/Eastern Europe, that build meters up from additive units of two and three pulses (rather than dividing large time units as in traditional time signatures). So in these traditions a meter of 2 3 3 isn’t more “regular” than 2 3 2, just because it happens to add up to 8 instead of 7.
My liberal academic and political instincts push me toward the latter definition. And honestly, I find “Take 5″ way too rhythmically monotonous to call it irregular. (But one could chalk that up to overfamiliarity.) On the other hand, there is something fun and agile about odd, non-triple patterns that seems categorically different from “regular” meters. What do you think?
by Peter on June 11, 2008 at 12:00 pm #
I hear you, Peter. Rhythm is a surprisingly imperfect science, and there’s a lot of cultural baggage that comes with trying to define terms.
First, I should point out that the time signatures I used in my more complicated transcriptions are largely arbitrary. In the last post, for example, I could have written the Ocarina of Time Ganondorf battle theme in 23/16 instead of alternating between 13/16 and 10/16. I also could have transcribed the Jet Force Gemini battle music in 24/16 instead of a cycle of 9/16, 9/16, and 6/16. My fluctuation between time signatures is really just for the sake of score-reading convenience, and not because the rhythmic subdivision is inconsistent.
Anyway, these posts have been working from an assumption similar to Cohn’s: irregular meter is a mix of duple and triple pulses. You’re right that other musical cultures might not find such meters unusual (and “meter” is a Western concept anyway, as you point out), but our tools of musical analysis can still be useful. When I studied West African music, for example, we were given staff notation transcriptions chock full of polymeter and irrational rhythms. It wasn’t representative of how actual Ewes or Dagombas understood their music, but it grounded us enough to learn the music quickly, in a situation where learning by rote wasn’t practical. I suppose a little ethnocentrism is inevitable in that approach, but I personally find it pretty harmless.
by Dan Bruno on June 11, 2008 at 1:08 pm #
Yeah, I didn’t mean that as a gripe about ethnocentrism. I’m just frustrated with the concept of “metric irregularity” in general, since it so often seems misaligned with what we perceive as irregularity. This happens in both directions: some irregular pieces like “Take 5″ sound tediously regular, but some regularly-metered pieces push up against their meter in interesting ways.
One of my favorite rhythmic moments in FF7 is near the end of the game, in a march (I forget the title, but it’s something about the Shinra army). I wish I could transcribe it here. Basically it’s the Shinra theme, an ascending melodic minor scale. Half note on G, half note on A, then quarters up on B-flat, C, D, and E, but instead of F# on the downbeat there’s a dotted-quarter rest, and THEN the F# on a super loud chord in a new key. Here’s a bit of the Lilypond code, on the off chance that someone here can read it:
g2 a |
bes4 c d e |
r4. fis8->~ fis2 |
(It just occured to me that it’s a lot like what Mahler does in the middle of the finale to the 1st Symphony)
Anyway, it’s not actually a metric irregularity — you could count or march right across it into the next bar — but it interrupts the rhythmic pattern so profoundly that it has a similar effect, to my ear anyway.
by Peter on June 11, 2008 at 2:02 pm #
I think the problem might be that the term “irregular” is loaded. It has the technical definition of mixing duple and triple meters, but also carries the connotation of an unusual or complicated rhythm. As we’ve seen with pieces like “Take Five,” that’s not necessarily the case. Perhaps “asymmetrical meter” would have been a better choice.
In any case, I certainly agree with your greater point that there can be rhythmic interest without metrical asymmetricality; I just find irregular meter interesting in and of itself.
(Also, it occurs to me that calling irregular meter “a mix of duple and triple pulses” is an oversimplification. I don’t think of “Clocks” by Coldplay irregular even though it has a 3 3 2 pulse, for example…)
by Dan Bruno on June 11, 2008 at 3:25 pm #
Wow, “asymmetric” is a really elegant word, but it took me a minute to understand why. If “symmetric meter” is one in which each level of the metric hierarchy can be divided into two or three units *of equal length* (and this is equivalent to how Rick Cohn defines it in the “ski-hill graph” article), then asymmetrical meter is one in which the units are of different sizes.
The easy geometrical interpretation of this is that symmetrical meters are nests of regular polygons on a beat-class graph. If any polygon in the nest is irregular (i.e. rotationally asymmetric), then so is the meter.
“Clocks” can be heard either way: as an 8-pulse pattern subject to symmetrical duple divisions, or as an asymmetrical pattern of three beats, two long and one short.
Cool!
by Peter on June 13, 2008 at 8:09 pm #
I’m glad you that like that one. I can’t take credit for it, of course — it’s from an old theory prof. That’s a really interesting geometrical parallel you made too.
Well! I guess I should get working on Final Fantasy VIII, eh?
by Dan Bruno on June 13, 2008 at 9:36 pm #
Love the FFVIII additions Dan. It really takes brings back so many lovely memories of hours and hours spent playing 8 as a kind. I’d probably go so far as to say that the two final fantasy’s (7 & 8) were probably very much some of the single biggest musical experiences I had growing up.
by Ben Abraham on June 22, 2008 at 10:19 pm #
Ha, now I understand why that particular “Closed Door” theme always felt so slightly off and unnerving…
by Nhexima on July 9, 2008 at 2:24 am #
Wow, you’re a transcription machine! You’re very welcome — it’s great to see this stuff written out. What notation software do you use?
Speaking of software, now that we have access to the actual code and data for the tracks, it would be really cool to see the internal representation for these rhythmic effects. (Not to mention the timbral tricks of the NES era!) Do you know whether there’s any way to “decompile” PSF, NSF, or SPC files and edit them with, say, a tracker-style interface?
Finally, that’s a very interesting observation about the “double-time” arpeggios in “Closed Door.” My first thought was that it’s more of a notational than an audible effect, since you could just write the whole thing in 5/8, but you’re right — it’s fun to try to hear the quarter-note pulse in the melody against the arpeggios. There’s a movement in Carmina Burana (I think it’s “Uf dem Anger”) with a similar effect pitting an irregular phrase ( |: 4/4 3/8 4/4 6/8 :| ) against a quarter-note vamp.
by Peter on July 9, 2008 at 12:20 pm #
Glad you’re enjoying these, Peter. I do the transcriptions with Sibelius, and then do all the cropping/resizing in Photoshop.
I’ve never looked into trying to convert game music data back into a tracker- or sequencer-readable format, but after a bit of Googling I came across this list of tools. It looks like a few popular formats, including SPC, can be converted into MIDI files. Cool!
I’ll have to try to find that Carmina Burana example you mentioned. I like rhythmic irregularity of all kinds, not just irregular meter! :-)
by Dan Bruno on July 9, 2008 at 1:47 pm #
I like the way you transcribed the FFIX “Run!” section into 15′s and 16′s—the piano book has it going 4/4 to 7/8 plus 4/4, which ruins the idea of the pulse I think. I feel it groove more with a steady 4/4 3.75/4 pulse…awkward way to say it, but you know what I mean?
by Sam on March 22, 2009 at 1:22 am #
This blog is wonderful! As a music theory nerd and game enthusiast, I have greatly enjoyed all your posts. Thanks so much!
I’ve always loved the FFVI (USA FFIII) music, but never tried transcribing it. Did you play this game? Any thoughts on its music?
Also, I read the entire Ocarina of Time chain, those were incredible! Keep up the good work, I’ll keep reading!
by Daniel on May 25, 2009 at 11:09 pm #
Hmm, analyzing the music from FFVI…What a curious idea. I’ve done it casually (I have my notes scattered around, but nothing electronically…yet), though I haven’t thought of posting anything online. Wouldn’t want to steal Dan’s thunder (nevertheless, Dan would probably do a superior job).
And Daniel, I’d say that FFVI is truly a work of art, the music just being the start. With its clever use of leitmotivs, the music really shines – the ending theme comes to mind (particularly the use of counterpoint with the themes for Locke and Celes). Maybe I should take another stab at it this summer.
by Rafi on May 26, 2009 at 7:19 am #
Thanks for backing me up. I was just thinking about the music some more today, and I realized we’ve got some 7/8 stuff right in the very beginning with the esper theme — the one that starts with an arpeggiated EbmMaj7 chord. A harmonic analysis of that piece would certainly be fascinating.
by Daniel on May 26, 2009 at 11:33 pm #
Hello, I just thought you might be interested that the tune ‘The Dreadful Fight’ from Final Fantasy IV has a number of odd measures. I won’t reveal anything though, you can have all the fun of working it out =)
by Garii on June 27, 2009 at 4:48 am #
Sam:: Huh. That transcription seems odd to me as well. There’s very often room for interpretation with music, though; people just hear things differently.
Daniel and Rafi: Glad you’re enjoying the posts! I am actually largely unfamiliar with Final Fantasy, but am becoming more interested in it through its music and everyone’s recommendations. I’ll check out the music when I get a chance for more irregular goodness. :-) And Rafi, please feel free to “steal my thunder” — I’d love to see more writing on music and games. I don’t want this to be just my gig!
Garii: Thanks for your recommendation as well! This series will be going for a while, eh?
by Dan Bruno on July 14, 2009 at 8:23 pm #
I just have a quick question: how do you make a caesura in sibelius?
PS. Here’s another Dan :P
by dwarduk on August 19, 2009 at 6:43 am #
In the later section of “Run” with the 15/16 and 4/4– it reads and looks much better (and sounds the same, with a better pulse if you ask me) as 15/8 and 4/2 and if you beam the stems together like you have up there for phrasing it is much neater. I don’t know if you’ve tried playing that on piano but just glancing at it made me have a heart attack. Dotted eighth notes scare me! :O
But anyways, I transcribed it so it looks better! If you want the Sibelius file tell me. Have you just been opening up FF9 midi’s and looking around? Where can I get these MIDI files? :D
Thanks for this awesome post, have been reminiscing about games and their awesome music since I read this.
by Romulus on August 27, 2009 at 5:08 pm #
Hah, I’ve got to second with David there on having an inexplicable penchant for odd timing, and perhaps knowing why now..
by Matt Spire on November 30, 2009 at 4:20 pm #
I’d like to suggest people to listen to Another World of Beasts from Final Fantasy VI. I have sheet music from that game and it’s listed as 7/8.
by Chris on August 29, 2010 at 12:18 am #