I just got back from a fantastic vacation to Berlin. I walked a lot, took the train a lot, and second-hand-smoked a lot. I did not do any real itinerary planning before the trip — I had lived in Berlin for a few months previously, so I already knew the lay of the land and free things I could do on the fly. But I did plan one thing: a trip to the Computerspielemuseum. Getting off the U-Bahn in Weberwiese, I was surprised to see that Berlin’s transit authority (the BVG) had promotions for the museum with signs pointing to the best exit to get to it. Just seeing the incredibly long word printed on official signage had me excited. Walking down Karl-Marx-Allee, I got my first look at the museum’s sign with a screen of animated pixel art depicting changing colors and games like Breakout and Pac-Man. The museum naturally included a history of the medium along with a small exhibit on the evolution of adaptive audio, and a cast of visitors who, for better or worse, were great representatives for gaming culture.

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Computers and Games

The museum’s name—the Computer Games Museum—is precise for a reason. This isn’t merely a museum of video games, but a museum of computers and games as separate cultural media, how each developed on its own, the circumstances that married them into a single medium, and how that medium has evolved since. On the computer side of things, many of the exhibits discussed how, since humans started making computers, they have sought ways to have them do more than just compute. Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA (1964), for example, was cast as an artificial-intelligence “therapist,” built to hold something resembling a therapy session. Ferranti’s Nimrod computer (1951) could beat almost anyone at a game of Nim (and beat me every time I went up against it). And there was a simulation of Tennis for Two (1958), regarded as the first computer game made purely for entertainment rather than research.

Of these mid-century computer programs, one of the most interesting to me was the Geniac, released in 1955. Short for “Genius, Almost-Automatic Computer,” the Geniac was essentially designed as an educational toy for the purpose of teaching “basic programming knowledge in a playful manner.” It was advertised with the ability to compute, play games, “reason,” and even compose music. To be sure, the musical example the advertisement provides is incredibly trite, composed of only the first five pitches in the C major scale with little harmonic interest besides an implied periodic structure: a half cadence in measure four, an authentic cadence in measure eight. (To be fair to the Geniac, contemporary AI models aren’t really capable of generating much better. At least the Geniac was cool and didn’t require deforestation and rampant waterway drainage to compose a dinky melody.)

It was also cool to see many of the early video games that paved the way for the industry. The aforementioned Tennis for Two and cabinets of the massively influential Computer Space (1971), Pong (1972), and Breakout (1976) were all on display, though visitors were not allowed to touch them. Best (and funniest) of all was a copy of the Atari 2600’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), one of the earliest games licensed from a major film and a game so awful that it is generally cited as a major contributor to the video game crash of 1983 and Atari’s own retreat from prominence in the industry. Most copies of the game went unsold and found their way to a landfill in New Mexico. Luckily, one was recovered by the museum.

One of the most interesting objects in the collection, however, didn’t involve computers at all. In the exhibit on the culture of play was a set of postcards from the German cities of Mühlhausen and Thermalbad Wiesenbad, dating to the mid-20th century. These weren’t postcards of a sight or tourist attraction. Rather, they were used to play a game of correspondence chess, also called Fernschach in one of the rare instances where German is more succinct than English. To play, you’d mark your opponent’s move and your own by crossing out pieces and coordinates on the card, then mail it off and wait. Because the speed of post is not generally the quickest way to transmit information, a single game of chess could stretch on for months. The commitment that this takes says something about how deeply play is ingrained in us. Elsewhere in the museum, a quote from cultural historian Johan Huizinga (a favorite in ludography circles) describes the value of play in culture. My translation:

For a long time the conviction has continued to solidify in me that human culture arises and unfolds in play—as play. For me, it matters not the position the play element takes among other cultural phenomena, but rather to what extent culture itself possesses the character of play.

That we humans are willing to play a single game of chess over the course of several months, with someone hundreds or even thousands of miles away, is a vivid example of what Huizinga means: that play isn’t peripheral to culture but woven into it as a mode of cultural expression. Also, I love the postcards’ sign-off: “Mit Fernschachgruß!” [“With correspondence chess greetings!”]

Notably, however, the museum has little to say about the current moment. The most recent gaming system in the “Wall of Hardware” is the Nintendo Switch (2017) and the most recent game on display was LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (2013). That’s a fair enough choice since recent history is hard to historicize, and the story of how games became one of today’s dominant media is necessarily a story about the past. But it does give an incomplete feeling to the museum. Several large movements have risen in the last two decades that the museum leaves out of its exhibits. Streaming alone has become one of the largest movements in the industry, both in terms of content creation on sites like Twitch and YouTube as well as the PlayStation 5’s ability to stream games from the cloud rather than running them locally. For a museum ostensibly predicated on the marriage of computers and games, it’s odd not to discuss how that marriage continues to evolve, especially as gaming becomes less reliant on computers and games existing in the same space.

Hören / Listening

If the entire museum had been a massive audio exhibit, I would have prepared to spend the night at the museum. Luckily for the staff, the audio exhibit only took up half a wall, so I had not brought a sleeping bag or any toiletries. Still, I happily read every blurb and listened to every audio example they had to offer, which included a reconstruction of music generated by the CSIRAC computer (1950), the earliest known computer to perform digital music.

Two things in particular grabbed my attention. The first was the Touch Me handheld game (1978), the Atari company’s belated response to Baer and Morrison’s popular Simon handheld (1978). (Ironically, Simon had itself been a very successful response to Atari’s original Touch Me arcade game [1974].) Both handhelds involve a sequence of button presses the player must memorize and perform correctly. This memorization is aided by several design factors, including the coloration of buttons and lights as well as distinct tones for each button. These tones, which sound as the computer demonstrates the sequence and as the player repeats it, create a sort of improvisatory call and response between the handheld system and the player. And while only four tones are ever heard, Touch Me and Simon both promote musical memorization: players become so accustomed to hearing the button presses with their tones that recalling the pitch sequence is just as, if not more, helpful than recalling the color sequence in successfully playing the game.

The other thing that stood out to me immediately was the header text for one of the exhibit’s blurbs: “Adaptive Audio.” Adaptive audio—the idea that music responds to changes in a game’s state—and its twin, interactive audio—that player input directly manipulates the playback of audio—are the two pillars of ludomusicologist Karen Collins’s theory of dynamic audio. The use of this language clearly alludes to the work of Collins, but neither she nor any other ludomusicologist is directly cited in the audio exhibit. I wouldn’t call this a gap in the museum’s curation, but rather another symptom of the museum’s focus on gaming traditions before the current moment. While ludomusicology is in many respects still a young field, it was even younger and less mainstream in 2017, the assumed endpoint of the museum’s curation. All the same, it would be a dream of mine to someday curate an up-to-date audio exhibit for this, or any other, museum.

The State of Gaming Culture: Manchildren and Children-at-Heart

Throughout the museum are rooms where visitors can actually get their hands on video games. There is a room that emulates the lighting of coin-op arcade halls with games like Donkey Kong (1981)and Pac-Man (1980) available to play. There are also small living rooms, game rooms, and computer closets modeled after each decade of gaming history from the 1960s to the late 1990s. In a cramped closet space, I had the chance to play Castle Adventure (1984) on an original Victor VPC II running MS-DOS. In a 1980s-based kid’s room, decorated with a poster for Return of the Jedi (1983), a plush ALF, and a clunky TV cabinet, visitors could play the Donkey Kong II Game & Watch handheld (1983), or more compelling, Super Mario Bros. (1985) on the NES. In all of these rooms, the games were the center of attention.

But just as integral to the museum as the curated exhibits are the people that walk through and interact with them. Of the visitors, two groups stood out to me, each saying something about the modern condition of gaming culture, who plays games, and how games are played today. The first of these groups was composed of four middle-aged British men who had either never gotten the memo on maintaining good hygiene or had taken a solemn vow never to use deodorant or brush their teeth. These chaps, whose development seemed to have been arrested in their long-past teenage years, were slow to relinquish the controllers in the interactive galleries. One of them stuck by the Donkey Kong cabinet for about thirty minutes while two of the others left sizable indents in the PlayStation exhibit’s bean bag chairs after hogging the controller for Spyro the Dragon (1998). They were still young when many of these games were first released, so it’s hard not to read a sense of ownership into how they moved through the space—as if their childhood memories, seniority, and fanaticism for games entitled them to the museum and whatever they wanted to do in its exhibits. They had no parents to tell them when it was time to move on, no children to chase around, and no apparent inclination to share the experience with other museum visitors. And even as they spent far more time with controllers in their hands than anyone else, I can’t recall ever seeing them smile or hearing them laugh.

Unlike the first group, I saw joy in the second. A young boy playing Super Mario Bros. on the NES for the first time pleaded with his mother, “Letztes Mal! Allerletztes!” [“Last time! Very last!”]. Later, two brothers passed the controller back and forth, taking turns each time they lost one of Mario’s lives. A boy in the Spyro gallery couldn’t quite figure out how to play and kept running into walls, but kept trying anyway. A young girl came up after him and absolutely crushed it. Kids got their hands on hardware older than their parents and grandparents. Those parents and grandparents got a chance to relive their own childlike glee and see it take root in their kids.

Seeing these two approaches to video games brought my mind back to Huizinga’s claim that play isn’t just another element of culture, rather that to some extent, culture is play. If “playing” a video game is constituted by holding a controller and operating a game, then the manchildren were technically “playing,” and they did so longer than anyone else I saw. But their method of play did not resemble what I saw in the second group. They had no visible joy, no openness to share, or anything that looked like fun. Whether through decades of acquaintance with games or just an unhealthy relationship with the medium, play had become possession for them. At its most toxic and organized, that culture of entitlement, built on the conviction that games belong to a certain type of fan, is what has fueled harassment campaigns like the misogynistic GamerGate (c. 2014–15).

The second group, on the other hand, represented a much more gleeful culture. They shared the controller; they tried, failed, and absolutely crushed; they were curious; and they took joy in watching each other play. The point for them wasn’t to take ownership of a game, but rather to have a shared fun experience. It was this curious and gleeful group—along with the correspondence chess postcards—that taught me the most about the cultural value of gaming: that it represents a shared and joyful mode of human interaction beyond mere human-computer interaction, technical mastery, and ownership.

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Games/Programs I Played or Watched Others Play at the Computerspielemuseum

Alcorn, Allan. Pong. Arcade. Sounds programmed by Allan Alcorn. Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, 1972.

Atari. Touch Me. Handheld. Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, 1978.

Bales, Kevin. Castle Adventure. MS-DOS. Kevin Bales, 1984.

Bennett, John Makepeace, and Raymond Stuart-Williams. Nim. Nimrod computer. Hollinwood, England: Ferranti, 1951.

Factor 5. Turrican II: The Final Fight. Amiga. Music by Chris Hülsbeck and Markus Siebold. Düsseldorf: Rainbow Arts, 1991.

Game Freak. Pokémon Red Version. Game Boy. Music by Junichi Masuda. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1996.

Higinbotham, William. Tennis for Two. Analog computer (oscilloscope). Upton, NY: Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1958.

Insomniac Games. Spyro the Dragon. PlayStation. Music by Stewart Copeland. Tokyo: Sony Computer Entertainment, 1998.

Konami. Scramble. Arcade. Tokyo: Konami, 1981.

MacLarty, Ian. ROM Check Fail! Freeware. Ian MacLarty, 2008.

Nintendo R&D1. Donkey Kong. Arcade. Music by Yukio Kaneoka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1981.

———. Donkey Kong II. Game & Watch. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1983.

———. Dr. Mario. Game Boy. Music by Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1990.

Nintendo R&D4. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1985.

Psygnosis. wipEout. PlayStation. Music by Tim Wright. Liverpool: Psygnosis, 1995.

Rausch, Wolfgang. Das Grab des Pharao. Commodore 64. Burgthann, DE: Markt & Technik, 1985.

Sega R&D1. Hang-On. Arcade. Music by Hiroshi Kawaguchi. Tokyo: Sega, 1985.

Stern Electronics. Berzerk. Arcade. Chicago: Stern Electronics, 1980.

Syzygy Engineering. Computer Space. Arcade. Nutting Associates, 1971.

TT Games. LEGO Marvel Super Heroes. Multiplatform. Music by Rob Westwood. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2013.

United Game Artists. Rez. Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Music by Keiichi Sugiyama et al. Tokyo: Sega, 2001.

VEB Polytechnik. Poly-Play. Arcade. Karl-Marx-Stadt, GDR: VEB Polytechnik, 1985.

Warshaw, Howard Scott. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Atari 2600. Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, 1982.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. ELIZA. IBM 7094. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1966.

When an in-game geography resembles a particular region on Earth, game designers tend to exploit that similarity as a way to bridge the gap between the fictional and real worlds. In doing so, designers appeal to the player’s literacy of the real and the fictional to deepen immersion through a process Tim Summers refers to as “texturing.” Texturing, Summers describes, adds depth to games by referencing “other media and cultural touchstones that are already well-established to enhance the game experience.”4 Texturing often results in some direct cultural borrowing, evident in game levels like Gerudo Valley in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) and nearly every part of Sid Meier’s Risk-inspired Civilization series (1991–).5 Thus, when we hear Indonesian musical styles in video games, it is frequently in levels of a game that geographically resemble the Indonesian archipelago, including densely vegetated islands, rainforests, and swamp forests.

Musical texturing in these cases draws on a large bank of musical elements that may evoke Indonesian aesthetics. These include the hallmarks of gamelan court music such as instrumentation of metallophones, interlocking melodies, cyclic forms, and persistent ostinati. These elements compose the primary semiotic vocabulary in games like Civilization VI (2016; hereafter, “Civ6”). However, the most surefire marker of Indonesian influence are the slendro and pelog tuning systems. In the sections below, I analyze examples of these tuning systems and their construction in Civ6 in addition to standouts from the Super Mario (1985–) and Legend of Zelda (1986–) series.

A Slendro and Pelog Primer

Before moving to the examples, it would first be of use to examine the construction of slendro and pelog scales. It must be said, too, that Western musical notation is severely limited when it comes to accurately portraying the sound of these tuning systems as they are heard in actual Indonesian gamelan music. Where appropriate, I have written plus (+) and minus (-) signs under pitches to approximate their pitch relative to Western tuning. Above each pitch are the Javanese, Sundanese, or Balinese pitch names where appropriate. Tuning practices also vary widely between islands and self-contained gamelan ensembles and there is no real standardization. Thus, the following descriptions should be taken as Westernized generalizations rather than absolute.

Slendro

The slendro tuning system is said to predate pelog and its suite of modes. Comprising a pentatonic scale, slendro contains five distinct pitches with no semitones between them. Because of this, slendro resembles other pentatonic (five-note) scales used globally from China and India to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This resemblance therefore makes slendro a rather weak signifier of “Indonesianness” on its own. Slendro is used frequently in Javanese gamelan (court) music.

Pelog

Pelog is the other essential tuning system in Indonesian gamelan music. It composes a heptatonic scale (having seven notes). Rather than being used in its heptatonic form in practice, pelog acts more as a bank of pitches from which several modes (called “pathet”) are derived. The tuning in pelog is arguably more striking than in slendro because it includes several semitones. In the illustration above, these are between bem and gulu, pélog and lima, lima and nem, and barang and bem. The pathet below each take five pitches from the heptatonic set. These three pathet are among the most commonly used in Indonesia, pelog bem and pelog barang being used frequently in Javanese and Sundanese gamelan and pelog selisir in Balinese gamelan.

Pelog bem

Pelog bem is a pathet based on the pitch bem. Pelog bem is frequently used in wayang kulit, Javanese shadow puppet theater.

Pelog barang

Pelog barang fully omits bem, instead tonicizing barang (notated as C# above). Noted by Marc Perlman, pelog barang is frequently used in Javanese gamelan.

Pelog selisir

Pelog selisir is the most frequently used pelog pathet in the Balinese gong kebyar style of gamelan. As such, I have annotated the pitches above according to their Balinese names (dem becomes ding, gulu becomes dong, and so forth). Pelog selisir is very similar to both pelog barang and pelog bem; each of the three pathet is distinguished by only one pitch.

Examples in Video Games

Indonesia in Civilization VI

In the Civilization series, the player leads a real-world nation to global dominance through prehistory to the modern age. Indonesia first became a playable nation in the series’s sixth installment, Civ6. An arrangement of the Balinese “Bapang Selisir,” the music for Indonesia in Civ6 is heard through a number of iterations, becoming progressively more “epic” (read: Westernized) as the player moves through eras of world history.6 In the two early iterations of Indonesia’s background music (namely, from the “Ancient” and “Medieval” eras), pelog selisir-based melodies are played by the gangsa, a Balinese mallet-struck metallophone. (The opening gangsa melody of the “Ancient” era cue is shown in Example 1 below.) By the game’s “Industrial” era, the Indonesian civilization music adopts Western idioms influenced by real-world industrialization, among which are Romantic-style harmonies and orchestration of valved brass, the violin family, and metal flutes. The melody in this era—and the “Atomic” era that follows—remains in pelog selisir and retains an interlocking rhythmic backing even in the midst of Western musical colonization.7 In this way, the music treats selisir as a flavor attached to Western globalization, historiographically mirroring the Dutch colonization of Indonesia.

This second audio example is of Bapang Selisir (“Indonesia – The Industrial Era”).

The Faron Temple in Echoes of Wisdom

Midway through her journey in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024), the heroic Princess Zelda must make her way to the Faron Wetlands and rid its temple of a monstrous spider plaguing the region. The entire wetland area is meant to evoke Indonesia, from its existence as a swamp forest to the frequent sounds of Sundanese angklung, a rattling bamboo instrument.

The Faron Temple itself leans into ritualistic imagery and sounds. In some respects, the temple resembles Indonesian temples with statues, reliefs, floor tessellation, and construction from large stones. The music here, transcribed in Example 2, also resembles courtly gamelan music with particular influence from Sundanese and Balinese practices. The primary melodic instrument in the Faron Temple cue is the suling, a Sundanese bamboo flute, and a set of three marimbas perform a kotekan, an interlocking rhythmic bed from Balinese gamelan music. The kotekan here is composed of three parts: a polos that serves as the primary rhythmic drive and two sangsih lines that fill in the gaps. Also heard in the cue are a set of Balinese gangsa that announce the beginning of each musical cycle.

Both the suling melody and marimba kotekan adhere to the pelog selisir mode based here on the pitch E. In this instance, the use of pelog selisir is well-suited for the abundance of Balinese elements also heard in the cue, though the simultaneous inclusion of Sundanese instruments risks confusing traditions.

The Forgotten Isle in Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo’s method of mapping gamelan styles to swamp forest levels occurs as early as the Forgotten Isle in Super Mario Odyssey (2017). Koji Kondo’s music for this level is entirely in D-pelog selisir, shown below in Example 3. What sets this depiction of Indonesian music apart from Civ6 and Echoes of Wisdom is its complex meter, renderable as 11/16. This asymmetry, a scalar selisir ostinato played by metallic mallet percussion, and regular bongo downbeat hits enact the cyclic form of gamelan practice. Also in the cue is a transitory kotekan passage performed by a set of marimbas.

Yoshi’s Fire Power in Super Mario 64 DS

Sometimes pelog appears in unexpected places. In fact, pelog is used somewhat jarringly in the dinosaur Yoshi’s variation on the “Metal Mario” power-up cue from Super Mario 64 DS (2004), shown in Example 4. Occurring in the middle of Yoshi’s “Fire Power” music, the gangsa performs a four-measure melody set in F#-pelog selisir. This is set in juxtaposition to the highly chromatic “Metal Mario” motive, performed here by sitar. The pairing of sitar and gangsa is unusual—they stem from Hindustani and Balinese/Javanese traditions, respectively—but together with Yoshi’s fiery breath evoke the sort of “mystical other” and general Eastern-ness that fire-breathing represents in circus performances.

Conclusions

An attentive reader will have noticed a striking pattern across these examples; each of them share pelog selisir tonality. In fact, in no example of Indonesian music in video games have I encountered slendro or any other pelog pathet. Rather it seems selisir, which provides the recognizable sound for gamelan music in Bali, has become the default mode for representing Indonesian styles in game music.

The ubiquity of pelog selisir is symptomatic of a semiotic tendency to standardize Indonesian styles in an effort to easily signify the geographies and cultures of the archipelago. However, this has a flattening effect. It is often the case in game music that idioms of Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese traditions are reduced and/or mixed together. Like in the example from Echoes of Wisdom above, this may occur as Sundanese and Javanese instrumentation accompanied by Balinese tuning and rhythmic texturing. While this blending has led to a musical semiotics of Indonesia that game composers may use to immersive effect, it collapses intricacies that remain unshared between islands, cities, and ensembles in Indonesia. In the best cases, this makes for engaging music for rainforest and swamp levels that draws from real-world practices. At worst, as we have seen in the Yoshi example above, this treats Indonesian cultural music as exotic decoration.

References

Bibliography

Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Cook, Karen. “Music, History, and Progress in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 166–82. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Lerner, Neil. “Mario’s Dynamic Leaps: Musical Innovations (and the Specter of Early Cinema) in Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, eds. K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 1–29. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Perlman, Marc. Unplayed Melodies: Javanese Gamelan and the Genesis of Music Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Summers, Tim. “Epic Texturing in the First-Person Shooter: The Aesthetics of Video Game Music.” The Soundtrack 5, no. 2 (2012): 111–27.

———. Understanding Video Game Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Ludography

Firaxis Games. Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. Multiplatform. Music by Geoff Knorr. Novato, CA: 2K, 2016

Nintendo EAD. Super Mario 64 DS. Nintendo DS. Music by Kenta Nagata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2004.

Nintendo EPD. Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo Switch. Music by Naoto Kubo, Shiho Fujii, and Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

Nintendo EPD and Grezzo. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Nintendo Switch. Music by Masato Ohashi et al. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2024.

Whoops! I did not write the transcription essay or Tim Summers bibliography entry that I had planned for this month. I will get around to them, though, because they are very interesting to me—so don’t fret! Instead, I wrote a little column celebrating the anniversary of this blog, a column for Zelda Universe about Indonesian musical aesthetics in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and a short survey of musical forms and their usage in video games. Play through the levels below to read more!

Warp Pipe

Level 1: Column — “Video Games are Total Works of Art”

Level 2: Zelda Universe Column — “The Faron Temple’s gamelan groove”

Level 3: Theory — “Basic Musical Forms in Video Games”

Level 1: Column

“Video Games are Total Works of Art”

https://www.hagb.art/ludomusings/columns/video-game-gesamtkunstwerk

Can you believe I’ve been at this for a year now? I can’t. In this column, I talk about how I got into ludomusicology, why I initially discarded the notion of video game music as a serious academic interest, and why video games are so culturally significant. Spoiler: video games are total works of art!

Level 2: Zelda Universe Column

“The Faron Temple’s gamelan groove”

https://zeldauniverse.net/2026/05/11/medlis-melodies-the-faron-temples-gamelan-groove/

A lot of my ideas for Zelda Universe columns come from the ZU Slack channels. For some time, one of my editors has been chronicling her first time playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024), one of the most inventive games in the Zelda franchise. Because of her I was inspired to write a piece about my favorite music from the game, the theme for the jungle-based Faron Temple. The theme borrows from the instrumentation and aesthetics of Indonesian gamelan music—particularly from the Sundanese and Balinese traditions. This of course weighs heavily into the worldbuilding of the Faron Temple and the region in which it is found in Echoes of Wisdom. And it’s very nice to listen to!

Thanks for the inspo, Elina!

Level 3: Theory

“Basic Musical Forms in Video Games”

https://www.hagb.art/ludomusings/theory/basic-musical-form-in-video-games

You read that right; I added a new section to Will’s Ludomusings. In this new “Theory” section, I hope to explain basic music theory concepts through examples in video games.

In this, the first Theory post, I discuss basic musical forms in Western art music: strophic, potpourri, binary, ternary, rondo, and theme and variation. These forms have organized Western music for centuries and are often used in video games for specific purposes. Potpourri form, for example, is used to prevent musical boredom in areas the player will spend a lot of time. Additionally, Majora’s Mask uses rondo form in its credits sequence to mimic the Groundhog Day mechanics central the game’s gameplay and narrative. Read the article to learn more!

Game Over.

Thanks for reading!

I learned this month that I can’t make any promises with what I plan on writing. But I will say what I expect to write. For June, be on the lookout for that transcription essay and that Tim Summers bibliography annotation. Those will happen come hell or high water.

Anything else is up to the wind. I will probably write another post for the new Theory section. I had a lot of fun writing the form piece! And a Zelda Universe column is kind of a given seeing as I’m voluntarily obligated write at least one column a month for them.

I am also working on completely overhauling my website design. So get excited to see a fresh hagb.art in the near future. And maybe eventually I’ll start hosting the site myself so it loads faster. Who knows? Stay tuned to find out!

TTFN,

Will

Happy April 20th and a warm welcome to the longest Ludomusings Update there will likely ever be! Picking up from where we left off in March, this newsletter begins with my last two posts from last month: a bibliography entry and a column written for ZeldaUniverse.net. This month, I wrote another column for Zelda Universe (I’m on rotation now!) and a column, essay, and game review for the blog. Play through the levels below for more information on each post!

Warp Pipe

Level 1: Bibliography — Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music

Level 2: Zelda Universe Columns

Level 3: Column — “My Grievances with the Nintendo Music App”

Level 4: Essay — “Hearing (and Queering) Gender in Video Game Music”

Level 5: Game Review — EarthBound / Mother 2

Level 1: Bibliography

Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music (2024)

https://www.hagb.art/ludomusings/bibliography/kamp-four-ways

Michiel Kamp’s Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music is the first book-length phenomenology of video game music. As the title so pithily puts it, Kamp describes four ways in which gamers hear video game music: as background, as aesthetic, as ludic (playful), and as semiotic (as a signpost).

This is one of my favorite books I’ve ever read! I suggest anyone interested in music and video game music read it.

Level 2: Zelda Universe Columns

“The 25th Anniversary Medley”

https://zeldauniverse.net/2026/03/16/medlis-melodies-the-25th-anniversary-medley/

This year represents two milestones in the Legend of Zelda community: it is both the 40th anniversary of the franchise and the 25th anniversary of Zelda Universe, a website dedicated to the franchise and the community it has created.

In March, I wrote a column looking at The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Special Orchestra CD, released alongside The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in 2011. This CD has a special place in my memory because its shiny goldenness surprised me the first time I opened my Skyward Sword game casing.

I’ll be a little more honest about my thoughts on the CD here than on ZU: the arrangements on the CD are not very interesting. More concerts have been performed since (including the 30th Anniversary Concert, 2018 Concert, and 2024 Concert) which have far more exciting arrangements. This does, however, open up ideas for a future essay about how video game music is arranged for the concert hall . . . Stay tuned!

“ZREO’s Concerning Clock Town Album”

https://zeldauniverse.net/2026/04/20/medlis-melodies-zreos-concerning-clock-town-album

This week, I wrote a column based on another orchestral arrangement of Zelda music. Performed by ZREO (formerly Zelda Reorchestrated), Concerning Clock Town (2025) celebrates the music of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000) for the game’s 25th anniversary. My column was published for the game’s 26th anniversary, so there’s a whole lot of celebration going on with my output at ZU these last two months.

I spend a considerable amount of time discussing two tracks on the album, “Concerning Clock Town” and “Oath to Order,” as they are two of the most narratively significant in Majora’s Mask and two of the most inspired tracks on the album. There’s some clear inspiration from Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, and Mahler in these tracks, so they’re very fun listens.

Listen to the Album

Level 3: Column

“My Grievances with the Nintendo Music App”

https://www.hagb.art/ludomusings/columns/nintendo-music-app-grievances

If it’s not already clear by the scope of my blog, I am deeply in love with video game music, and Nintendo music in particular. Nintendo has infamously been very protective of its intellectual property, so its music has historically been inaccessible. It was a godsend when they published the Nintendo Music app in 2024, where I could finally listen to my favorite game music without downloading it in a less-than-legal way.

It came with a catch though, as I write in the column: Nintendo does not credit their composers or performers. Again, this is due to Nintendo’s approach to its IP. Read all about it in the column!

Level 4: Essay

“Weaving Their Own Music: Hearing (and Queering) Gender in Video Game Scoring”

https://www.hagb.art/ludomusings/essays/hearing-and-queering-gender-in-video-game-scoring

Since the 17th century, the semiotic capabilities of music have been used to perpetuate repressive gender norms, intentionally or not. These practices have bled over into the realms of film music, and naturally, video game music. But what does it really mean for game music to perpetuate these norms and what does it look like when it breaks from convention? Looking at character themes from games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024), and the Hollow Knight series (2017–25), I seek in this essay to discuss ways in which video game music engages with genders that queer the masculine-feminine binary that has been upheld by music for so long.

(P.S., I had so much fun reading and writing for this essay! I really think topics of gender and queerness in video game music may end up being my niche. Eeeeek!)

Level 5: Game Review

https://www.hagb.art/ludomusings/reviews/earthbound

EarthBound / Mother 2 (1994)

I think I’ve written before that I’m often very late to what some would consider “canonical” games. This is certainly the case with EarthBound (known in Japan as Mother 2).

I had a lot of fun with EarthBound, its cooky characters, its wacky music, and equal parts whimsical and disturbing narrative. The gameplay and mechanics, I must say, do not hold up well compared to the modern gaming landscape. But it’s easy to forgive this in the light of everything else the game has going for it.

Game Over. Continue?

Thanks for reading!

Coming up in May is a whole new swath of writings, including a (maybe shorter) essay discussing the inherent challenges and aesthetic considerations of arranging video game music for concert settings and a bibliography entry for Tim Summers’s ever-useful Understanding Video Game Music (2016), along with my general cycle of column-writing. Stay tuned!

TTFN,

Will

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Guess what!!

I have my own website now! It looks like this:

From here on out, the blog side of Will’s Ludomusings will be hosted at hagb.art — so called because my middle name happens to be Hagbart.1

On the new Ludomusings website you’ll find all my essays, columns, and reviews.2 I’ve also begun keeping a glossary of key terms related to games and game music and will keep a reading list/annotated bibliography for all things ludomusicology.

My hope is for the website not only to be a place for my research, but also a living resource for others interested or enthused by game music studies.

Explore the website a little bit! There are some real swanky features. Let me know if you notice anything weird. You can DM me on Substack or reach me at will@hagb.art (or my private channels if you know me personally).

The Future of this Substack

So, if everything is being migrated to hagb.art, what does that mean for this Substack?

For one, I will no longer be posting my writings here directly. Instead, this Substack will shift into more of a newsletter role. Once a month, I’ll send out the Ludomusings Update, a short newsletter detailing each of my monthly posts — plus any additional posts I write — and a sneak peak into what you can look forward to in the next month.

Each time I post on hagb.art, I’ll crosspost here as a Note (not a full Newsletter).

My plan is to write a few posts each month along the following schedule:

• 1st Monday: Essay.

• 2nd Monday: Column.

• 3rd Monday: Bibliography entry or game/soundtrack review.

• 4th Monday: Ludomusings Update / bye-week for essay writing.

• (5th Monday: Who knows!?)

So don’t unsubscribe! This Substack will remain the primary way for you to find my writing and for me promote my writing.

Essay: “Playing the Video Game Console”

Published parallel to this newsletter is a new essay, “Playing the Video Game Console: Gaming Systems as Sites of Instrumental Performance.”

By merely using the phrases “playing music” and “playing video games,” we routinely analogize the performance of music with gaming. But as video games and the consoles that run them are media through which music is performed, this is not just analogy. When we operate video game consoles and play games, we actively control their musical output. In this way, the game console is not just a system for running games, but a medium for instrumental music performance.

In this essay, I look back to the beginnings of video game sound and the evolution of electrophonic instruments that made it possible. From the bleeps and bloops of Pong to modern game hardware, game consoles have become standalone electronic instruments as well as sites of musical performance embedded within the practice of play.

(I’ve also changed my ludography citation style to favor game titles over developers.3 If you’re someone who has ever paid attention to the way I cite the games discussed in my essays, you can let me know if you like the new style.)

Read “Playing the Video Game Console”

Game Over. Continue?

Coming this Monday will be an annotated bibliography entry for Michiel Kamp’s Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music (2024). Four Ways is a newer work building off of Kamp’s research since the early 2010s and details experiential modes of hearing game music. Written by one of the foremost scholars in the field of ludomusicology, the book is a seminal work in the phenomenology of video game music.

I hope you’re on the edge of your seat! See you then and in April with the next Ludomusings Update.

A Shortcut to (Hylian) Mushrooms

After falling off a cliff while fighting a horde of monsters, I find myself in a common situation in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017): my player-character Link is low on hearts and I need to find him something to eat. Wandering through the fields of Hyrule, I forage for mushrooms, carry them to a cooking pot, and prepare a simple Mushroom Skewer (see the Video Example below). When I select the meal in the game menu, Link scarfs it down, pats his belly, and recovers a few hearts. This sequence—injury, foraging, cooking, navigating the menu, eating—is routine. It is not remarkable in terms of the game’s broader narrative, nor is it very complex mechanically. It is, however, a necessary and frequently repeated gameplay aspect of Breath of the Wild.

Cooking meals and concocting potions are everyday practices in Breath of the Wild, required for maintaining Link’s health and safely traveling through harsh conditions in the game world. From the initial forage to the final feast, every action is accompanied by musical cues and sound effects. A short neighbor-tone jingle plays when gathering mushrooms and other common materials. An ensemble of metallic objects (suggestive of spoons and other cooking utensils) performs as Link prepares his meal. When the food is finally eaten, a soft, bubbling sound effect signals the restoration of health.

Video Example. Collecting, cooking, and eating Hylian Shrooms in Breath of the Wild.

These sounds fulfill a primary function of game audio: conveying information about and affirming changes in game state.1 In this sense, the sonic design of cooking in Breath of the Wild parallels many everyday sounds in the “real” world. A bell on a coffee shop door signals a caffeine-addicted customer’s arrival. A Samsung washing machine playing Franz Schubert’s “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) announces the end of a wash cycle. In both cases, music does more than communicate information and reframes the mundane activities it accompanies (entering a shop or doing laundry) as moments of charm and whimsy. In this essay, I argue that the sound design of Breath of the Wild likewise introduces a layer of spectacle to the everyday practice of cooking some ‘shrooms. By adding fanfare to moments of average mundanity, game composers transform ordinary practices into significant gameplay.

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Strategies and Tactics: The Practice of the Everyday

To understand how everyday gameplay operates, it will help first to look at theories of the everyday in the “real” world. For phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, the everyday (Alltäglichkeit) is the base mode of being-in-the-world (Dasein).2 Stephan Käufer points to everydayness as “a movement away from exceptionality and toward the usual, a tendency . . . to reinforce routines.”3 For Heidegger, this everydayness is dictated in part by a “subjection to Others” (das Man).4 In other words, the practice of the everyday is that which we do normally and is formed by average public norms.5

A concern with public norms is also noted by Michel de Certeau, whose own definition of the everyday involves a distinction between what he calls strategies and tactics. Strategies are enacted by those who inhabit “proper” places in society from which an environment can be organized, surveyed, and controlled.6 De Certeau illustrates strategy as the view from the 110th floor of the original World Trade Center, in which Manhattan becomes a “theoretical simulacrum,” separate from the practices of those below and legible like an urban planner’s map.7 Tactics, on the other hand, are the everyday practices of those without such a position of power, ordinary people who move through spaces they do not control.8 Pedestrians walking in Manhattan enact these tactics, reappropriating strategy-defined spaces by taking improvised paths and shortcuts.9 Put simply, strategies are the ways in which institutions design spaces; tactics are the ways in which ordinary people move through those spaces.

Everyday Listening: Ubiquitous Listening and Background Music

Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening” closely aligns with de Certeau’s everyday. Following Joseph Lanza and Jonathon Sterne’s examinations of the Muzak corporation and easy-listening practices,10 Kassabian describes ways in which companies like Starbucks exert control over the music played in their stores. With music piped into nearly every commercial space:

Those of us living in industrialized settings (at least) have developed, from the omnipresence of music in our daily lives, a mode of listening dissociated from specific generic characteristics of the music. In this mode, we listen ‘alongside,’ or simultaneous with, other activities.11

In these consumer settings, music acts as “a form of architecture—a way of organizing space[.]”12 Starbucks customers, who do not have power over the musical choices in public spaces, navigate these designed soundscapes through their own everyday listening practices.

Michel Kamp extends this understanding to video games, noting that background music in video games takes on a very similar role to Kassabian’s ubiquitous music. Background music, for the most part, is insignificant. It barely registers on one’s consciousness, but does the work of mood management (what Kamp equates to Heidegger’s “equipment”) and “functions alongside other elements of video games to structure the way in which we perceive possibilities for action[.]”13 Just as the design of a grocery store structures the way in which one shops,14 background music acts as the ground that structures the sonic character of a video game.15 It shapes perception while typically receding from conscious attention, functioning as a strategic layer imposed by designers. The ways in which players hear. listen, and respond to background music is then part of the everyday tactics of playing a video game.

Rules and Gameplay: The Everyday of Games

The sorts of activities that constitute the everyday in the “real” world—commuting, preparing and eating meals, brushing teeth—do not necessarily equate to the everyday in video games. This is because, as a general design strategy, video games often avoid such mundane tasks. If they appear at all, these activities are typically seen in cutscenes and not experienced in moments of gameplay. Rather, the everyday of video games may best be understood in the Certeauian sense. In fact, de Certeau’s division between strategy and tactics is very similar to Jesper Juul’s division between game rules and gameplay tactics.16 Like institutional strategies, game rules are imposed by designers from the top down. They act as “absolute commands” that limit the activity of players.17 Gameplay, by contrast, emerges as a “consequence of the game rules.”18 Players develop gameplay tactics that allow them both to satisfy the rules of a game and make the most efficient use of its mechanics. As Juul writes, gameplay is “the way the game is actually played.”19 The everyday of video games, thus, is not the representation of the real-world everyday, but involves all those things that constitute how a game is “actually played”: movement through the game world, menu navigation, use of the controller, and so forth. Elements imposed by designers—such as narrative cutscenes, music and sound design, and mechanics—function as the strategic structures that shape the everyday practices of gameplay.

Everyday Gameplay and Spectacular Music in Breath of the Wild

As mentioned above, cooking is one of these everyday gameplay practices in Breath of the Wild, done in response to structurally imposed game rules. It is a routine practice alongside and involving other ordinary activities such as world exploration and menu navigation, and is enacted frequently in response to injury and environmental conditions. Meals and potions are necessary for replenishing Link’s health and granting him temporary status effects such as greater movement speed and resistance to freezing temperatures.

The mechanics of cooking in Breath of the Wild foreground the player’s ability to improvise recipes. Within the cooking system, players may combine up to five ingredients per dish, with the resulting meal’s efficacy determined by the properties of those ingredients. Cooking together multiple ingredients with the “Hearty” descriptor, for instance, yields a meal with enhanced healing effects. On the other hand, combining foodstuffs with monster parts or insects produces a dish labeled “Dubious Food,” which restores only a few hearts, provides no special effects, and visibly disgusts Link. Cooking thus aligns with ordinary Certeauian “ways of operating,” improvised and situational responses to the constraints of game rules.

Musically, however, cooking is not represented as an everyday practice. Rather than background or ubiquitous music, the music that accompanies cooking responds directly to the player’s actions. This kind of reactive music is defined by Karen Collins as “interactive audio.”20 Instigated by the player, interactive audio comments on and provides feedback regarding player actions.21 This feedback may be positive or negative. When cooking a meal with enhanced effects, for example, a marimba is layered onto the regular metallic percussion and mimics the Zelda series’s recurring “Item Get” fanfare. Upon cooking Dubious Food, by contrast, the ensemble falls apart, reflecting the failed meal. By simply picking up a mushroom and triggering sound effects, routine participation in the game world allows the player to contribute to the greater musical architecture.22 I have written elsewhere about this kind of musical participation in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002), where normal battles are transformed into dynamic musical compositions based on gameplay tactics.23 While enacting those everyday practices that constitute gameplay on the one hand, the player is also actively participating in the spectacle of the accompanying music on the other.

By conveying meaning and allowing the playful participation of the player, the music of cooking functions simultaneously as semiotic and ludic music, bringing it out of the everydayness of background music. In doing so, Breath of the Wild transforms the practice of routine gameplay into moments of musical spectacle.

The Spectacular Mundanity of Nintendo

The playful music juxtaposed against the mundanity of cooking follows Nintendo’s longstanding design strategy, summarized (if somewhat problematically) by Reggie Fils-Aimé in 2017: “If it’s not fun, why bother?” Walking across a large, relatively empty field in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) is not scored by atmospheric music that may otherwise affirm its mundanity. That, of course, may not read as “fun.” On the contrary, “epic” and heroic music cues reframe pedestrian activity as grand adventure in the fantastical game world.24

A similar aestheticization of everyday play occurs in the Animal Crossing series (2001–), a franchise structured around monotonous gameplay enacted in real time. The amount of progress a player can make in any given day is deliberately limited: only a small number of fossils may be uncovered and donated to the museum each day, shops operate on fixed schedules, and village improvements unfold slowly through repeated labor. In the early stages of an Animal Crossing game, players may spend hours catching fish and insects to sell and repay their extensive (and predatory) home loans. Despite the tedium of such repetition—catching sea bass after sea bass—player success is always marked by a brief fanfare and a punny notification message like that shown in the example below. Instead of signifying exceptional gameplay or narrative significance, this fanfare celebrates everyday participation with the game’s design. As in Breath of the Wild, music in the Animal Crossing games transforms mundane gameplay into spectacle.

Fantastical Realism and Everyday Gameplay as Indicators of Genre

As realism continues to be an aesthetic goal for game developers, games increasingly incorporate institutional strategies and ordinary tactics from the real world. In a discussion of EverQuest II (2004), Joshua Zimmerman points to the inclusion of “existing social systems” in the game design and how games “re-configure and re-enact those systems for their own purposes.”25 Within the magical world of EverQuest II, for instance, players have the opportunity to organize their own simulated home. According to Zimmerman, the mundanity of domestic life enables the game to maintain its fantastical setting by juxtaposition.26

Realism and the inclusion of everyday practices have only grown in the gaming industry over the last two decades. With a greater focus on real-world structures than any previous Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild incorporates real-world everydayness—cooking and eating, adapting to weather conditions, breaking tools, and so forth—into its core gameplay loop. Yet Nintendo consistently resists allowing these existing systems to fall into average mundanity. Instead, through playful music and sound design, the game reframes everydayness as a site of spectacle and invites the player to have fun with ordinary tasks.

An additional area for research is how ludic and musical everydayness (or lack thereof) communicate genre. In flagship 2D platformers such as those in the Super Mario Bros. series (1985–) and Mega Man series (1987–), dynamic level designs yield fast-paced and exciting gameplay tactics. Music in these series generally affirms the genre’s everyday intensity with energetic, playful music. As in Breath of the Wild’s cooking sequences, everydayness may be subverted, when a mismatch emerges between genre-defined expectations and musical spectacle. In Donkey Kong Country (DKC; 1994), for instance, the sonic background consists primarily of ambient music. Where the dance tunes of Super Mario Bros. recede into the gameplay mundane, DKC juxtaposes its intense strategies and tactics against contemplative music. This unexpected music strategy urges the player to shift their attention from fast-paced platforming to a more calculated approach.

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Bibliography

Blauvelt, Andrew. “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life.” In Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Blauvelt, 14–37. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003.

Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013.

Käufer, Stephan. “Everydayness (Alltäglichkeit).” In The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, edited by Mark A. Wrathall, 293–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: Picador, 1994.

Nelson, William. “Link’s Sword is Mightier than the Pen: Composing and Performing in the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda Series.” Venture: The University of Mississippi Undergraduate Research Journal 6 (2024): 108–24.

Sterne, Jonathan. “Sounds like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space.” Ethnomusicology 41, no. 1 (1997): 22–50.

Stevens, Richard. “The Inherent Conflicts of Musical Interactivity in Video Games.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 74–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summers, Tim. “Epic Texturing in the First-Person Shooter: The Aesthetics of Video Game Music.” The Soundtrack 5, no. 2 (2012): 131–51.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: A Game Music Companion. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2020.

———. Understanding Video Game Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Zimmerman, Joshua. “Really Fake: The Magic Circle, the Mundane Circle, and the Everyday.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4, no. 2 (2010): 237–51.

Ludography

Capcom. Mega Man. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Manami Matsumae. Osaka: Capcom, 1987.

Daybreak Game Company. EverQuest II. Windows. Music by Laura Karpman and Inon Zur. San Diego: Daybreak Game Company; Saint-Mandé, FR: Ubisoft; Tokyo: Square Enix, 2004.

Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing. GameCube. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Kenta Nagata, Toru Minegishi, and Shinobu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2001.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo 64. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1998.

———. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. GameCube. Music by Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2002.

Nintendo EPD. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo Switch. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yumi Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi, and Masato Ohashi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2020.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Wii U and Nintendo Switch. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

Nintendo R&D4. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1985.

Rare. Donkey Kong Country. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by David Wise, Eveline Fischer Novakovic, and Robin Beanland. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.

Midna’s Desperate Hour

Rushing across Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006) after completing Lakebed Temple is a matter of life and death. Zant, the Usurper King of Twilight, has trapped Link in the form of a wolf and critically wounded his companion Midna, the eponymous Twilight Princess. With Midna on his back, Link races to Hyrule Castle to find the only person that can help: Princess Zelda. Where Hyrule Field generally stands as a site of grandeur and adventure, denoted by its heroic musical cue, Midna’s uncertain fate at the end of Twilight Princess’s second act—along with the music that accompanies it—urges the player to make a beeline to Hyrule Castle, ignoring everything but getting Midna help.

Compounded by audio and visual elements such as Midna’s labored breathing, her deathly pale complexion, and heavy nighttime rain, the music that accompanies this scene instills a sense of urgency and desperation. First and foremost, the cue—titled Midna’s Lament—is set primarily to the minor sound of the Dorian mode. While minor tonality does not universally signify sadness, familiarity with film music and video game music tropes, reinforced by other audiovisual signifiers, allows listeners to interpret minor-mode music (and especially the Dorian mode) as expressive of sorrow and vulnerability. In Midna’s Lament, played by a lone piano with generous use of the sustain pedal, the Dorian mode amplifies a sense of desperation and uncertainty. Diminished seventh chords, a hastening harmonic rhythm, and a stretto-like melodic pace heighten the drama as the track prepares to loop.

In Midna’s darkest hour, Link’s single-mindedness, Midna’s condition, and Midna’s Lament all tell the same message: the situation is desperate and Link must save Midna. Experienced together, this agreement between gameplay, narrative, and game audio can be described as harmonious or ludonarratively consonant. However, as Wolf Link races across Hyrule Field, he frequently encounters enemies that distract from his rescue mission and interrupt the music of Midna’s Lament. I want to argue in this essay that these encounters represent moments of ludonarrative dissonance, a term coined by game developer Clint Hocking in 2007 to describe contradictions between a game’s story and its mechanics and gameplay.1 In particular, Midna’s crisis represents a significant site of ludomusical dissonance, Michiel Kamp’s musical analog to ludonarrative dissonance.2 In Twilight Princess, there is an apparent contradiction between the music’s narrative and ludic functions on the one hand, and the game’s narrative stakes and gameplay priorities on the other.

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Ludonarrative Consonance

Moments of ludonarrative consonance and dissonance rely on a player’s ludoliteracy. Coined by José P. Zagal, ludoliteracy refers to the ability to interpret a video game in relation to the broader culture, the gaming industry, and gaming hardware.3 More fundamentally, it is the capacity to read and decode a game’s signifiers (e.g., a green bar shrinking as the player runs) and derive meaning from them (e.g., running depletes stamina). Literacy is also a pillar of Isabella van Elferen’s ALI (affect-literacy-interaction) model for game audio immersion.4 First, game music literacy relies on a familiarity with musical conventions of Western art music and audiovisual media including film and television.5 To achieve an immersive result, game audio leans heavily on pre-existing systems of musical signification. As van Elferen puts it:

Game music is not often very original or complicated, and this has a clear reason. Literacy in game music’s interpretation should be easy to acquire: because of music’s crucial role in gaming interaction, the sonic cues that the player gets must be immediately recognizable and interpretable. Game musical literacy’s contribution to immersion, thus, must be characterized by an almost clichéd audio-visual intertextuality.6

By engaging with musical conventions players are already frequently exposed to, game audio allows players to easily understand what it means to communicate.

Both ludoliteracy and game musical literacy allow for moments of ludomusical consonance. Writing in terms of “ludonarrative harmony,” Frédéric Seraphine points to an agreement of gameplay incentives and narrative directives as a site of consonance.7 This is evident when incentives guide the player toward gameplay decisions that match the intended narrative of a particular game. This extends too to game music. In a discussion of Hocking’s ludonarrative dissonance, Michiel Kamp points to its inverse as a situation in a game “where a change in musical signification can easily be interpreted against a change in game state.”8 In other words, ludonarrative consonance, a term coined by Kamp, also arises when game audio and game mechanics are in conversation.

A recent example can be experienced in the battle against the Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025). Before the battle begins, two large gears can be seen winding up mechanical bugs sitting dormant in the background. The dancers always move synchronously to the beat of the music and their moves telegraphed by beams of light. After dealing sufficient damage, the dancers return to the background and the gears wind them up more hastily. The music quickens as do the dancers’s attack patterns. The dancers return to the background once more at the end of this second phase where the winding gears now rotate out of sync, cluing in the player on the asynchronous attack patterns they will face in the battles third phase.

When one of the Cogwork Dancers has been defeated, the mood shifts. The music reverts to a slow pace and becomes understated in its orchestration, the remaining dancer moves more slowly, and the mechanical challenge becomes lighter. The musical, ludic, and narrative shift humanizes the dancer, communicating its perceived sorrow at the loss of its dancing partner. This kind of ludonarrative and ludomusical consonance is often seen as a goal of contemporary game design and is expected by players. It is against these expectations that moments of dissonance become especially perceptible.

Ludonarrative and Ludomusical Dissonance

As we saw earlier, Midna’s desperate hour presents a significant site of ludonarrative and ludomusical consonance. All the ludic, narrative, and musical signs initially point to the same meaning of urgency and gravity. When an enemy approaches Link, however, Midna’s Lament is overtaken by Twilight Princess’s generic battle music. This kind of alternation between danger and safety music has been a common practice in Action-Adventure games, as described by Zach Whalen,9 and has been a fixture of the genre since at least Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987). As such, Action-Adventure players are familiar with the combat implications of sudden fast-paced, cluster chord-filled, low-pitched music.10 In this darkest episode of Twilight Princess’s story, however, the usurpation of Midna’s Lament by a harmonically dissonant and frenetic battle cue urges the player to disregard the severity of the narrative in favor of combat. The onset of battle music puts into conflict all the game aspects that had previously been in agreement, producing a moment of ludonarrative and ludomusical dissonance.

In a critique of BioShock (2007) for his blog Click Nothing, Clint Hocking argues that the game “seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story.”11 For Hocking, ludonarrative dissonance appears as a conflict between the game’s “ludic contract” and its “narrative contract.” In essence, a ludic contract involves gameplay tactics and choices a player uses to overcome challenges and complete a game. In the case of BioShock, the ludic contract reduces to “seek power and you will progress.”12 A narrative contract involves character arcs and the moral of a game’s story. According to Hocking, BioShock’s ludic and narrative contracts contradict each other.

Central to Hocking’s argument is his interpretation of BioShock as an explicit commentary on the inherent problems with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.13 On the one hand, the ludic contract offers the player opportunities to act in Randian rational self-interest. After defeating a Big Daddy, for example, the player can choose to “harvest” or save their companions, defenseless and genetically altered orphans called Little Sisters. Harvesting Little Sisters, and thereby killing them, rewards the player with resources that enhance their abilities. To Hocking, this “seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice.”14 On the other hand, BioShock’s narrative contract demands the player aid the revolutionary figure Atlas. To borrow again from Seraphine, this brings into conflict its gameplay incentives and narrative directives.15 BioShock simultaneously incentivizes Randian self-interest in its gameplay while directing the player to embrace altruism through its narrative.

Applying the idea of ludonarrative dissonance to game audio, Michiel Kamp discusses ludomusical dissonance in terms of Heideggerian semiotics and what he refers to as “broken signs.”16 Broken signs produce moments of ludomusical dissonance in which a change in musical signification does not seem to accompany a change in game state. According to Kamp, this dissonance is evident in a musical cue heard in the celestial Gardens of Hope in Diablo III (2012). Kamp observed that, as he moved his character across a bridge in the heavenly setting, “two ‘epic’-sounding tutti chords” sounded with a “portentous quality to them that didn’t quite fit the routineness” of hacking through “trash mobs.”17 As an avid game player, Kamp expected the narrative implications of these tutti chords to be accompanied by a grandiose gameplay event. When they weren’t, he was left wondering what the bridge cue meant.

The Problem with Midna’s Lament

In the case of Midna’s Lament, musical signification is not “broken” in the Kampian sense. In fact, it works as designed: the shift between lament to battle music communicates Link’s relative safety. Players of the Action-Adventure genre are familiar with separate musical cues mapped to moments of relative danger and safety in gameplay. The problem with Midna’s Lament is that this musical mapping undermines the narrative stakes of the moment. Where dissonance occurs in Twilight Princess, therefore, is not with a confusion of musical signification, but with a conflict between the ludonarrative contract and ludomusical contract.

Examined above, a ludonarrative contract involves the gameplay tactics needed to progress through a game’s story. In Super Mario games, for example, this contract involves performing platforming challenges, collecting power-ups, and defeating enemies to complete each level and rescue Princess Peach. A ludomusical contract, on the other hand, involves the interaction between gameplay and musical architecture. Under this contract, music “actively communicates information that is significant for the mechanics of play.”18 When Mario collects a Super Star, an energetic musical cue plays for the power-up’s duration that communicates both Mario’s increased speed and invincibility. These contracts are broken by instances of dissonance where mechanics and fiction are at odds (as in BioShock), or where mechanics and musical signification come into conflict (as in Diablo III).

Both contracts remain intact in Twilight Princess. The ludonarrative contract consists of the need to quickly move through Hyrule Field in order to save Midna, affirmed by the dramatic music of Midna’s Lament. The ludomusical contract involves the danger-/safety-state binary, as expected in the Action-Adventure genre. If these contracts are viewed separately, they contribute to ludonarrative and ludomusical consonance. Everything is working as it should.

When near an enemy, however, Midna’s Lament, operating as safety music, is abruptly usurped by the game’s generic battle music (see Example 2). While the narrative urgency demands that the player focus on saving Midna’s life, the battle cue instead insists that fending off enemies takes precedence. Using a term from Elizabeth Medina-Gray, the two musical cues exist in complete modular disjunction.19 Between the two musical modules, there exist no commonalities in tonality, meter, orchestration, timbre, or affect that might otherwise render their interaction smooth.20 The abrupt alternation in musical cues draws attention to the game’s modular music design. Because enemy encounters are frequent in Hyrule Field and during the ascent of Hyrule Castle’s central tower, this modular disjunction produces a whiplash effect as Midna’s Lament and the battle cue vie for dominance. As Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers note, “Music that jumps rapidly between different sections, reacting to every single occurrence in a game can be annoying or even ridiculous.”21

To test this, try jumping between the two tracks below:

Midna’s Lament

“Battle (Second Half)”

The yo-yoing between lament and battle cue tears the player’s gameplay focus in two. The ludonarrative contract urges the player to focus solely on their dying companion on the one hand, while the ludomusical contract incentivizes combat on the other. In doing so, the musical architecture places narrative stakes and gameplay priorities in direct opposition.

Towards the Intentionality of Ludonarrative Dissonance

Dissonance is inevitable in video games that aim to tell a story. Operating between game mechanics and fictional worlds, video games are understood within Jesper Juul’s “half-real” framework. Game fictions are generally incomplete (not every aspect of their world is explained) and incoherent, “where the game contradicts itself or some game events cannot be explained as part of the fictional world.”22 When Mario falls in a pit and reappears at the beginning of a level in Super Mario Bros., I do not understand this as a fictional scenario in which Mario possesses the ability to reincarnate, but rather I understand this in terms of game mechanics: I have three lives—or attempts—to finish the level and I just expended one of them. As such, games with fictional worlds have an inherent and largely unproblematic dissonance that can be explained through game rules.

The question, then, is not whether to avoid dissonance in games, but how to use it effectively. When unintended, ludonarrative contradictions undermine immersion: self-interested gameplay challenges the perception of selfless characters, broken musical signs lead to narrative confusion and gameplay disruption, and interruptive battle music erodes the stakes of emotionally fraught scenes.

Designed intentionally, though, dissonance can be a powerful expressive tool. When traveling through Winters, a snowy area in the world of EarthBound (1994), the player faces challenging enemies on the one hand, and hears festive music on the other. This seems to be a broken sign: when the music communicates holiday cheer, why must the player be on guard? This ludomusical dissonance, however, is reflective of the game’s competing narrative themes of innocence and corruption. The childlike glee of exploring a winter wonderland and celebrating the holidays is deliberately contrasted against disturbing realities that encroach upon it.

The issue with Midna’s Lament is not the presence of ludonarrative or ludomusical dissonance, per se, but in its unintentionality. In fact, exempting the typical safety-danger mappings would itself present a conflict between soundtrack and genre, according to Kamp’s definition: “Ludomusical dissonance, then, is a particular kind of ludic experience that arises out of (sub)genre expectations in a historical context of ever-changing scoring practices.”23 Twilight Princess allows its genre-specific musical logic to assert itself in a moment when its exception would better suit the narrative. When the modular system shifts between Midna’s Lament and battle music the same as it would in any other scenario, it maintains the routineness of enemy encounters in the midst of an extraordinary episode.

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Bibliography

Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Elferen, Isabella van. “Analysing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model.” In Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, edited by Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney, 32–52. Sheffield, UK, and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016.

Fritsch, Melanie and Tim Summers. “Creating and Programming Game Music: Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 59–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Hocking, Clint. “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The Problem of What the Game is About.” Click Nothing (blog). October 7, 2007. https://clicknothing.com/2007/10/07/ludonarrative-d/

Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

———. “Ludomusical Dissonance in Diablo III.” In Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies, edited by William Gibbons and Steven Reale, 131–45. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011 [2005].

Medina-Gray, Elizabeth. “Meaningful Modular Combinations: Simultaneous Harp and Environmental Music in Two Legend of Zelda Games.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 104–21. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Seraphine, Frédéric. “Ludonarrative Dissonance: Is Storytelling About Reaching Harmony?” Frédéric Seraphine (blog). September 2, 2016. https://www.fredericseraphine.com/index.php/2016/09/02/ludonarrative-dissonance-is-storytelling-about-reaching-harmony/.

Whalen, Zach. “Play Along: An Approach to Videogame Music.” Game Studies 4, no. 1 (2004).

Zagal, José P. Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Games Education. Halifax: ETC Press, 2010.

Ludography

2K Boston and 2K Australia. BioShock. Various platforms. Music by Garry Schyman. Novato, CA: 2K, 2007.

Ape Inc. & HAL Laboratory. EarthBound. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.

Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo III. Various platforms. Music by Russel Brower, Derek Duke, Edo Guidotti, Laurence Juber, Joseph Lawrence, and Glenn Stafford. Irvine: Blizzard Entertainment, 2012.

Nintendo EAD. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo GameCube and Wii. Music by Toru Minegishi and Asuka Ota. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2006.

Team Cherry. Hollow Knight: Silksong. Various platforms. Music by Christopher Larkin. Adelaide, AU: Team Cherry, 2025.

I played a lot of games in 2025. It was a good year for gaming! For one thing, the Nintendo Switch 2 launched. For another, we got about thirty million racing games from Kirby Air Riders, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and Mario Kart World to the long-awaited Garfield Kart 2: All You Can Drift.

Like the aforementioned Garfield Kart 2, 2025 was a year of long-expected games coming to reality. After 26 years, Donkey Kong Bananza finally saw the eponymous ape return to the third dimension. We also finally got Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Hollow Knight: Silksong after cult followings became mainstream clamoring. On the other hand, Grand Theft Auto 6 got its billionth delay and there’s still really no update on The Elder Scrolls VI other than it’ll have more trees than TES V: Skyrim did.

I also got around to playing a lot of older games for the first time in 2025 thanks mostly to Nintendo Classics. I dipped my toes into the weird world of Wario games, playing WarioWare, Inc: Mega Microgame$! (2003) and Wario World (2003). I had a lot of fun with Luigi’s Mansion (2001) even though its controls are hellish.

But enough of all the preamble. Here are my top games from 2025!

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Special Mentions

Nobunaga’s Ambition (1993)

Developer: Koei

Music: Yoko Kanno

My Rating: 2.5/5

Definitive Music Track: “War”

Every now and then, I like to flip through the Nintendo Classics library to see if any retro games catch my eye and to potentially increase my gamer cred by playing them. One day in August, I happened upon a game with a samurai on its cover art. Samurai are badass, so naturally I launched the game.

I was not prepared to spend the next ten hours of my life listening to the same two songs on repeat while role-playing as the Great Unifier and Demon King of the Sixth Heaven Oda Nobunaga on his quest to unify Japan in the mid- to late-16th century.

Nobunaga’s Ambition plays out like a wildly in-depth game of the tabletop strategy game Risk (1957). Instead of arbitrarily drawn global regions, though, the player chooses from a selection of Sengoku-period fiefs. As the daimyo of their selected fief, the player is tasked to fulfill Oda Nobunaga’s dream: violently unify Japan. To do this, the player must go through a cycle of domestic development and wars with other daimyo.

I can’t stress enough that music is not Nobunaga’s Ambition’s claim to fame. The entire soundtrack is only two and a half minutes long, composed of seven tracks between ten and forty seconds each. There are only really two tracks that play with any regularity in the game. The first is typical safety-state music that plays over a tactical map of Japan, and continues to play while you navigate game menus to allocate your resources, develop your land, and make marriage offers to other provincial governments. The music is vaguely folkish and plays with some common signifiers of Japanese music.

The danger-state music, “War,” plays any time the player witnesses or takes part in a skirmish between enemy territories. The real-time strategy and grid-based combat of Nobunaga’s Ambition ensure that battles take a hefty portion of time. When your military is especially beefy toward the endgame, battles can take up to thirty minutes. The length of battles is very mentally taxing, and to be honest, becomes very boring.

To make matters worse, the battle music only lasts about fifteen seconds before looping. Its 16-bit texture is very flat even when compared to other examples from SNES-era soundtracks, and the melody retains the stratospheric range of some of the most grating 8-bit music from the previous console generation. Listening to the track while writing this is like having a flashback to a real war.

If I find so much of this game annoying, why did I play it for ten hours?

In spite of how aggravating it can be—sometimes you can lose the game in the first round simply because you picked the wrong daimyo to role-play—Nobunaga’s Ambition is addictive. Once you’ve taken the time to figure out how to efficiently develop your territories, care for your citizenry, strengthen your militaries, bolster your alliances, sabotage your enemies, and pick your battles, the game really opens up.

What sucks, though, is that it took me six hours to figure all of that out, and the other four hours were spent repeatedly trying to topple the computer daimyo who had also figured the game out.

And sitting through the music doesn’t get easier.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo Switch 2 Edition) [2017, 2025]

Developer: Nintendo EPD (Production Group No. 3)

Music: Manaka Kataoka (lead), Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai

Sound Team: Mitsuhiro Hikino, Tarō Bandō, Yohei Miyagawa, Ryu Tamura, Takuro Yasuda, Eiji Nakamura, Chiharu Minekawa, Hiroki Taniguchi, Kensuke Matsui, and Shunsuke Hongo

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Track: Overworld (Day) [imagine lots of footsteps, bird chirps, equipment rustling, wind, and all that jazz filling in the gaps]

I’ve sunk an inordinate amount of hours into Breath of the Wild since it released alongside the Nintendo Switch in 2017. I should be bored of the game. I know all the narrative beat-for-beat, I know the solutions to all of the game’s puzzles, and I often fulfill the requirements for side quests before I’ve even received them. I even know the locations of most of the 900 hidden Koroks by heart. There shouldn’t be anything left for me to uncover, but every time I play Breath of the Wild is a unique experience.

This was especially true when I played through the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild. The graphical upgrades, including a consistently smooth 60fps frame rate and 4K HDR resolution, are enough to make Breath of the Wild feel like an entirely different game from its 30fps, 1080p iteration on the original Switch.

While the enhanced graphics were by-and-large the most advertised feature of the rerelease, Breath of the Wild’s Nintendo Switch 2 Edition also comes with enhanced audio. The audio from the original Switch version was already top-tier, nearly winning the game the Game Award for Best Audio Direction in 2017. With the Switch 2 Edition, you can hear all the tiny sonic details with even more clarity. You can clearly hear the difference between walking around with fabric clothing versus metal armor. You can hear the difference in sound between walking across short grass, tall grass, sand, dirt, wood, stone, pavers, and snow and how different boots alter that sound. You can hear how metal equipment clinks and how wooden equipment clatters on Link’s back while he runs across Hyrule. The Foley work of Breath of the Wild takes my breath away.

The rest of the game isn’t half bad, too.

5 • Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025)

Developer: Team Cherry

Music: Christopher Larkin

My Rating: 4.5/5

Definitive Music Track:

• “Choral Chambers”

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a punishing game. Playing as spider-wyrm warrior princess Hornet, the player must navigate platforming puzzles with pinpoint precision, defeat impossibly difficult enemies, and memorize the labyrinthine land of Pharloom—an insect kingdom haunted by silk, and get this, song. Most of my time playing Silksong has been repeating the same mindless trek from checkpoint to insane boss battle for hours. A lot of the time, Silksong really isn’t all that fun.

Reggie Fils-Aimé, former president of Nintendo of America and the mastermind behind Pizza Hut’s Bigfoot Pizza, once asserted, “If it’s not fun, why bother?”

It’s like practicing a sonata for a recital. It’s tough work and rarely enjoyable. Sometimes you get stuck repeating the same four notes for hours on end without making any progress. Sometimes your face and fingers stop communicating with your brain. Sometimes even the easiest passages trip you up and make you question everything. Sometimes you just have to put your instrument away, take a walk, eat some food, and try again later.

But then it clicks. You go about your practice more thoughtfully and everything falls into place. You mark specific notes or passages that give you grief and you work to even everything out. You ask your friend to show you how they do it, and it starts to make sense.

That impossible run feels natural under your fingers. The measures start coming together to make actual musical phrases. With enough practice, you’re able to transcend technical difficulty and have fun playing some real music. And then you get to learn a new sonata.

That’s the beauty of Silksong. Sure, a skilled Metroidvania player could make their way through Pharloom without any issues. But it doesn’t take a skilled player to beat Silksong. It takes a willingness to fail repeatedly, learn from that failure, and make incremental improvements that finally lead to a win. (Some shit really isn’t balanced though. cough Savage Beastfly cough.)

And once you’ve mastered the game mechanics, you’re able to see what makes Silksong really shine: mystery, characters, environmental storytelling, and music.

4 • Undertale (2015)

Developer: Toby Fox

Music: Toby Fox

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

• “Hopes and Dreams”

• “ASGORE”

• “MEGALOVANIA”

I’m often very late to playing universally lauded video games. The first time I played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), for example, was in 2021. In 2024, I played Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010) and Metroid Prime (2002). I finally got around to playing Undertale in 2025, and I’m glad to have waited the ten years—a thirteen-year-old me would not have appreciated or even understood the point of Undertale.

Undertale is a weird game. In a role-playing genre predicated on defeating enemies to gain experience points, Undertale’s tutorial advises you, “While you are in a FIGHT, strike up a friendly conversation.” It challenges you to spare your enemies rather than attack them.

And so I did. I spared every monster I came across, even when boss monsters protested. Sparing everyone allowed my character to develop friendships with their once-enemies, to learn their stories, and to grow attached to the underground world they sought to escape. In the end, I was able to save all of the monsters imprisoned underground and bring them back to the surface. By going out of my way not to kill any monsters, I had accomplished the requirements for the game’s True Pacifist Route.1

The monsters that inhabit the Underground world of Undertale are all filled with personality. They’re also somewhat goofy. A goat lady, who wants more than anything to be a mother, makes butterscotch-cinnamon pie for the protagonist. A human-hunting skeleton—whose goal is to be a member of the Royal Guard—really just wants to design puzzles and learn to cook the perfect spaghetti. A robot designed to kill humans is a cooking show personality, news anchor, and musical performer. If you pet a dog warrior too many times, its neck joyfully extends to the point that the screen can’t picture it all.

The music for Undertale is also filled with personality. This is due largely to Toby Fox’s extensive use of leitmotifs, short musical ideas associated with Undertale’s characters and places. Fox develops these leitmotifs from the very beginning of the game when the player first encounters Flowey, a cheerful golden flower who teaches the protagonist the basics of Undertale’s gameplay. Flowey’s leitmotif is likewise cheerful, marked by the juvenile naïvety of a nursery-rhymish melody. This leitmotif is almost immediately reframed as sinister as Flowey attempts to viciously attack the protagonist: “You idiot! In this world, it’s kill or BE killed.”

By the end of the True Pacifist Route, Flowey returns as the final boss and his happy leitmotif returns in the tracks “Hope and Dreams” and “SAVE the World” to signal his former childlike innocence as Asriel, Flowey’s former self and the prince of the Underground. It’s very effective, but far from the only incredible use of leitmotif. For more, I recommend Jason Yu’s series of essays dissecting the appearances of leitmotifs in Undertale.

Beyond leitmotif, the Undertale soundtrack is filled with sarcastic humor. A track that accompanies a bird that carries you over a disproportionately small gap (entitled “Bird That Carries You Over a Disproportionately Small Gap”), for instance, is epic and grandiose.2 Not at all does it fit the imagery of a small bird carrying you over a gap that you could easily jump across, but it does make you chuckle.

The soundtrack also seems to remember the kind of player you choose to be. Following the game’s Neutral route—defeating some enemies while sparing others—Undertale ends with an epic, emotionally charged boss battle against the sympathetic King Asgore, complete with music to match the inevitable tragic conclusion to the battle. The Pacifist route, by contrast, culminates in a long, narratively powerful battle against Flowey/Asriel, underscored by music that shifts between unsettlingly soulless and fervently uplifting, reflecting both trauma and redemption. The Genocide route ends with the massively popular track “MEGALOVANIA,” a piece that reframes you—the protagonist-turned-antagonist—as the game’s final boss.

Undertale is truly a marvel in indie game development and game music. Almost single-handedly, Toby Fox created a gaming touchstone with cult-status music and catalyzed the rise of indie developers to prominence in the game industry.

3 • Donkey Kong Bananza (2025)

Developer: Nintendo EPD (Production Group No. 8)

Music: Naoto Kubo (lead), Daisuke Matsuoka, Reika Nakai, Yuri Goto, and Tsukasa Usui (with original music by Yukio Kaneoka, David Wise, Eveline Fischer Novakovic, Robin Beanland, and Grant Kirkhope)

My Rating: 4.5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

• Lagoon Layer

• Mossplume Marsh (Forest Layer) – I’m always a sucker for Gamelan aesthetics.

• Eggshell Hotel Annex (Forest Layer) – And then they add a jazz trio to Gamelan?! Wow!

• Banandium Root Tower (“Gangplank Galleon” from Donkey Kong Country)

• “Breaking Through (Heart of Gold)” Vocals performed by Jenny Kidd.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t understand Donkey Kong Bananza at first. People were treating it like the best thing since sliced bread when it came out in July, but I was mostly bored by trying to find fossils and banana chips by smashing all the terrain to oblivion.

I really had to look inward at my approach to playing video games to get why I didn’t agree with everyone else. When I was still in the tutorial area of Bananza after playing for five hours, it occurred to me that my biggest weakness as a gamer is my proclivity towards completionism. Completionism is the biggest hindrance to enjoying a game like Donkey Kong Bananza, where thousands of collectibles exist solely so you don’t have to collect them all.

Once I got past my urge to get each of the one thousand Banandium Gems, I was finally able to enjoy how radically bonkers and self-referential Bananza is. Donkey Kong games have never really had a coherent plot. Most of the time, they revolve around a massive crocodile stealing DK’s hoard of bananas and the subsequent globetrotting quest to recover them. Bananza’s plot is similarly nonsensical. DK and his pal Pauline race against Void Kong to reach the wish-granting Heart of Gold at the center of the Earth. Naturally, DK’s greatest wish is for a hoard of bananas. The narrative is goofy, but suddenly becomes totally immersive in the game’s final act due to a massive(ly foreshadowed) plot twist related to the fourth Definitive Music Track I listed above.

Donkey Kong Bananza follows the traditions of three separate Nintendo franchises. Most obviously, it picks up where Donkey Kong 64 (1999) left off, returning the titular gorilla to a massive three-dimensional world with more than enough collectibles, interesting characters and enemies, and dozens of mini-games sprinkled throughout which frequently make reference to levels from the side-scrolling Donkey Kong Country (DKC) series (1994–). Musically, too, Bananza regularly ties in themes from previous titles, including Eveline Novakovic’s “Stickerbush Symphony” from DKC 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambience” from DKC.

Bananza was developed by Nintendo EPD’s Production Group No. 8, the same team that produced Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey. This lineage is obvious in Bananza’s mechanical fluidity, which affords players the freedom to make wild leaps and simply have fun in its game world.

Donkey Kong Bananza also restores The Legend of Zelda series’s fixation on the power of music. Especially in the Y2K-era Zelda games—Ocarina of Time (1998), Majora’s Mask (2000), and The Wind Waker (2002)—music often plays a diegetic narrative role in the Zelda series as a source of and conduit for magic and personal autonomy. In Bananza, music—and particularly the singing voice of Donkey Kong’s companion Pauline—has the power to transform Donkey Kong into various “Bananza” forms including a speedy zebra and an ostrich that inexplicably has the ability to fly.

Bananza has some of the most understated yet effective musical interactivity of any game I’ve played. This is largely due to the prevalence of Fractones—mineral-based lifeforms that guide Donkey Kong and Pauline on their quest. Any interaction with a Fractone from normal conversation to just punching them cues musical sound effects that smoothly weave into the musical architecture of whichever location DK happens to find himself in. Like battles in The Wind Waker, this allows players to directly collaborate in the construction of Bananza’s music. Pretty cool stuff!

Nintendo will forever advertise Bananza with its credits song “Breaking Through (Heart of Gold).” It’s so corny and makes the game’s central metaphor so blatantly clear that it almost makes it ineffective. But it’s funny, so I like it.

2 • Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023)

Developer: Larian Studios

Music: Borislav Slavov

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

• Main Theme I

• “The Odds Are Cast Anew” – Battle Theme

• Bard Dance

I have tried for years to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I played as a bard in a campaign with my dad and sisters. I impromptu DM’ed a campaign with a friend group in college. I put a lot of effort into DM’ing for another college friend group. None of these campaigns lasted longer than one session. I was finally able to experience a Dungeons & Dragons campaign when, while crashing at my friends’ house, I discovered Baldur’s Gate 3. Finally I didn’t have to deal with other people’s schedules!

Baldur’s Gate 3 starts like any D&D campaign: making a character sheet. It took me nearly two hours to craft my halfling bard, read up on cantrips and spells, and develop a backstory. I lovingly named them Glorgio.

As a bard, I was proficient in instrumental performance. I could play violin, lute, flute, and drums like nobody’s business. My companions—a vampire rogue, an emo cleric, and a humorless warrior—were unfortunately not gifted in the musical department and couldn’t join me in playing tunes like “Bard Dance,” “Old Time Battles,” and “The Power.” Luckily, I eventually jammed out with some carnies while onlookers threw coins at us.

Music plays several roles within and outside of BG3’s diegesis. Like with Undertale, BG3 makes liberal use of leitmotifs, with musical themes that represent Bhaal (D&D’s God of Murder), Mind Flayers, a charismatic tyrant, and J.K. Simmons (the God of Death’s “Chosen”). There are also happier and more heroic themes, like the Baldur’s Gate theme that appears in almost every track.

Some of BG3’s strongest music lies in its battle cues, which scale in intensity from skirmishes with goblin raiders to an apocalyptic clash against a gargantuan brain for the fate of all living things. At one point, a devil even sings his own boss theme with operatic bravado, albeit with some very dumb lyrics.

If you play as a bard, music is also the source of your power. Musical performance allows you to persuade, deceive, distract, heal, and inspire all rolled into one (or, ideally, a 20).

When I reached Act III after over fifty hours of gameplay, I realized I had missed so many storylines and opportunities in Acts I and II. After defeating the Elder Brain and Mind Flayer army with Glorgio and their motley crew, I immediately started a new campaign as an amnesiac wood elf with diabolic ancestry and the urge to murder indiscriminately. I make sure they resist that urge, though. I couldn’t resist, however, making them a bard.

1 • Mario Kart World (2025)

Developer: Nintendo EPD (Production Group No. 9)

Music: Atsuko Asahi (lead), Maasa Miyoshi, Takuhiro Honda, and Yutaro Takakuwa

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

• Great ?-Block Ruins

• Dry Bones Burnout

• Ground BGM (Country Version) [from Super Mario World (1990)]

• Rosalina in the Observatory (from Super Mario Galaxy [2007])

• Rainbow Road (full)

Holy shit. It should be illegal for a game soundtrack to be this good.

Mario Kart World’s soundtrack is a Mario music jamboree. In addition to compositions and arrangements for the game’s 30 racetracks, World’s music team (led by Atsuko Asahi) arranged an additional 230 tracks from every previous Mario Kart and Super Mario game with others from the Wario and Donkey Kong franchises. Most of these arrangements can only be heard as background music in Mario Kart World’s “Free Roam” mode, a feature that allows players to drive at their leisure through the vast open world that connects each racetrack.

The arrangements reframe original Mario music in entirely new musical contexts. There are samba, bossa nova, and flamenco arrangements. There’s funk, blues, bluegrass, big band, rock band, and honky-tonk. There’s lo-fi hip hop radio beats to relax/study to, ambient music, and rave music. The serene “Sky & Sea” theme from Super Mario Sunshine (2002) is even transformed into a 100 gecs-esque hyperpop fever dream. If you can imagine a music genre, the Mario Kart World music team probably arranged Mario music in it.

Mario Kart World also celebrates the cult status of some Mario music. In an arrangement of Mario Kart 8’s “Dolphin Shoals,” Kazuki Katsuta’s wild saxophone run dubbed the Mario Kart Lick is scored for the entire saxophone section. The arrangement of “Coconut Mall” is somehow more exuberant than it was in Mario Kart Wii.

The music for the new Rainbow Road is one of the greatest pieces of video game music I’ve ever heard. It checks all the boxes for what great game audio should be. First, it’s memorable—its melody simple, effective, and ear-wormy.

Second, it’s adaptive and interactive. A unique section of music is mapped to each of the race’s four sections. As you pass from the exciting first section into the more relaxed second, the music drops to half time and slowly becomes more texturally complex as you make your way through the trickier turns of the section. It’s like the racetrack, the soundtrack, and you are all connected with your behavior being informed by and informing the behavior of the race and music.

Lastly, it’s immersive. A lot of this is due to the ludic aspect of the music playing along with your gameplay (and vice versa). It’s also due to the meticulous mapping of the music’s interest curve to that of the race. Almost without fail, the climax of the soundtrack arrives as you round the curve at the end of the racetrack, and almost without fail, it makes me tear up.

The soundtrack to Mario Kart World is far and away my favorite of any video game.

And don’t even get me started on the gameplay. You can get stamps for doing fun tricks and you can play as a cow! What more do you need in a video game?

Every Game I Played in 2025 (backloggd)

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The Sound of Winter

It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and as of the publishing of this essay, it’s the Twelfth Day of Christmas. There’s a crispness to the air, the sky is almost always overcast, and many places are covered in snow or ice. Depending on where you are, going out is like walking in a winter wonderland. It’s a beautiful sight. In the lane, snow is glistening. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?

If you don’t hear sleigh bells around the holidays and the rest of winter, you really must not be listening. They’re everywhere. You especially can’t escape sleigh bells around Christmastime. Sleigh bells have been fixtures of wintry soundscapes for centuries. While no extensive history of sleigh bells has yet been published, the concept of sleigh bells has been attached to winter weather and Yuletide since humans began fixing bells to horses in the winter months. Writing on the history of bells in general in 1928, Satis N. Coleman offers a brief description of sleigh bells and their wintry connotations:

Sleigh bells fastened upon the horses that draw sleighs are still to be heard in all cold climates. Traveling over soft snow is so noiseless that sleigh bells are a necessary safeguard to prevent collisions. The jingle of sleigh bells is a characteristic sound in nearly all towns of Russia during the winter.1

The silence of snowy roads proved sufficiently dangerous that, in the early nineteenth century, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enshrined into law that “No person shall travel on a way with a sleigh or sled drawn by a horse, unless there are at least three bells attached to some part of the harness.”2

Sleigh bells had become a fixture of wintry landscapes by at least the mid-19th century when James Lord Pierpont composed “The One Horse Open Sleigh” (1857), now commonly known as “Jingle Bells.” While its original purpose is disputed,3 “Jingle Bells” has become a perennial Christmas favorite.

One of the earliest appearances of sleigh bells in the Classical repertoire can be heard in Leopold Mozart’s divertimento Die musikalische Schlittenfahrt (The Musical Sleigh Ride; 1755). Among the instrumentation, Leopold Mozart called for five tuned sleigh bells and two whips, the sounds of which were meant to evoke the actual sounds of a sleigh ride. Following his father, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would go on to feature a set of tuned sleigh bells in his Three German Dances (1791), in trio and coda sections nicknamed “Die Schlittenfahrt” (“The Sleigh Ride”). In both of these Schlittenfahrten, the Mozartian sleigh bells maintain a steady pulse reflective of a horse’s trotting pace.

This metronomic, sleigh ride-evoking role for sleigh bells in classical repertoire extends well beyond the flourishing of the Mozarts. In line with Coleman’s characterization of Russian towns, Sergei Prokofiev utilized sleigh bells heavily in the “Troika” scene from the Soviet film Lieutenant Kijé (1934), mapping a drunken sleigh ride to the jingles of sleigh bells in his score. Leroy Anderon’s Sleigh Ride (1948) is likely the most popular instance of sleigh bells in classical literature and has become a staple of the American Christmas season. Through all of these examples, the use of sleigh bells has become a compositional shortcut for evoking not just sleigh rides, but winter festivities by extension.

Audiovisual media have long used sleigh bells to signify the holidays and winter.4 This is particularly evident in prominent films scored by John Williams including Home Alone (1990) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). Video game soundtracks in particular are well known for including sleigh bells to add festive flair to snowbound levels and worlds.

In a 2022 Music Theory Online article, Megan Lavengood and Evan Williams used informatic methods to trace common musical features associated with snowy video game areas.5 They discuss five “core characteristics” including heavy reverb, arpeggiated textures, metallic percussion (including sleigh bells), plucked/pizzicato strings, and a lack of membranophones (that is, most drums).6 They also look into the intersections of these elements with Christmas music, popular music of the 1980s, and the waltz as further signifiers of wintry game locales.7 While Lavengood and Williams define winter as a musical topic and demonstrate how video games can serve as a model for further topical explorations, their essay does not address how winter music operates holistically across aesthetics and gameplay.

In this essay, I offer a different framework for understanding the winter topic in video games by dividing winter music into two broad categories: Frigid Music, which relates to wintry environments and conditions, and Festive Music, which relates to winter holidays and celebrations. The ways in which Frigid and Festive Music are employed in games provide players with ludic signals that shape strategy and expectations, while also revealing a game’s broader aesthetic and experiential goals.

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Frigid Music

Frigid Music places the environmental conditions of winter in the foreground; there is little, if any warmth embedded in Frigid Music. The sound of Frigid Music is characterized by slow (or unmoving) harmonies, sparse textures, piercing melodies, and heavy reverb. A lack of harmonic and rhythmic propulsion in Frigid Music is symbolic of icy stasis. The sparseness and slow-movingness of Frigid Music allows environmental sound effects—such as wind gusts and crunching footsteps—to take equal importance with the background music. The naturalistic sounds of wind and snow further elicit wintry feelings.

~ Phendrana Drifts, Metroid Prime

The music that accompanies the snowy Phendrana Drifts of Metroid Prime (2002) is a prime (pun intended) example of this kind of Frigid Music. The music opens with an electronic drone that immediately establishes a sense of frozen stasis and isolation. A piano enters shortly after, echoing arpeggiations—one of Lavengood and Williams’s quintessential aspects of winter music—in its upper registers. Synthesized tones enter intermittently, dissipating almost as soon as they sound like snowflakes melting as they land on a river. In the case of the Phendrana Drifts, Frigid Music speaks to both harsh and beautiful aspects of wintry environments by simultaneously eliciting isolation and the elegance of snow.

Harsh Frigid Music

In its harshest form, Frigid Music depicts winter as an active threat, scoring video game settings in which freezing conditions pose a threat to the player avatar. While the music of the Phendrana Drifts kept room for the harshness of winter, it does not really communicate a sense that the location is a difficult place to exist or traverse. After all, Samus, the bounty-hunting protagonist of the Metroid series (1986–), has a well-insulated spacesuit, so winter weather does not bother her.

Harsh Frigid Music often accompanies scenarios of Character vs. Nature, where the player is pitted against subzero conditions. This game design approach has become a staple of recent games in the Legend of Zelda series (1986–) from Breath of the Wild (2017) to Echoes of Wisdom (2024). The former was the first game in the series to introduce dynamic weather conditions for players to adapt to temperature, requiring them to put on suitable clothing or concocting special potions. Trekking through Breath of the Wild’s frozen landscapes without a warm doublet or Spicy Elixir results in Link steadily losing health to the cold.

The game’s background music likewise adapts to the climate. In Breath of the Wild’s cold climates, like the one shown above, the music is devoid of warmth and reinforces the danger presented by the freezing temperatures.

~ Field (Freezing), Breath of the Wild

The music that plays when Link explores cold climates feels incredibly empty, even compared to other sparsely-scored locations in Breath of the Wild. There are only two main groups of instruments to be heard in the track: hand percussion and synthesizers. The hand percussion instruments are generally the first sounds heard when entering a cold area and include shaker, tambourine, and something that sounds like a pair of claves.8 The synthesizers intermittently sound stratospheric cluster chords. Each instrument, however, seems to enter at random, and there is no discernible tonality to ground players as they make their way through areas like the Hebra Mountains or the Mount Hylia. Pairing health depletion with music that offers no rhythmic or harmonic comfort, the game encourages the player to do whatever they can to ensure even the smallest bit of warmth during extended journeys in the cold.

The emptiness of the cue also foregrounds the interaction between environmental sound effects and the pre-composed music. As much as the shaker and synth clusters, Link’s labored steps through deep snow and wind are essential to the sonic architecture of snow-covered regions in Breath of the Wild. It seems, in fact, that the music was written to supplement these two environmental sounds. The timbre of the hand percussion blends with Link’s crunchy footsteps and the synth clusters are tied closely with the sound of wind. In this way, the entire sonic architecture contributes to the harshness Link faces in Hyrule’s snowy areas.

Beautiful Frigid Music

On the other end of the spectrum, Beautiful Frigid Music paints a picture of the endearing aspects of winter. This character of music takes inspiration from works Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Snowflakes” which sonify snowfall and the calm of a landscape blanketed with snow. While Yamamoto and Kyuma’s cue for the Phendrana Drifts differs greatly from anything written by Tchaikovsky,9 its sonification of melting snow nonetheless depicts the sublime beauty of winter weather.

More specifically, Beautiful Frigid Music mimics the kinds of aesthetic marvels discussed in Felix Bernard and Richard Bernhard Smith’s “Winter Wonderland” (1934), namely, the falling of snowflakes, the glistening of snow already on the ground, and the serene stillness of landscapes blanketed by snow. Where Harsh Frigid Music frames these as hazards, Beautiful Frigid Music invites players to stop and smell the snow, as it were.

An example of this kind of music is heard in Toby Fox’s self-published Undertale (2015), for which he also composed the soundtrack. Upon leaving the game’s tutorial area, the protagonist Frisk enters the Snowdin Forest (read: snowed-in) and Fox’s “Snowy” cue sounds for the first time. Like several examples of winter music examined by Lavengood and Williams, the range of “Snowy” is limited to relatively high pitches played by piano, strings, and piccolo. The piano in particular performs with a dry staccato articulation similar to the sound of pizzicato strings. The entire track is mixed with a heavy reverb reflective of the way in which sound travels across compacted snow.

Festive Music

Festive Music exists in a separate realm from Frigid Music. In a sense, it ignores the natural phenomena associated with winter that Frigid Music seeks to sonify. Sleigh bells might still “sound” like a flurry of snow, but Festive Music idealizes motion, human presence, and social meaning behind snowy spaces and the holidays that land in the winter months. A touchstone example of this kind of music is heard in the Freezeezy Peak level of Banjo-Kazooie (1998). A sleigh bell pulse underpins the entire Freezeezy Peak cue. Lush string choirs, brass choirs, and baritone saxophone lend a sense of timbral warmth. Like many Christmas carols, too, Freezeezy’s bass line maintains a near constant root-fifth motion. All of these elements tie the cue to Christmas music classics that put you in the mood to bake cookies and pass presents around.

~ Freezeezy Peak, Banjo-Kazooie

Sleigh Ride Music

Like Frigid Music before, Festive Music can be split into its own categories. The first approach to Festive Music is predominantly characterized by the jingling, ring, ting, and tingling of sleigh bells. Discussed briefly in the introduction, video games have long capitalized on the wintry connotations of sleigh bells. Often, game composers may simply add a sleigh bell ostinato to an existing track to make it more wintry. Take, for example, the Frosted Glacier overworld theme from New Super Mario Bros. U (2013). The music that accompanies the snowy levels in the Frosted Glacier area is a near-direct copy of that from the earlier Acorn Plains overworld music, now with sleigh bells added for a three-horsespeed rhythmic propulsion.

~ Snowball Park, Super Mario 3D World

Many instances of Sleigh Ride Music take Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride as a compositional model. The music for the Snowball Park level in Super Mario 3D World (2013), for example, borrows many of Sleigh Ride’s characteristic musical ideas for its construction. The first, and most obvious, is a constant sleigh bell pulse that suggests a steady horse trot. Another is heard in the bass line, which follows the same lilting emphasis on beats one and four heard at the tail of Anderson’s introduction to Sleigh Ride. Harmonically, both pieces also lean on a ii⁷–V⁷–I⁷ progression typical of the jazz standards that influenced American Christmas music. The Snowball Park cue may only be 54 seconds long, but it encapsulates so much of what makes Sleigh Ride sound so energetically festive.

Many other examples of Sleigh Ride Music come from racing games like those in the Mario Kart series (1992–). Racetracks like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s (2014, 2017) version of Snow Land in particular use Sleigh Ride Music to accelerate musical and ludic momentum as racers avoid crashing into tobogganing penguins on the way to the finish line.

~ Snow Land, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Hot Cocoa Music

A final type of Festive Music evokes the feeling of sipping hot cocoa, sitting by a fire, and celebrating the season with others. Hot Cocoa Music borrows heavily from popular American Christmas music, leaning on jazz harmonies, and a vague bittersweetness. Like Sleigh Ride Music, Hot Cocoa Music has a clear major tonality and frequently makes use of sleigh bells, though as timbral ornamentation and not as backbone. Hot Cocoa music generally appears in villages and home interiors—areas safe from harsh conditions and filled with people.

~ Toy Day (Snowy Weather), Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Hot Cocoa Music can be heard in the track that plays during Toy Day celebrations in the Animal Crossing series (2000–). The iteration of the Toy Day music heard in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) particularly exemplifies Hot Cocoa Music through its jazz harmonies, relaxed tempo, and instrumentation (including brass, accordion, and sleigh bells). The coziness of the Toy Day cue prompts players to enjoy the day by bringing gifts to their anthropomorphic neighbors and participating in other low-stakes festivities.

A good portion of Hot Cocoa Music tends to be written in the form of a jazz waltz. While the waltz does not inherently signify holiday cheer in video games,10 it has a long-standing association with winter holidays. From the three prominent waltzes in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (1891) to Frank Sinatra’s “The Christmas Waltz” (1954) and the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Skating” from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), waltzes have become fixtures in the pantheon of Christmas music. Festive video game waltzes rely on an implicit understanding of the intertextuality to affirm their festiveness. This intertext, along with other wintry signifiers, clearly communicates a sense of intimate holiday cheer.

~ Snowman, EarthBound

An example of this waltzy Hot Cocoa Music can be heard in “Snowman,” the music that serves as the snow-covered location cue heard in each game of the Mother/EarthBound series (1989–2006). Musical ideas in the “Snowman” iteration heard in EarthBound (1994; known as Mother 2 in Japan) particularly resemble those in the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Skating.” Both tracks rely heavily on modal mixture and favor mostly scalar, running eighth-note melodic passages. And of course, “Snowman” features the sound of sleigh bells.

~ Winters White, EarthBound

EarthBound’s soundtrack also includes a non-waltz example of Hot Cocoa Music in the track “Winters White,” which plays in the land of Winters. Like others in the Festive Music category, the track makes heavy use of sleigh bells. The most interesting harmonic feature of “Winters White” is the interplay between the major and minor modes throughout the cue, creating a sense of bittersweetness inherent to many holiday songs since “White Christmas” (1942).11 Additionally, its bright synth timbres and pop-oriented harmonies align it with ‘80s and ‘90s Christmas pop songs, such as Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (1984) and the bridge of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (1994).

Both of EarthBound’s Hot Cocoa examples, however, introduce a form of ludonarrative dissonance. “Snowman” and “Winters White” accompany areas that are demonstrably unsafe and, at times, more difficult than much of the surrounding game. Rather than reinforcing a sense of comfort or security, the warmth of these cues softens the player’s perception of danger. In EarthBound, then, Hot Cocoa Music does not communicate festivity insofar as it reframes the relative danger of Winters through a festive lens.

Frigid and Festive Music as Extensions of Ludic and Aesthetic Goals

Both Frigid and Festive Music play roles beyond signifying winter weather. Music has been used for its ability to evoke winter since Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1725) at the very least, so the continuation of wintry music in video games is nothing special.

What is special is how winter music shapes the way in which players interact with game worlds and rules. At their core, Frigid and Festive Music function similarly to the danger- and safety-state music first described by Zach Whalen in 2004.12 Like danger-state music, Frigid Music generally warns players to stay safe while facing the elements. Festive Music, on the other hand, communicates safety, social presence, and permission to engage playfully with winter environments.

As we saw above, Harsh Frigid Music urges the player to properly equip themselves for freezing temperatures or find shelter in Breath of the Wild. Beautiful Frigid Music functions differently, encouraging players to consider the connection between snowy sounds and visuals. This is aligned with Michiel Kamp’s definition of aesthetic hearing, which causes players to pause and consider the connection between a game’s audio and diegetic environment. By way of example, Kamp points to unauthored moments of beauty in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) when musical cues serendipitously accentuate the visual beauty of Skyrim’s snowy landscapes and mountains.13 Beautiful Frigid Music affords players the ability to move slowly through frozen landscapes while enjoying both music and graphics.

Sleigh Ride Music, like what we heard in Super Mario 3D World, simultaneously encourages frivolity and haste. After all, Mario generally only has 400 in-game seconds to finish each level before time runs out and he has to start over. The forward momentum of Sleigh Ride Music pushes the player to finish the level in time while still enjoying the winter wonderland they find themselves in and skating in an oversized shoe. This approach is probably most apparent in racing games such as those in the Mario Kart series that routinely score wintry racetracks with Sleigh Ride Music.

Different modes of winter music also reveal the overall affective goals of a video game. By highlighting naturalistic sounds in and around its Harsh Frigid Music, Breath of the Wild affirms its commitment to immersing players in the realistic environments that make up its massive open world. Likewise, the whimsy of Snowball Park’s music matches with the imaginative whimsy and relative absurdity of the Super Mario franchise (1985–).

Earlier we looked into the dissonant relationship between Festive Music and ludic challenge in EarthBound’s wintry zones. The game’s narrative hinges on a conflict between childlike innocence and corruption, as its four young protagonists traverse a game world that is at once quirky, wondrous, and genuinely disturbing. The ludomusical dissonance players experience in Winters, therefore, affirms the innocence–corruption dichotomy at the core of EarthBound’s narrative.

Conclusion

Of course, the separation between Frigid and Festive Music is not a hard and fast border. As with the EarthBound examples, there will be instances of Festive Music mapped to dangerous game worlds. There are also games that opt not to score their cold zones with typical winter signifiers. This is true for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), which sporadically cues contemplative tracks when exploring its open world that don’t necessarily communicate anything about how dangerous its snow may be.

When video games do use winter signifiers, they invariably relate to their aesthetic goals. From Breath of the Wild and EarthBound to Undertale and Metroid Prime, the way in which composers employ festive and frigid musical ideas advances the goal of their respective games in regard to player experience.

A final example that affirms the relationship between winter music and broader aesthetic goals can be heard in Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (1999) in a level titled “Totally Scrooged.”

Based on hearing the track, let me know in the comments what you think they were going for with that one.

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Bibliography

Atkinson, Sean E. “Soaring Through the Sky: Topics and Tropes in Video Game Music.” Music Theory Online 25, no. 2 (2019).

Coleman, Satis N. Bells: Their History, Legends, Making, and Uses. Chicago; New York: Rand McNally, 1928.

Hamill, Kyna. “‘The Story I Must Tell’: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire.” Theatre Survey 58, no. 3 (2017): 375–403.

Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Lavengood, Megan, and Evan Williams. “The Common Cold: Using Computational Musicology to Define the Winter Topic in Video Game Music.” Music Theory Online 29, no. 3 (2023).

Schartmann, Andrew. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack. 33 1/3. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Whalen, Zach. “Play Along: An Approach to Videogame Music.” Game Studies 4, no. 1 (2004).

Ludography

Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory. EarthBound. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.

Bethesda Game Studios. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Various consoles. Music by Jeremy Soule. Rockville, MD: Bethesda Softworks, 2011.

Crystal Dynamics and Gratuitous Games. Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko. PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Music by John Baker, Jim Hedges, and Burke Trieschmann. London: Eidoes Interactive; Newport Beach, CA: Crave Entertainment, 1999.

Fox, Toby. Undertale. PC. Music by Toby Fox. Boston: Toby Fox, 2015.

Nintendo EAD. New Super Mario Bros. U. Wii U. Music by Shiho Fujii and Mahito Yokota. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2012.

Nintendo EAD and Nintendo EPD. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Nintendo Switch. Music by Shiho Fujii, Atsuko Asahi, Ryo Nagamatsu, Yasuaki Iwata, and Kenta Nagata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017. Additional downloadable content added from 2022–23.

Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Super Mario 3D World. Wii U. Music by Mahito Yokota, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, and Yasuaki Iwata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2013.

Nintendo EPD. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo Switch. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yuma Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi, and Masato Ohashi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2020.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Wii U and Nintendo Switch. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

Retro Studios. Metroid Prime. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuma. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2002.

Rockstar Games. Red Dead Redemption 2. Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Music by Woody Jackson. New York: Rockstar Games, 2018.

A Day in the Life in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Being a mayor is tough. In my small village of Hobbiton, I do all the landscaping, I check in on my villagers and do chores their chores, and I fund all of my public works projects.

And as the sole donor to the museum uptown, I also have to hunt for fossils. Before I can do that, though, I need to make a quick trip to the local supermarket, because after smashing every rock in the village to uncover pill bugs and a couple coins, my shovel broke!

My trip to the Nookling’s shop is one of necessity, but as I enter, I’m suddenly in the mood to shop around. There’s a stereo system in the back corner that catches my eye, wallpaper that might work nicely in my kitchen, and some medicine that would be nice to have in case of a bee attack. I don’t know why I spent ten minutes inspecting everything in Timmy and Tommy’s T&T Mart. Maybe it was the inviting personalities of the young tanooki twins that operate the store or the assortment of goods available for purchase. Most likely, though, it was the cool bossa nova playing over the loudspeakers.

While music has been practiced for its ability to elevate worker synergy since ancient times, it was the company Muzak that first capitalized on piping soothing music into workplaces and retail spaces in 1934. Since then, Muzak has become infamous for creating “elevator music,” a genre of easy-listening music that scores the background of many commercial settings. Bossa nova, as illustrated in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, is commonly associated with Muzak.

In this essay, I want to look at the origins of both the Muzak company and the bossa nova movement. I am particularly interested in exploring how the rise of bossa nova situated the genre for its near-ubiquitous use in elevator music and commercial spaces. In the end, I will explain the trajectory of bossa nova from its origins to its use as a musical shorthand for commerce in video games.

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Elevator Music: The Soundtrack of Consumerism

The company that would become Muzak was founded by electrical engineer George Owen Squier. Before becoming Chief Signal Officer during World War I, Squier devised a system in which living trees could be used as antennae to transmit radio signals. He is also credited with inventing telephony multiplexing in 1910, a process through which multiple radio signals could share a single telephone wire before being dispersed to their respective outputs. Squier founded Wired Radio, a sort of subscription service that piped music to homes, in 1922 as radio’s consumer-base surged and radio exploded into everyday life.1 Wired Radio was rebranded as Muzak in 1934, inspired by the commercial success of George Eastman’s Kodak camera company.

As wireless radio became more accessible in the residential market, Muzak shifted its focus to department stores, hotels, and restaurants. In these settings, Muzak pioneered the field of audio architecture, programming music to fit specific audiences and settings. By the forties, Muzak programmed music to fit what it dubbed the Stimulus Progression, “which held that most workers would be more productive if they were exposed to music of gradually increasing intensity, in fifteenminute [sic] cycles.”2 Stimulus progressions generally begin with groggy, placid tunes before moving into more upbeat tracks as workers’ coffee kicked in. The image below is an advertisement for Muzak depicting a woman whose mood progressively brightens throughout a stimulus progression.

From its inception until the 1980s, Muzak’s programming mainly featured dull arrangements of popular music (typically jazz) performed by studio orchestras along with similarly unassuming tracks commissioned from popular musicians. Particularly in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Muzak shaped and popularized the genre of music that came to be known as easy-listening, even becoming a metonym for the genre (like Band-Aid and Styrofoam).

Below is the tune “At Seventeen” from the Muzak Archive’s The Mall Tales Volume 1.

Following a period in which Muzak’s programming moved farther and farther away from popular music tastes, the company began programming popular vocal music after merging with competitor Yesco in 1986. It was at this time that Muzak made a shift from instrumental background music to vocal foreground music. Muzak’s product lines would eventually become “barely distinguishable from existing FM radio stations.”3 After some questionable bankruptcies, restructures, and a failed merger with its competitor DMX, Muzak was acquired by Mood Media in 2011 (along with DMX). Mood Media provides its clients with a variety of tools to regulate consumer engagement including in-store signage and advertisements, scents, audio messages, and curated music playlists.

The mood regulation of Muzak playlists has been co-opted by modern streaming services, too. Music platforms like Pandora, Apple Music, and Spotify curate mixes to fit certain vibes. Apple Music (my platform of choice) makes use of an algorithm that generates a number of “radio” stations named for music-listening moods including “Chill,” “Get Up!” and “Heartbreak.”4 Critics of these platforms note the deleterious effects they have on the music industry by reducing the efficacy of labels and poorly compensating artists. At the same time, the end result of these mood-based playlists places nearly all music under the Muzak umbrella, transforming all music into “emotional wallpaper.”5

Muzak in the Background

From its adoption in office and commercial spaces, Muzak was primarily in the business of mood regulation. Described by film musicologist Claudia Gorbman, Muzak’s easy-listening music is meant to reduce “the displeasure engendered by the economic tensions of shopping and the physical fear of dentists’ drills,”6 to help “the consumer buy, the patient relax, the worker work; its goal is to render the individual an untroublesome social subject.”7 In fact, both Owen and Lanza purport Muzak’s colloquial reputation as “elevator music” is owed to its probable use “in early skyscrapers to make people feel less nervous about stepping into a contrivance that looked like a death trap.”8

Muzak’s music programming is designed for the background. As background, easy-listening music is not meant to be attended to, but “something you hear without listening.”9 Easy-listening is, in essence, the music of mood. It is meant to register on the subconscious without the need for interpretation. Joseph Lanza explains that Muzak “shifts music from figure to ground, to encourage peripheral hearing.”10 In gestalt psychology, the terms “figure” and “ground” are quintessential to perception. A figure—the object of our attention—is understood in reference to the ground over which we perceive it. The text of a book contrasts with the page on which it is printed so it can more easily be read. We know the page is there, but it exists in the background. We don’t need to know anything about the page to understand the text.11

This figure-ground relationship is key to Muzak. Perhaps ironically, listening to music is not the goal of easy-listening, but to linger in the background as we attend to other things. Ludomusicologist Michiel Kamp argues that this kind of background hearing is “so understanding that no explanation is necessary.”12 As shoppers, we know there is music playing over the loudspeakers, but we don’t need to listen to it to know why Muzak exists as the ground over which other activities—work, shopping, coffeeshop chit-chat—can be attended to.

A Brief History of Bossa Nova

In essence, bossa nova is characterized as a mixture of Brazilian samba and American jazz. Described by Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha,

Bossa nova was a new type of samba in which the genre’s rhythmic complexity had been pared down to its bare essentials, transformed into a different kind of beat. It was full of unusual harmonies and syncopations, all expressed with a sophisticated simplicity. . . This “new fashion” or “new way” . . . of singing, playing, and arranging songs was born in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s.13

Even more, Bryan McCann and Irna Priore argue bossa nova’s flavor is owed primarily to its rhythmic character—its batida de violão (guitar beat)—developed by guitarist and singer João Gilberto.14

Perhaps the earliest catalyst in the development of the bossa nova movement came in 1956 with the stage play Orfeu da Conceição (Orpheus of the Conception), written by Vinícius de Moraes with music by Tom Jobim based on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth. Jobim and de Moraes would become frequent collaborators, writing the song “Chega de Saudade” in 1957. Although Elizeth Cardoso’s performance of the song for the 1958 album Canção do Amor Demais is generally considered the first recording of bossa nova, it was João Gilberto’s rendition on the album Chega de Saudade (1959) that received bossa nova’s first major commercial success and began to truly define the bossa style.15 Together, de Moraes, Jobim, and Gilberto would go on to become what McCann dubs the “bossa nova triumvirate.”16

It was the same year that Orfeu da Conceição was adapted into the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) by French director Marcel Camus using music by Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. Black Orpheus won the Palme d’Or (the highest prize) at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1959, and “went on to become a surprise success in the United States,”17 launching the cool sounds of bossa nova into the global spotlight.

By 1962, bossa had been fully exported to the United States when Carnegie Hall hosted a bossa nova festival featuring the triumvirate (Jobim, de Moraes, and Gilberto), Bonfá, Sérgio Mendez, and American saxophonist Stan Getz, among others. Two years later, Gilberto and Getz released their first duo album Getz/Gilberto (1964) which included the massively popular “Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl from Ipanema”) written by Jobim and de Moraes. Getz/Gilberto is highly regarded as the most influential (and best known) bossa nova album, with “The Girl from Ipanema” quickly becoming a jazz standard. Much of the album’s success is due to the participation of Astrud Gilberto, whose voice “provided the ineffable allure that made the album irresistible” and “enabled it to cross over to pop success.”18

The Girl from Ipanema:

A Bossa Nova for the American Middle Class

The global breakout of bossa in the early 1960s coincided with a wave of American consumerism following the Second World War. Consumer-based societies were “championed as the bright future to which the ravaged economies must direct themselves.”19 Magazines and the increasingly-accessible television promoted consumption and the growing affluence of the middle class added more fuel to the consumer frenzy. The retail space grew astronomically and Muzak’s market was larger than ever. For Muzak programmers capitalizing on both the consumer and bossa movements, the cool restraint and popularity of the bossa nova made the style ideal background music. While other cool genres filled Muzak playlists, bossa nova “acquired . . . connotations as the archetypal ‘background’ muzak of airport lounges and shopping malls[.]”20

The most well-known bossa, “The Girl from Ipanema” may well be the most well-known Muzak arrangement. When Muzak merged with Yesco in 1986, however, it gradually left behind its elevator music-style arrangements in favor of popular vocal music. Many retail spaces in the last three decades have used Muzak playlists that are nearly indistinguishable from radio programming (or the “chill” playlists of popular streaming services).21 Even so, the cultural connection between retail spaces and bossa had already been cemented in the public imagination.

John Landis was the first to use “The Girl from Ipanema” to poke fun at elevator music in his 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Landis would use “The Girl from Ipanema” as an in-joke for any scene taking place in an elevator going forward, and the bossa standard has since been used for similar scenes in films and TV series like Catch Me if You Can (2002), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Severance (2022–). Dreamworks Animation’s Shrek (2001) even uses an easy-listening bossa nova as the eponymous ogre and his companion Donkey enter a seemingly-abandoned spoof of Disneyland.

Because of its historical placement and its appearances in Hollywood scores, bossa nova is inextricably linked to the aesthetics of Muzak. It has become shorthand for commercial settings, corporate ambience, and the sonic wallpaper of American consumer culture.

“Buy Somethin’ Will Ya!” — Bossa Nova in the Background of Video Games

Since at least Super Mario Bros. (1986) and its calypso-tinged “Ground Theme,”22 video games (and Nintendo games in particular) have been indebted to the grooves of Latin and Caribbean music to provide rhythmic drive and excitement.23 Because of associations with the sandy beaches of Rio de Janeiro and the Caribbean, Latin music most often accompanies coastal game levels or areas. In fact, video game composers Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu almost exclusively score beach levels with bossa nova within the Super Mario (1985–) and Final Fantasy (1987–) series, respectively.24

Koji Kondo, “World 3 Map” (a beach-themed map), from Super Mario Bros. 3.

In the introduction to this essay, I noted the bossa nova that plays while shopping at T&T Mart in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Other games in the Animal Crossing series use bossa in similar settings, including the Able Sisters’s clothing store and portions of music heard in the Dodo Airlines boarding area in New Horizons (2020). The “Girl from Ipanema”/Muzak association is so strong that bossa has become the predominant sound accompanying commercial settings in video games, and can be heard in the Poké Marts of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver (2009), the “Shopping in Wakeport” cue in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (2013), and the MTT Resort hotel in Undertale (2015).

Go Ichinose, “Poké Mart,” from Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver.

Unlike in Hollywood films, however, bossa is not generally utilized for comedic/ironic effect in video games,25 but rather to appeal to a sense of consumerist nostalgia and to further Muzak’s original mission to provide a soothing sonic architecture. In this way, the easy-listening connotations of bossa allow shop themes to cross out of the realm of background hearing. Video game Muzak may at various times play into any of the four modes of hearing outlined by Michiel Kamp: background, aesthetic, ludic, and semiotic.26

As background, the T&T Mart bossa nova barely registers on our conscience, yet puts us in the mood to shop. It can move into the realm of the aesthetic when it causes us to put the controller down for a second, recognize it as Muzak, or vibe out to the cool bossa nova. It becomes ludic (playful) when we play along to the music and, in a state of “childlike glee,”27 make believe that we are shopping in a store with piped-in music. Lastly, through the associations of Muzak and Hollywood, bossa acts within a game’s semiotic system, musically signaling commerce.

Video Game Shops outside the Magic Circle

Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most famous pieces of video game music does not appear in a video game. Preinstalled on the Wii console came the Wii Shop Channel, an online service operating from 2006–2019 that enabled Wii owners to browse, purchase, and download digital games. As a real marketplace, the Wii Shop Channel does not fit within Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle,” a concept adopted by video game theorists which describes the boundary between game worlds and the real world.28 It should go without saying, but the Wii Shop Channel is not a game.

Yet it functions within the same frame of understanding as fictional video game shops. Borrowing the term from Erving Goffman, Mia Consalvo describes frames in terms of their use to “organize our activity and structure our experiences.”29 Existing in the same commercial frame, we understand the T&T Mart and the Wii Shop Channel as digital marketplaces, while each deals in currency with varying degrees of realness. The fact that we use a fictional currency in Animal Crossing: New Leaf keys players into the make-believe nature of the store. The Wii Shop Channel, on the other hand, operated with a system of Wii Points—a digital currency that anticipated the much-loathed rise of microtransactions.

In addition to all the default Wii console music, the Wii Shop Channel theme was written by Kazumi Totaka, the voice of Yoshi and lead composer/sound director for the Animal Crossing series.30 The music is expectedly a bossa nova and its instrumentation Muzak. At the same time, it complicates both genres. Like the Muzak arrangements of the 1980s and before, the Wii Shop Channel removes the bossa nova from its original contexts. Totaka’s bossa does not closely resemble Gilberto’s batida, nor does it have the same poetry of de Moraes. At the same time, the Wii Shop Channel cannot be heard as authentic Muzak—it’s significantly foregrounded and carries a self-aware playfulness.

Rather, the Wii Shop Channel Muzak plays with common musical signifiers in video games. Up to the point the online marketplace launched, bossa nova was already a well-established symbol for real- and game-world commerce. Even The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a high-fantasy with a medieval setting, plays with a faux bossa nova beat in its shops.31 We’ve seen, too, how bossa nova was positioned historically to become Muzak in the real world. As such, Totaka’s music for the Wii Shop Channel stands as a representative of both the real and virtual consumer worlds.

The Wii Shop Channel (Emulated from wiishopchannel.net — the audio is a little funky.)

Conclusion

Bossa nova’s path from its early performances by the bossa triumvirate to virtual shops shows how its cool, easy-going style slowly became one of the defining sounds of everyday consumer life. Through Muzak, it was reshaped into musical architecture—soft, functional, and quietly persuasive. Video games pick up this shorthand, treating bossa not just as pleasant ambience but as a musical symbol. In video games, bossa nova generally tells us that we’re entering a space meant for making purchases and spending too much time at the T&T Mart. It also becomes something we can play along to while we check the prices of shovels and slingshots.

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Software and Ludography

AlphaDream and Good-Feel. Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. Nintendo 3DS. Music by Yoko Shinomura. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2013.

Fox, Toby. Undertale. OS X and Windows. Music by Toby Fox. Boston: Toby Fox, 2015.

Game Freak. Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver. Nintendo DS. Music by Go Ichinose, Shota Kageyama, Hitomi Sato, Junichi Masuda, and Takuto Kitsuta. Tokyo: The Pokémon Company; Kyoto: Nintendo, 2009.

Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Nintendo 3DS. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Atsuko Asahi, and Kazumi Totaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2012.

Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Super Mario 3D World. Wii U. Music by Mahito Yokota, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, and Yasuaki Iwata. Kyoto: Nintendo: 2013.

Nintendo EPD. Miitomo. iOS and Android. Music by Maasa Miyoshi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2016. Discontinued in 2018.

Nintendo R&D4. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System and Arcade. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1986.

———. Super Mario Bros. 3. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1988.

Nintendo Special Planning and Development. Wii Shop Channel. Wii. Music by Kazumi Totaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2006.

Square. Final Fantasy VII. PlayStation. Music by Nobuo Uematsu. Tokyo: Square; Foster City, CA: Sony Computer Entertainment, 1997.

Bibliography

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———. “The Wii Shop Theme can teach you Jazz Songwriting.” September 30, 2023, YouTube video, 17:31.

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Castro, Ruy. Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music that Seduced the World. Chicago: A Cappella, 2000.

Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Consalvo, Mia. “There is No Magic Circle.” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 408–17.

Dietrich, Elise M. “No tempo de Zicartola: Locating Cultural Mediation and Social Change, 1963–65.” Hispania 100, no. 3 (2017): 439–49.

Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

Finn, John C. “Soundtrack of a Nation: Race, Place, and Music in Modern Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Geography 13, no. 2 (2014): 67–95.

Fisher, Andrew. “Hidden Secrets of Kazumi Totaka: Totaka’s Song and its Variations Analyzed.” Ludomusicology 2014 International Conference. University of Chichester, April 10–12, 2014.

Galloway, Kate. “Soundwalking and the Aurality of Stardew Valley: An Ethnography of Listening to and Interacting with Environmental Game Audio.” In Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes and Harmonies, edited by William Gibbons and Steven Reale, 159–78. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Hart, Iain. “Semiotics in Game Music.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 220–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Heazlewood-Dale, James C. “Nintendian Jazz: Centering Jazz in Nintendo’s Approach to Ludic Scoring Practices.” Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 2024.

Higgs, Kerryn. Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Hilton, Matthew. “Consumers and the State since the Second World War.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 611 (2007): 66–81.

Hira, Cadence. “Why Does Shop Music Sound Like SPENDING?” May 31, 2025, YouTube video, 23:23.

Hui, Alexandra. “Muzak-While-You-Work: Programming Music for Industry, 1919–1948.” Historische Anthropologie 22, no. 3 (2014): 364–83.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1938] 1949.

Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: Picador, 1994.

———. “The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music is the Real World Beat!).” Performing Arts Journal 13, no. 3 (1991): 42–53.

McCann, Bryan. “Blues and Samba: Another Side of Bossa Nova History.” Luso-Brazilian Review 44, no. 2 (2007): 21–49.

———. João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Getz/Gilberto. 33 ⅓ Brazil. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

McGowan, Chris, and Ricardo Pessanha. The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music of Brazil. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

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With Halloween in the rearview mirror, it’s officially Thankful Season. This year, I’m thankful for a video game series that has been with me through thick and thin: Mario Kart!

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As with most games of the same genre, the musical macrostructure of each game in the Mario Kart series (1992–) is relatively the same. Each game in the series sticks to a cycle of musical objects and cues represented in Figure 1, a game score graph based on those devised by Jason Brame.1 In the figure, boxes depict individual musical cues. Rounded corners indicate looping cues while sharp corners indicate through-composed cues. Arrows indicate the succession of cues and possible routes between them.

This cycle is more or less uniform across the entire racing game genre, and ties the Mario Kart series to games like Diddy Kong Racing (1997), Sonic R (1997), and even Garfield Kart (2013).

What I’m more interested in, rather, is how a shared musical grammar maintains a sense of unity between each game of the Mario Kart series. In this essay, I’ll take a look at three major sites of unity in the series, beginning with a breakdown of the original Mario Kart’s Title Theme. I then move to a discussion of broader connections across other games in the Super Mario series (1985–) by way of the ubiquitous Final Lap Fanfare. The essay ends with a longer look at three motives that unite the various versions of Rainbow Road that appear in each Mario Kart game. To conclude, I attempt to explain the purpose for this unity: why do games in the Mario Kart series need to resemble each other musically?

The Mario Kart Theme

Reducing a Melody

One way to analyze a melody is through music theorist (and horrible person) Heinrich Schenker’s method of structural reduction. Schenker’s approach involves three main layers of analysis. The first is a foreground analysis, taking a melody as written and tracing its harmonic structure. Below is an example from the Title Theme of Super Mario Kart (what I’ll call the Mario Kart Theme). In the Mario Kart Theme, we hear a straightforward I – II – V – I progression, the II acting as a secondary dominant that pushes toward the V chord.

On the quest for a melody’s fundamental structure (or Ursatz), Schenkerian analysis strains out rhythmic hierarchies and focuses solely on the pitches of a melody. Middle ground analyses, like the one in Figure 3a below, show the main structural pitches with stems pointing upward. Stemless notes are those which run between the structural pitches, showing the movement between them. Solid slurs indicate the motion between notes and dotted slurs indicate pitches that are prolonged within that motion. Figure 3b shows a further reduction, removing the non-structural pitches.

The third step of a Schenkerian analysis gets to the heart of the melody, removing all but the most essential pitches. Figure 4 shows the very basic structure of the Mario Kart Theme; a scalar walk from E down to C with a bass arpeggiation. While the pitch E does not feature in the melody itself, it does appear in the parallel chords under the melody, and can be implied in the fundamental structure.

The background analysis is purposely not very informative on the music we actually hear.2 Rather, it presents the basic form of a melody that other melodies may share. A middle ground analysis, therefore, is much more useful in discussing the contour and motion of a specific melody.

What I’ve shown does not really begin to scratch the surface of Schenkerian analysis. While this sort of reduction has its benefits, the analysis in Figure 5 gets the same point across as a middle ground analysis, showing structural pitches along with embellishing pitches without the hullabaloo of several reductions. Another benefit of this analysis is that it retains the rhythmic structure which, while not crucial to the melody’s tonal structure, can show variation in a theme’s rhythm over time. Plus we won’t have to deal with all the weird music notation innate to the Schenkerian method. I’ll call this the Pretty Middle Ground (PMG) because it’s basically a middle ground and it looks nicer. In essence, this is the stage in reducing a melody before negating rhythms.

Scale Degrees

When we consider these structural pitches, it is often useful to discuss them in terms of scale degrees. Scale degrees follow the solfège classification of pitches within a key center. For example, in C major, C is the first scale degree (do), D is scale degree two (re), and so forth. Scale degrees are notated with carets above the number, as depicted in the example below.

The structural pitches of the Mario Kart Theme, therefore, belong to the scale degrees 5, #4, 2, and 1, as shown below.

The Title Themes

As with the Schenker-lite middle ground from before, it’s also important to consider the movement between each structural pitch. In the Pretty Middle Ground below, movement is illustrated with three differently-colored arrows, representing the following:

• Blue Arrow — chromatic (out-of-key) movement by step.

• Red Arrow — leaps outlining the underlying chordal structure.

• Yellow Arrow — diatonic (in-key) movement by step.

We will see below, that while rhythms may vary, every iteration of the Mario Kart Theme follows the same 5 – #4 – 2 – 1 motion. The rhythm of the Mario Kart Theme is greatly augmented in the second game of the series, Mario Kart 64 (1996), for example. Where the initial G lasts one beat in Super Mario Kart, in Mario Kart 64 it lasts a whopping six beats. Contrary to the original theme, the theme for Mario Kart 64 ends with a leap down to scale degree 5 after its resolution to 1. This prepares our ears for the theme to repeat.

From Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (2003) to Mario Kart 7 (2011), the Mario Kart Theme takes on the same basic rhythmic structure, lingering on scale degree 5 before landing on #4 in the second measure and jumping to scale degree 2 on the upbeat of the second beat. Scale degree 1 comes fleetingly on the upbeat of beat 4 in measure 3 before landing on scale degree 5 on beat two of the final measure, setting up a repeat.

Figures 10a–d. PMGs of the Title Themes of Mario Kart games from 2003–11.

When the Mario Kart Theme finally arrives in Mario Kart 8 (2014), it takes on the exact same contour and rhythm as its SNES forebear, now in the key of E♭ rather than C.

The Mario Kart Theme is subjected to one of its most interesting rhythmic transformations in Mario Kart World (2025), taking place in a highly syncopated and bluesy breakdown in 12/8 time. It is immediately repeated in 4/4 time with the same rhythm as the SNES, though swung. Instead of finishing on scale degree one, this second iteration in Mario Kart World rises stepwise to the dominant, setting up a bridge back to the top of the theme.

One Exception

Missing from the above list is Mario Kart: Super Circuit (2001) for the Game Boy Advance. While it boils down to the same mi–re–do Ursatz, the title theme for Super Circuit does not reference or quote the Mario Kart Theme like others in the series. In fact, where the melody of the Mario Kart Theme doesn’t include scale degree three, the theme for Super Circuit uses it pretty frequently. Beyond that, the movement of the melody is far less scalar than in other entries (jumping more frequently between chord tones), and the rhythms blend the spriteliness of the SNES theme with the relative stasis of the N64 theme.

However, the structural pitches of the Mario Kart Theme do feature in Super Circuit’s theme, in the same order and with the same general space between their appearances, as shown in Figure 13b. While they may not appear in a quotation of the Mario Kart Theme (or even sound like it), this signals a hereditary connection to the theme.

The difference in thematic material may be explained by a key difference in the game’s development. Developed by Intelligent Systems, Super Circuit is the only Mario Kart game not to be developed or co-developed by an in-house Nintendo studio. And while Nintendo composer Minako Hamano was a member of the sound team for Super Circuit, it seems her only contribution was to the composition and arrangement of the track for the course Bowser’s Castle. In his theme for Super Circuit, lead composer Kenichi Nishimaki had the opportunity to put a unique stamp on the series in a game largely untouched by its publisher. While composing a distinct musical theme for the game, he nonetheless wove the Mario Kart Theme into its broader structure. As such, even when it doesn’t necessarily resemble other themes in the series, it maintains a sense of unity within it.

“Hurry Up!” and Final Lap Fanfares

As their common main themes assert unity with the Mario Kart series, these games also assert their Mario heritage with connections to games throughout the broader franchise. This is most obvious in each game’s reference to the “Hurry Up!” alert from Super Mario Bros. (1985). This alert is composed of a chromatic ascent through four dominant seventh chords from E7 to G7.

Audio 0. Super Mario Bros. (“Hurry Up!”) [1985].

As you begin the last lap of each race in the Mario Kart series, a short fanfare plays that adds to the drama of the final stretch. As in Super Mario Bros., the music of the race itself increases in tempo after the fanfare to tell you, “All that stuff before doesn’t matter—now it’s real!”

With only a few exceptions, the Final Lap Fanfare in the Mario Kart series is a shortened, rhythmically varied version of the “Hurry Up!” alert, moving three chords from E7 up to F#7.

Audio 1a–f. Final Lap Fanfares.

1a. Super Mario Kart (1992).

—

1b. Mario Kart 64 (1996).

—

1c. Mario Kart: Super Circuit (2001).

—

1d. Mario Kart 7 (2011).

—

1e. Mario Kart 8 (2014).

—

1f. Mario Kart World (Normal Fanfare) [2025].

Exceptions to this are Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Mario Kart DS, and Mario Kart Wii, which both use the full four-chord progression in their Final Lap Fanfares.

Audio 2a–c. Four-chord fanfares.

1a. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (2003).

—

2b. Mario Kart DS (2006).

—

2c. Mario Kart Wii (2008).

The fanfare for the final race of Mario Kart World develops this idea a bit. Rather than ending on a chord early on F♯7, this iteration of the fanfare pushes one chord farther than the original “Hurry Up!” alert, ending on an A♭7 chord. This extended fanfare sets Rainbow Road apart from other racetracks in the game and even evolves one of the oldest Mario motifs. The tempo stays consistent after this version of the fanfare, moving to a new exciting section of music rather than increasing the tempo to increase interest.

Audio 3. Mario Kart World (Rainbow Road Fanfare) [2025].

Like the variations on Super Mario Kart’s Title Theme, the Final Lap Fanfares present a rather straightforward connective tissue between games in the series in addition to DNA that ties it to the broader Mario franchise.

PITSTOP!

You got through the first bit. Good job! Drink some water, and maybe come back later to finish up. Also take this poll:

Okay, back to the race!

Rainbow Roads

Another major site of musical unity in the Mario Kart series comes in the final race of each game: Rainbow Road. Each iteration of Rainbow Road riffs on a library of three main thematic motives that lend an uplifting feeling to the tracks they accompany. In this section, we’ll take a look at each iteration of Rainbow Road chronologically, in part because the first Rainbow Road lays out the motives rather clearly.

Three Motives in Super Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road

The opening of Super Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road (hereafter SNES Rainbow Road)3 is very harmonically dense. Thirteenth chords ensure that almost every diatonic pitch (plus a chromatic B♭) is a chord tone, obscuring the functionality of the harmonies we hear. By contrast, the bass is very simple, jumping between C and its fifth, G, firmly signaling a tonality of C major, as shown in Figure 14a. This presents the first of three motives common between Rainbow Road themes: a heavy structural focus on the first and fifth scale degrees (hereafter Motive 1). While these structural pitches mirror those of the Mario Kart Theme, there they were largely softened by embellishing pitches between them. Here in SNES Rainbow Road theme, there is seldom embellishment between scale degrees one and five. Instead, the bass moves directly from one to the other in Perfect Fifth and Fourth motion (see Figure 14b).

This bass idea runs throughout the entire track, unifying SNES Rainbow Road’s repeating simple binary form (A, B).

The B section introduces Motive 2, a progression of planing chords, rising chromatically while keeping intact their intervallic structure (depicted in Figure 15a). In other words, each chord tone remains on the same parallel “planes” as the chords change.

The harmony of SNES Rainbow Road’s B section follows the same I – II – ♭III – IV structure of the example above, making some sacrifices in favor of colorful chord extensions (see Figure 15b). At the same time, the melody reaffirms Motive 1, mainly through a prolongation of the fifth scale degree G.

The loop back to the beginning of the track, shown in Figure 16, unveils Motive 3, a backdoor progression from ♭VII – I that rounds out the form with a satisfying return to the tonic chord.

The three gestures we’ve explored appear in nearly every iteration of Rainbow Road. In the following sections, I will explore how the motives manifest and evolve in the Mario Kart games after Super Mario Kart.

Mario Kart 64

After a four-bar introduction, N64 Rainbow Road begins with Motive 1 with strong, repeated Perfect Fifth motion between scale degrees one and five. N64 Rainbow Road also expands Motive 3. The track’s A section, transcribed in Figure 17 below, settles on the I and ♭VII chords over long stretches, transforming the backdoor progression of SNES Rainbow Road into the harmonic backbone of the track.

Motive 2, however, is largely absent from this iteration of Rainbow Road. The closest we get to a fully-realized iteration of Motive 2 is heard in measures 21–24 (Figure 18). The ascending bass movement in these measures resembles that implied in Motive 2, but the chords themselves do not follow the same I – II – ♭III – IV progression. Rather, the II and ♭III chords are replaced by the ii and I⁶ chords respectively.

While this does not exactly follow Motive 2, the stepwise motion of the bass and the ascent from the I chord to the IV produces a similar uplifting effect.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit

The introduction to the Game Boy Advance’s GBA Rainbow Road, on the other hand, directly embraces Motive 2. In fact, it evolves Motive 2 by planing further to the V chord in a half cadence that sets up the track’s theme. Like N64 Rainbow Road, the theme follows a broad harmonic structure following that of Motive 3. Both motives are illustrated in Figure 19 below.

Audio I: mm. 1–6.

Audio II: mm. 7–.

As with the Title Theme to Super Circuit, Nishimaki’s take on Rainbow Road sounds noticeably different from its predecessors. Rhythmically, this Rainbow Road is much different than those which came before and after, leaning on offbeat stinger chords to generate much of the theme’s interest. The melody itself does not follow the strong movement of Motive 1, instead centering on embellishment of the tonic triad and scale degree 3 (much like in Super Circuit’s Title Theme). This results in a melody with a gentler, more lyrical quality that juxtaposes the stinger chords.

Even so, Nishimaki’s employment of Motives 2 and 3 signal the Rainbow Road lineage, uniting the GBA outlier in the Mario Kart family tree.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

The introduction to the following Rainbow Road on the Nintendo GameCube (GCN) follows the same planing progression as its GBA predecessor, though stopping on the IV chord instead of the V. Together with the GBA version, GCN Rainbow Road establishes a tradition that we will see in future Mario Kart games, in which Motive 2 serves as the introductory progression to Rainbow Road tracks.

Also like its GBA forebear, the melody to GCN Rainbow Road is more scalar than others in the series, softening Motive 1’s movement between scale degrees one and five. Harmonically, however, GCN Rainbow Road sticks to our motivic library, following the ♭VII – I structure of Motive 3.

Mario Kart DS

DS Rainbow Road continues the now-established practice of opening with Motive 2 (see Figure 22).

As we’ve come to expect, the harmonic structure of DS Rainbow Road follows Motive 3 (Figure 23a). While the chords change, however, the bass remains consistent on a tonic pedal point and follows a rhythmic structure reminiscent of SNES Rainbow Road. As the theme prepares to repeat, a new color emerges. The ♭VI chord interrupts the progression and introduces the sequence ♭VI –♭VII – I (shown in Figure 23b), a backdoor progression popularly dubbed the “Mario Cadence” for its frequency in the Super Mario franchise. The melody, also shown in Figure 23a, is composed of strong, perfect-interval movement between scale degrees one and five that restores Motive 1 after its two-game hiatus.

Mario Kart Wii

With Mario Kart Wii, the introductory Motive 2 progression evolves. After the initial walkup of the I – II – ♭III – IV planing structure, the harmony reverses direction, descending through the ♭VII and ♭VI to arrive on the V (see Figure 24). This inversion brings us to a half cadence that harmonically prepares the remainder of Wii Rainbow Road’s theme.

Motive 1 appears most prominently in the B section of Wii Rainbow Road (shown in Figure 25a). The key center initially confuses analysis, however, as the melody seems to lean on scale degrees two and six. The chord extensions starting in measure 33 allow the melody and harmony to function in two separate key centers while still making sense as a whole. While the harmony repeats a I – iii – V progression in G♭ major, the synth and piano play a melody squarely in A♭ major, outlining the upper extensions (ninths and thirteenths) of the G♭ tonality underneath.

Therefore, to best analyze it for structural pitches, we should look at the melody separate from the harmonic structure. Taking the melody in relation to A♭ major, as shown in Figure 25b, we can see that it shares the same structural dependence on scale degrees five and one as Motive 1.

What we inevitably don’t hear in Wii Rainbow Road is the harmonic structure of the ♭VII and I chords of Motive 3. While the inverted planing of the introduction may be interpreted as a variation on Motive 3, this reading relies on the ♭VII acting as a back-relating dominant chord. This ultimately produces a weaker harmonic effect than if the ♭VII (already a weaker dominant chord than the V) directly preceded the I chord.

Mario Kart 7

The next entry to the series, Mario Kart 7 for the 3DS, continues to develop the introductory Motive 2. After the initial I – II ascent, the progression inverts midway, sliding down to the ♭II rather than up to the ♭III, before returning to I (see Figure 26 below).

In addition to an unrelenting tonic pedal point in the bass, this slide back down to the I when we expect to hear an uplifting rise to the IV signals a feeling of space-like stasis. The melody that follows (transcribed in Figure 27) maintains this floaty feeling, moving relatively slowly between prolonged scale degrees five and one (Motive 1).

Though ♭VII – I motion of Motive 3 is absent for most of the cue, it makes a quick appearance at the very end in a Mario Cadence that sets up the track’s loop, shown in Figure 28.

Mario Kart 8

Motives 1 and 3 are present immediately after the introduction to Wii U Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 8. Shown below in Figure 29, the harmony begins with motion characteristic of Motive 3 before moving to other harmonic territory and the melody is filled to the brim with scale degrees one and five moving to each other in perfect-interval leaps.

Though the cue nods to the inverted planing gestures in Mario Kart Wii, Motive 2 is never fully realized in Mario Kart 8.

Mario Kart World

In Mario Kart World for the Nintendo Switch 2, Motive 2 returns in what I find to be its most interesting form. Transcribed in Figure 30, the introduction begins in D major, with Motive 2’s II chord modified as the minor ii. The progression is interrupted, however, when the harmony lingers on the ♭III and modulates to the key of F major. After Motive 2 is fully realized the new key, we finally move to the IV of D major to finish the original statement of Motive 2.

The function of this interruption is twofold. First, like the introductions of Wii Rainbow Road and 3DS Rainbow Road, the Switch 2 version plays with our expectations of Motive 2. The interruption of a familiar chord progression piques our interest early in the track to prepare us for the wild ride to follow. Second, the abrupt modulation foreshadows Switch 2 Rainbow Road’s eventual modulation to F major in Section Three of the race, briefly providing a synopsis of the large-scale structure of the entire track.

Motive 1 permeates the melody of Switch 2 Rainbow Road (Figure 31a), which hovers around scale degrees one and five both in perfect-interval leaps and scalar passages.

The motive retains its rock-solid power in the bridge melody later in the track (Figure 31b). Here, scale degrees one and five take on the roles of the colorful third and seventh of the B♭ major seventh chord—the ♭VI of D.

Motive 3 occurs after the climax of Switch 2 Rainbow Road in an extended Mario Cadence that prepares the repeat of the race’s fourth section of music, shown below in Figure 32.

Summary of Rainbow Road Motives

Below is a table summarizing the appearances of the Rainbow Road motives in each Mario Kart game. Although no motive appears in every Rainbow Road, the three motives together make up a small collection of tools for the cues to signal their relatedness.

Mario Kart’s Musical Symbols

There are several other ways in which the Rainbow Road themes resemble each other. The GCN and 3DS versions share N64 Rainbow Road’s B Section, for example. In addition, the bass lines of the SNES and Wii versions—along with the melodies of the DS and Switch 2 versions—all take the shape of a Dsus2 arpeggio.

Now, after all these similarities (and the billions of figures I created), we return to our question: why do games in the Mario Kart series need to resemble each other musically?

Simply put, they don’t. It would be easy to give each Mario Kart game its own musical identity, and in most cases it would be enough just to throw in the Mario Kart Theme as the only recurring link between games. In fact, this seems to be the approach taken in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2011), in which the only significant musical thread between films involves quick quotations of John Williams’s “Hedwig’s Theme.”4

Using the same musical grammar between games in the series, however, situates the series’s various themes, fanfares, and motives as musical symbols.

The dominant seventh chords of Super Mario Bros.’s “Hurry Up!” alert inspire a kind of anxiety energy that pushes you to skedaddle toward the flagpole at the end of the level before time runs out. As descendants of that gesture, the Final Lap Fanfares become symbols of the same kind of encouraging anxiety. It urges us to stay focused, dodge red and blue shells, and reach the finish line first.

Likewise, the rising planing chords that recur in Rainbow Road tracks spark an association between that sound and the racetrack’s joyfully climactic mood. Over time, the I – II – ♭III – IV progression becomes a musical shorthand for optimism.

In his essay linking the various Overworld themes of the first twenty years of The Legend of Zelda (1986–2006), Jason Brame notes how Perfect Fifth intervals (particularly between scale degrees one and five) communicate the idea of the “hero’s quest.”5 At the same time, the open sonority of the Perfect Fifth interval reflects the open fields of Hyrule and the open space around Rainbow Road.

Similarly, major chords borrowed from the minor scale (♭III, ♭IV, and ♭VII) appear all the time in music that is meant to evoke feelings of heroic adventure and fantasy. These chords define the harmonic language of Howard Shore’s “Fellowship” theme from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03) and Koji Kondo’s music for The Legend of Zelda (1986). As the characteristic chords of the Mario Cadence, too, they lend the Super Mario series that same sense of adventure. In the context of Rainbow Road, they appeal to the fantastical imagery of racing on a solid rainbow in outer space.

Unless directly instructed by Nintendo, the music of the Mario Kart series isn’t united by necessity. While one could easily recognize a cue as “Mario Kart music,” the soundtrack is not an essential part of what makes a Mario Kart game. (Frankly put, a Mario Kart game is a racing game with Super Mario characters.) On the contrary, familiar musical ideas are repurposed in the series to build and play with ludomusical associations. No matter what they ultimately signify, these ideas join the massive, interconnected web of semiotic functions that make a video game work.

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Bibliography

Brame, Jason. Examining Non-Linear Forms: Techniques for the Analysis of Scores Found in Video Games. Master’s thesis, Texas Tech University, 2009.

———. “Thematic Unity Across a Video Game Series.” ACT: Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance 2 (2011): 16 pages.

Mainline Mario Kart Games (Chronological)

Nintendo EAD. Super Mario Kart. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Soyo Oka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1992.

———. Mario Kart 64. Nintendo 64. Music by Kenta Nagata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1996.

Intelligent Systems. Mario Kart: Super Circuit. Game Boy Advance. Music by Kenichi Nishimaki, Masanobu Matsunaga, and Minako Hamano. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2001.

Nintendo EAD. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Nintendo GameCube. Music by Shinobu Tanaka and Kenta Nagata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2003.

———. Mario Kart DS. Nintendo DS. Music by Shinobu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2005.

———. Mario Kart Wii. Wii. Music by Asuka Hayazaki and Ryo Nagamatsu. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2008.

Nintendo EAD and Retro Studios. Mario Kart 7. Nintendo 3DS. Music by Kenta Nagata and Satomi Terui. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2011.

Nintendo EAD. Mario Kart 8. Wii U. Music by Shiho Fujii, Atsuko Asahi, Ryo Nagamatsu, and Yasuaki Iwata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2014.

Nintendo EPD. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Nintendo Switch. Music by Shiho Fujii, Atsuko Asahi, Ryo Nagamatsu, Yasuaki Iwata, and Kenta Nagata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

———. Mario Kart World. Nintendo Switch 2. Music by Atsuko Asahi, Maasa Miyoshi, Takuhiro Honda, and Yutaro Takakuwa. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2025.

Other Ludography (Alphabetical)

Artefacts Studio. Garfield Kart. Nintendo 3DS, PC, Mobile. Sound design by Pierre Michaud. Paris: Microids, 2013.

Nintendo R&D4. The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo 1986.

———. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System, Arcade. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1985.

Rare. Diddy Kong Racing. Nintendo 64. Music by David Wise. Twycross, UK: Rare, 1997.

Traveller’s Tales and Sonic Team. Sonic R. Sega Saturn. Music by Richard Jacques. Tokyo: Sega, 1997.

Happy Halloween Eve!

I recently wrote a column for Zelda Universe about the theme for Kilton’s Shop in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the melodic and orchestral techniques used that make it one of the creepiest pieces in the Zelda repertoire.

It would be a shame, though, not to talk about some of the other pieces that make up Nintendo’s wealth of spooky music.

To cap off this Hallowtide, I want to take a look at a few of my favorite spooky Nintendo tunes and why they’re so bone-chilling.

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Mansion Theme (Luigi’s Mansion, 2001)

The premise of Luigi’s Mansion, Nintendo’s whimsical foray into the horror game genre, is charmingly silly: equipped with a souped-up vacuum cleaner, Luigi goes on a Ghostbusters-esque mission to exorcise a haunted mansion he won in a contest he never entered and to save his twin brother, Mario, from King Boo.

Like The Castle of Otranto (1759), Dracula (1897), and The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Luigi’s Mansion contains the trappings of Gothic classics—a decaying estate with secret passageways, paranormal beings, and doors and portraits that move of their own volition.

The main theme of Luigi’s Mansion, which plays throughout the mansion’s corridors, similarly draws on elements of Gothic music. The theme is orchestrated with the organ, the harpsichord, and the theremin.

— “Mansion” by Kazumi Totaka and Shinobu Tanaka

The organ and harpsichord have a long history in the music of horror films as a symbol of the Gothic. In her book on Gothic music, Isabella van Elferen explains that both keyboards are often a signifier for a supernatural threat, like the ones presented by Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean and the vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. (The harpsichord is also featured heavily in the 1965 The Addams Family episode “Lurch and His Harpsichord,” though to more comedic effect.)

Similarly, synthesized sounds have long haunted horror soundscapes as phantoms of the human voice. The theremin in particular evokes ghosts, aliens, and other supernatural beings.

The rhythm of the bass line also follows an almost Jaws-like structure. It begins slowly, with a lot of space between notes, before ramping up the pace as the music becomes more suspenseful.

Most apparent in the orchestration, though, is the humming of Charles Martinet, the voice actor for the Mario Brothers and their palette-swapped antitheses Wario and Waluigi from 1991 to 2023. Through Martinet’s shaky humming, Luigi’s Mansion directly communicates Luigi’s horror.

— Luigi Humming at High Health

In fact, as Luigi drops to low health, his humming becomes even more shaky and terrified and the tempo slows down a bit

— Luigi Humming at Low Health

Shifty Boo Mansion (Super Mario 3D World, 2013)

The Super Mario series (1985–) has included ghosts and Gothic mansions even before Luigi’s Mansion, beginning with Super Mario World (SMW; 1990). The music accompanying SMW’s Ghost Houses resembles the bewitching opening to Mussorgsky’s tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (1867). The Ghost House cue features a high, chromatically wandering line harmonized in tritones underpinned by a low minor variation of SMW’s overworld theme. Adding to the horrific atmosphere are long synth tones that droop in pitch like ghostly wails.

— “Ghost House” by Koji Kondo

This cue is textbook spooky, but what I find more compelling is the music for Shifty Boo Mansion in Super Mario 3D World (3D World; 2013) which is set to a lush waltz. The Super Mario association between ghosts and the waltz goes back at least to Super Mario 64 (1996). Within the haunted mansion level Big Boo’s Haunt lies a merry-go-round on which Mario confronts the mansion’s ghost proprietor. As Mario approaches the merry-go-round, music fades in that evokes the waltz music of late 19th-century circuses. It isn’t particularly dissonant or spooky, but placed in juxtaposition against the horrific mansion, it produces an uncanny effect—not to mention the association of circuses and creepy clowns.

— “Merry-Go-Round” by Koji Kondo

The ghostly waltz of 3D World leans less on carnival connotations and more on the expressiveness of waltzes of the Romantic period. In particular, Shifty Boo Mansion’s waltz resembles a slow, melancholic waltz like Chopin’s Op. 69, no. 1. Its melody is based primarily on a descending chromatic figure with suspensions marking the ends of phrases. The waltz might have been rendered completely mournful if not for the inclusion of plucky synthesizers, the theremin, and the harpsichord. In conjunction with this Gothic orchestration, the mournful quality of the melody seems to communicate the unfinished business that tethers Boos to their haunted mansions.

— “Shifty Boo Mansion” by Mahito Yokota

The Shadow Temple (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998)

Unlike Shifty Boo Mansion, where the horror of the haunted mansion is lessened by the cartoonish visuals of the Mario series, Ocarina of Time’s Shadow Temple is downright terrifying. The temple, tucked behind a graveyard, is a site in which the royal family of Hyrule carried out horrible tortures and executions away from the public eye. Skeletal remains are scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the temple along with guillotines, bloodstained surfaces, various torture devices, and the Stygian “Ferry to the Other World.” The enemies of the temple are just as horrifying and play on body horror tropes. They include zombies, mummies, disembodied hands, a bloodied mass with a skeletal face and severed arms (pictured below), and so on. And mind you, this is all included in a game that was rated E (for Everyone) by the ESRB.

Like the temple’s visual design, the sound design also plays with common horror signifiers.

— “Shadow Temple” by Koji Kondo

A drum beat and wind drone lay the foundation for the Shadow Temple cue over which other sonic elements are spread. The wind drone helps to create a sense of space and atmosphere within the dark, cavernous rooms of the Shadow Temple. The drum beat, provided by a synthesized djembe, lays down an almost dancelike groove.

The drumming becomes more significant when the player reaches the end of the temple where the player faces off against the dungeon’s boss atop a massive drum. The boss, aptly named Bongo Bongo, takes the form of a decapitated body with a pair of giant, disembodied hands. Between attempts to swipe, crush, and grab Link, the hands play the drum on which Link stands, bouncing him in the air. As Tim Summers points out in his companion to the music of OoT, the implication here is that Bongo Bongo has been the source of the djembe beat throughout Link’s time in the Shadow Temple.

Other elements of the Shadow Temple cue play into common horror film tropes. For starters, running through the entire cue is a sort of call-and-response between bass vocal synths and alto vocal synths that slide uneasily between dissonant pitch intervals. Even deeper vocal samples that resemble chants are woven interstitially as the piece continues. Put together, the vocal synths and samples blur the line between song and chant in a way that evokes the trope of the demonic choir. Link’s fairy companion Navi points these voices out when the player approaches certain skeletons or demonic portraits, saying “I can hear the spirits whispering in this room.”

Bongo Bongo and Navi’s integration of these sonic elements into the diegesis of the Shadow Temple make the score all the more unsettling. The drums and voices haunt Link as he makes his way through a place that the ghostly presences call the site of “Hyrule’s bloody history of greed and hatred…”

Perhaps the only non-diegetic part of the score is our Gothic harpsichord, which meanders around the chromatic scale, layering more crunchy dissonance into the overall sonic architecture.

K.K. Dirge (Animal Crossing series, 2001–)

A final, maybe most upsetting, example comes in the ordinarily cutesy Animal Crossing series (2001–). In each game of the series, the player has the opportunity to hear live concerts from K.K. Slider, a guitar-playing Jack Russel Terrier. Afterward, the player can purchase vinyl records of K.K.’s songs to play at home. Most are relatively upbeat, like “K.K. Bubblegum” and “K.K. Bossa,” but one stands out as their complete opposite.

The live version of “K.K. Dirge” resembles its namesake genre. It has a funeral march pulse, an entirely static harmony, and a lamenting melody. On its own, it’s already very eerie.

— K.K.’s performance of “K.K. Dirge” in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

The “aircheck” version of the song, the recording that plays from the in-game vinyl, is about 1,000 times more spooky and borders on disturbing.

– “K.K. Dirge (Aircheck)” by Toru Minegishi.

This version opens with ghostly, wavering sine waves that lend a theremin-like otherworldliness. The same funeral march pulse is kept, but low, haunting vocal synths replace K.K.’s relatively bright singing voice. A barrage of Sci-Fi-ish synthesizer tones buffers a modulation up by half-step. The suddenly piece ends with two loud bangs, like the Grim Reaper knocking at the door.

Spooky!

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Bibliography

Elferen, Isabella van. Gothic Music: Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012.

Link, Stan. “Horror and Science Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford, 200–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Summers, Tim. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: A Game Music Companion. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2017.

Ludography

Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing. Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Kenta Nagata, Toru Minegishi, and Shinobu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2001.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo 64. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1998.

———. Luigi’s Mansion. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kazumi Totaka and Shinobu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2001.

———. Super Mario 64. Nintendo 64. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1996.

———. Super Mario World. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1990.

Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Super Mario 3D World. Wii U. Music by Mahito Yokota, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, and Yasuaki Iwata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2013.

Nintendo EPD. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo Switch. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yumi Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi, and Masato Ohashi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2020.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Wii U and Nintendo Switch. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

Jentsch, Freud, and Heidegger: Unheimlichkeit and the Uncanny

Few experiences unsettle us more than encountering a distorted version of ourselves. Reflections in a darkened window, lifelike dolls and robots, and nearly-human voices act as eerie resemblances that fall into the realm of the uncanny. Offering the first psychological exploration into the uncanny in 1906, Ernst Jentsch connected feelings of the uncanny to disorientation and “psychological uncertainty” concerning the “animacy of a seemingly living being.”1 Jentsch points to the uncanny atmosphere of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann brought about by a doll which, while clearly a toy, moves and acts as a human.2

Among the incoherent oedipal and castration-fixated musings of his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” Sigmund Freud expands the understanding of Jentsch’s uncanny partly through rigorous etymological exploration. Freud comes to the conclusion that the unheimlich (the uncanny) and the heimlich are inherently intertwined. By enumerating several definitions for heimlich—particularly the contradictory senses of “hidden” and “familiar/at-home”—Freud demonstrates how

this little word heimlich shows, with all its nuanced meanings, one which coincides with its opposite unheimlich. The heimlich then becomes the unheimlich; compare to the example of Gutzkow: “What we call unheimlich, you call heimlich.”3

Later, he summarizes his etymological findings, saying that the ambivalence of the definitions of heimlich causes the term to “collapse into its opposite.”4 Below is an illustration borrowed from Katherine Withy that depicts Freud’s semantic view of the un- prefix as applied to the varying senses of heimlich:5

Despite his claims to the contrary, Freud ultimately complements Jentsch’s definition in that the uncanny emerges when “the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred.”6 For Jentsch, this was confusion of an object’s (in)animacy. For Freud, this looked like the return of repressed anxieties—fantasies of the past resurfacing in the present reality. Taken together, Jentsch and Freud depict a version of the uncanny that represents the in-between area in which the familiar and unfamiliar coincide and collapse into each other.

In his ontological (and very dense) masterwork Being and Time, Martin Heidegger offers a more phenomenon-oriented account of feeling uncanny. Whereas human existence (Dasein) and “being-in-the-world” are generally wrapped up in feelings of “being-at-home” (heimlich), anxiety rips us from these feelings and “Everyday familiarity collapses” and “Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home’ [unheimlich].”7 Simply put, for Heidegger, the uncanny emerges from feelings of angst in which “things that were familiar and homely become strange.”8

Through the nebulous frameworks of philosophical, semantic, psychoanalytical, and existentialist methodologies, feelings of the uncanny inevitably find a clear home, so to speak, when what is familiar to us becomes unfamiliar.

If you like what I write and want to see more, feel free to buy me a coffee!

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The Doppelgänger and the Uncanny Valley

As described by Heidi Schlipphacke, the “slippage between self and other” and unfamiliar familiarity that are inherent to feelings of the uncanny are an essential part of the Doppelgänger (literally, “double-walker”).9 Historically a symbol of impending doom in German folklore,10 the Doppelgänger represents a person’s ghostly double, an alter ego, or the mirrored self. In a footnote to “Das Unheimliche,” Freud recalls a train journey in which an older man had mistakenly entered his sleeper car. Rising to correct the man, Freud realised he was looking at his own image in a mirror beyond the compartment door. In an aside, he writes that he still remembered the distaste he had for the figure in the mirror before realizing it was his own.11 When we don’t expect it, our own reflections surprise and unsettle us. But the Doppelgänger is neither self nor other: your reflection exists apart from you, yet remains composed entirely of you.

Because the Doppelgänger often represents a vision of terror, it serves as the driving force behind the concept of the uncanny valley. Working in the field of robotics in 1970, Masahiro Mori describes that as a robot’s human resemblance increases, so too does our affinity for its appearance.12 (This is abundantly clear in the case of the eponymous hero of Chibi-Robo!, shown in Example 1a below.) Our acceptance of a robotic visage crumbles, however, when it becomes nearly indistinguishable from a human and displays a degree of animacy (cf. Example 1b).

Mori warns roboticists of this valley when creating humanoid robots, saying they must either perfectly resemble human features—a severely difficult task—or “deliberately [pursue] a nonhuman design” that optimizes affinity over resemblance.13 While Mori only hints at the reason for uncanny feelings at the end of his essay, in the context of Jentsch, Freud, and Heidegger’s explorations, the uncanny valley can be understood as that place in which what is familiar (i.e. the human face) becomes unfamiliar and where we see our Doppelgänger face-to-face.

Uncanny Music, Voices, and Video Games

The unheimlich has been a topic of music scholarship and criticism since its introduction to the lexicon in an anonymous review of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in an 1803 issue of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.14 Musicologists and theorists have explored the musical uncanny through the lens of music theory. Richard Cohn, for example, has pointed to the juxtaposition of hexatonic poles (major and minor triads separated by a major third) and the destabilization of consonance as a major source of the uncanny in music.15 Others take a more affective approach. Amanda Lalonde considers the uncanniness of ombra [shadow] musical topics such as those in the introduction to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Schubert’s Octet, D. 803. She argues that “mysterious or threatening” ombra passages reveal “the uncanny nature of music itself” and its ability to reveal the hidden sublimities of existence.16

Much of this scholarship has been directed toward harmonic and formal aspects of music. What is largely unmentioned are discussions of the performance of music. On the other side of this, that first usage of unheimlich in 1803 was in reference not to the musical content of Don Giovanni, but to the theatrical and vocal performance of the titular villain, his representation of the feeling of uncanny, and conveyance of that feeling to the audience. As the medium through which a musical composition is realized and understood by its audience, musical performance must also be considered when citing the uncannying ability of music.

The human voice is first and foremost the aspect of musical performance that is closest to us. Effective vocal performances require a deep understanding and engagement of one’s body.17 Because of its proximity to us, our voices are deeply personal parts of what make us individuals. This individuality is enhanced by the perceived power of the voice. Citing Amanda Weidman, Tiina Männistö-Funk and Tanja Sihvonen point to the human voice as a “powerful tool for agency” and sincerity.18 In common parlance, to have one’s voice taken away is to have their autonomy taken from them.

The voice is also a powerful tool for grabbing the attention of others. Think of hearing loud voices in a quiet library or café, ripping you from your concentrated study. “When in any given sound environment you hear voices,” Michel Chion explains in his landmark film music text, “these voices capture and focus your attention before any other sound.”19

And yet, the voice itself is a significant site of the uncanny due to its association with human agency and being. If we remove anatomical traces of vocal production, “the voices we are left with feel foreign and mechanical (or perhaps enticing in their otherness).”20 In the same paragraph that Männistö-Funk and Sihvonen affirm the agency of the human voice, they assert the perceived agency and animacy it lends to automata and other nonhuman sources.21 Additionally, opposites collide in vocal music that employs the technique of Sprechstimme (a hybrid of the speaking and singing voice) and other extended vocal techniques. A simultaneous presence and absence unsettles us when we hear voices without a visible source. The Doppelgänger appears when we play back recordings of the human voice, especially when audio is distorted or altered to sound other than human.

Concepts of the uncanny are also inherent parts of video games. Jesper Juul explains that video games are “half-real,” depicting incoherent worlds in which fictional and non-fictional worlds collapse into each other. The magic circle of a video game, a term inspired from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, is often a blurry boundary between game rules and real-world procedures.22 Additionally, in his essay providing a psychoanalytical view of the video game avatar, Bob Rehak writes:

Appearing on-screen in place of the player, the avatar does double duty as self and other, symbol and index. As self, its behavior is tied to the player’s through an interface (keyboard, mouse, joystick): its literal motion, as well as its figurative triumphs and defeats, result from the player’s actions. At the same time, avatars are unequivocally other. Both limited and freed by difference from the player, they can accomplish more than the player alone; they are supernatural ambassadors of agency.23

Thus, the game avatar—that virtual figure to whom we players convey our actual agency—becomes our uncanny double within the digital game world.

What I aim to discuss in this essay are methods by which the singing voice is rendered uncanny, not through strictly musical means, but by the psychological uncertainty induced by disembodied or acousmatic voices, extended vocal techniques, and distorted audio. Throughout the essay, I will explore 20th-century precedents for these three uncannying methods, particularly through the works Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Philomel (1964). In turn, I will point to the implementation of uncanny voices in video game soundtracks where they are compounded by the inherent uncanniness of the medium. While horror games such as Resident Evil (1996) and Silent Hill (1999) may be obvious choices for this kind of exploration, I will focus here on non-horror games of the action-adventure, role-playing, and platform genres.

Extended Vocal Techniques

Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire

Though any vocal technique outside of the normal may render the singing voice unfamiliar, the technique of Sprechstimme [speaking voice] is among the clearest avenues for evoking the uncanny. Often interchangeably referred to as Sprechgesang [speech-song] in English usage,24 Sprechstimme involves the simultaneous engagement of a singer’s speaking and singing voices. While the antecedents of the technique go as far back as Engelbert Humperdinck’s Königskinder (1897),25 Arnold Schoenberg was the composer who codified and popularized Sprechstimme in the oratorio Gurre-Lieder (1911) and the melodrama Pierrot lunaire (1912). In a foreword to Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg explains that to accomplish Sprechstimme, a singer must be

precisely aware of the difference between a sung tone and a spoken tone: the sung tone maintains the pitch unaltered; the spoken tone does indicate it, but immediately abandons it again . . . The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either.26

In his description of the technique, Schoenberg positions song as the Doppelgänger of speech. In Sprechstimme, these doubles collapse into each other, resulting in vocalization that is simultaneously song and speech while remaining neither.

A Kafkaesque Transformation of the Voice in Metamorphosis

The 2020 adventure game Metamorphosis is an ode to the imagination of Franz Kafka. The game is based broadly on Kafka’s works, though particularly adapts the stories of The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Trial (1925). Both of these works convey the unheimlich in their own right. The Metamorphosis depicts the sudden transformation of Gregor Samsa into a massive bug.27 The story follows Samsa, generally depicted as a cockroach, as he attempts (and ultimately fails) to navigate the world in his unfamiliar form. The Trial is likewise odd, following the unexplained incarceration of Josef K. and the impossibly opaque bureaucracy behind his subsequent trial. In a 1952 essay, Bernard Hecht analyzes The Trial from a Freudian perspective, pointing to the Oedipal father and mother motifs in the novel as sources of the resurfaced repressed.28

Metamorphosis combines these stories and follows Gregor, the man-turned-insect, as he grapples with his transformation and attempts to help his friend Josef out of his undisclosed criminal charges and the absurd court proceedings. Gregor serves as the player’s avatar as they explore everyday locations from his tiny, bug perspective. That the game presents the familiar world from an unfamiliar perspective already presents the game as an uncanny experience. Combining this perspective with Kafka’s nightmarish stories of The Metamorphosis and The Trial adopts the uncanniness at the heart of Kafka’s narratives. In the midst of this, the game dips frequently into the sort of Kafkaesque humor described by Hernán D. Caro that makes light of Kafka’s otherwise strange stories.29

The music of Metamorphosis is highly reminiscent of Pierrot lunaire and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954), a ghoulish operatic setting of Henry James’s 1898 same-named gothic horror novel. Formally, The Turn of the Screw is defined by Britten’s “Screw” theme and variations thereon. This theme is composed of the twelve chromatic pitches organized in a tone row, a distinctly atonal technique of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg as part of his mission to emancipate dissonance from its subservient role in tonal music.30 In works like The Turn of the Screw, twelve-tone techniques serve to unsettle us as there is no possible tonic for our ears to latch onto—no place for our ears to be at home.

Written by Garry Schyman and Mikolai Stroinski, the music of Metamorphosis is riddled with twelve-tone rows, off-kilter dance rhythms, and chromatic sequences. As such, Schyman and Stroinski’s score lends the game an unsettling, and at times anxiety-inducing, sonic character.

This character is compounded by the soprano voice that pervades many of the musical tracks. The voice, whenever it is heard in the music of Metamorphosis, is performed by Joanna Freszel using the Sprechstimme technique (listen to the audio below for an example). As in Pierrot lunaire, the speech-song of Metamorphosis depict the psychological uncertainty and the coincidence of opposites that Jentsch and Freud describe. Sprechstimme additionally precludes us from feeling at home in the Heideggerian sense, as the technique denies us the familiarity of either song or speech.

“Metamorphosis Theme” – Sprechstimme enters around 0:57.

Disembodied and Acousmatic Voices

Babbitt, Hollander, and Beardslee’s Philomel

A Kafkaesque metamorphosis is also the subject of Philomel (1964), Milton Babbitt and John Hollander’s work for live soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound. The story of Philomel, based on Ovid’s telling of the legend of Procne and Philomela, is far from a happy one. Substack may not be the venue for providing a synopsis of the myth, but suffice it to say it deals with Philomela’s assault and glossectomy at the hands of the Thracian king Tereus and her sister (and wife to Tereus) Procne’s gruesome revenge against her husband. The myth concludes as, while Philomela and Procne flee Tereus, the three are transformed into birds by the gods. Accounts differ as to which sister became a nightingale and which became a swallow.31 Regardless, while silenced in her life and stripped of her agency as a human, Philomela is able to sing again as a bird.

Both the text and music were written expressly to be performed by the soprano Bethany Beardslee who commissioned the piece and whom Babbitt and Hollander considered best suited to perform the challenging diction and complicated twelve-tone construction.32 Indeed, while writing the text, Hollander’s acquaintance with Beardslee allowed him “to feel that [he] could proceed without fear of the singer’s limitations.”33

John Hollander’s text, which concerns the moment of Philomela’s transformation and the rediscovery of her voice, is set between both live and recorded voice. As Beardslee would have performed the brunt of the text live, the tape would provide commentary on the live text through the playback of prerecorded fragments and utterances in echo verse. Beardslee’s recorded voice was amplified by four KLH speakers that shared the stage with her.

Though we’ve become accustomed to hearing each other through phones and radios, there is something preternatural about a human voice emerging from a non-human source. Vocalization is an intrinsically physical activity involving precise engagement of our vocal cords and utilizing our bodies as resonating chambers and amplifiers.34 Removing the body renders the voice at least mysterious and at most horrifying. In her introduction to Gothic Music, Isabella van Elferen points to disembodied childsong as a signifier of the supernatural in horror films.35 The phone call in Pet Sematary (1989) in which a reanimated child sings “First I played with Jud, then I played with Mommy. . .” has haunted me since I was nine years old and swore off horror films entirely.

Beardslee’s prerecorded voice operates in much the same manner in Philomel. This disembodied voice reflects the fractured mind of the work’s subject and “represent[s] variously what she heard in the woods, what she thought she heard there, what she fancied she heard inside her head, and so forth.”36 Though not horrifying in the way of Pet Sematary, the voice emanating from the speakers indicates the confusion of Philomela’s material being. As she transforms into a nightingale, she sings “I am becoming / my own song. . .” In a way that is simultaneously tragic and hopeful, the voiceless Philomela collapses into her rediscovered voice. In the anxiety of Tereus’s pursuit, her familiar silenced state is usurped by a now unfamiliar voice.

In context of the performance, too, these disembodied voices induce feelings of the uncanny. While electronic speakers with human voices give rise to the sort of psychological uncertainty Jentsch describes, their coexistence with Beardslee’s live voice furthers the uncertainty. At times, Beardslee’s voice would have been heard with her mouth closed in a way that replicates the uncanniness of ventriloquism.

Acousmatic Voices in Hollow Knight: Silksong

In horror games, sound often functions as the player’s most reliable source of information. Rebecca Roberts notes that “[sonic] signifiers are usually the only real indication of approaching danger” in games like Dead Space 2 (2011).37 While these signifiers are intended to give players a heads-up, Roberts asserts their double-function to heighten the anxiety of their situation when “audio designers frequently use these basic conventions against the players.”38 Writing about the use of acousmatic voices in her own films, Chu-Li Shewring recalls “the strange effect a human voice can have when you are not able to see its producer or . . . generator.”39 This feeling is often alleviated when we find the source of a voice or escape its presence altogether.

The above horror audio tropes are inherited by the action-adventure game Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025) in which enemies can be heard mumbling both on- and off-screen regularly.40 In Silksong the player controls the insectoid protagonist Hornet as she explores a massive underground kingdom, defeats ludicrously difficult enemies, and uncovers the secrets of the game world. While combat weighs heavily in the game’s core mechanics, the brunt of the player experience deals with the adventure and mapping of the vast Kingdom of Pharloom.

Each time the player enters a new area in Pharloom, they must become familiar with its layout and the enemies they will come to encounter. On one occasion as I wandered into a new location, I could hear singing and I was immediately put on edge: would the bearer of the voice be friend or foe? Luckily, as I ventured further, I found that the voice belonged to the friendly cartographer-warrior Shakra who offers Hornet maps. While anxiety-inducing at first, Shakra’s song became a reassuring signal. Not only does it mean I’m safe, but I can purchase new maps and cartographic trinkets to expand my knowledge of Silksong’s intricate world.

The frequency of mumbles and singing in Silksong has confronted me with more troubling examples, though. In a later adventure, I could hear a distant humming for which I could not find a source (see the video above). “A sound or voice that remains acousmatic,” explains Michel Chion, “creates a mystery of the nature of its source, its properties and its powers, given that causal listening cannot supply complete information about the sound’s nature and the events taking place.”41 Like horror games in which disembodied voices “haunt [the] digital world as sonic doppelgängers of analogue ghosts,”42 the humming and mumblings of Silksong haunt Hornet’s journey through Pharloom.

The uncertainty of the humming’s source is compounded by its melody, the medieval Dies irae chant sequence. Since its use in the Requiem Mass in the 13th century, its quotation in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830), and appearance in films such as Star Wars (1977) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03), this melody has long functioned as a musical signifier for death, terror, and impending doom. The cultural spectre of the Dies irae intensifies the dread engendered by the unseen voices.

Electronically Distorted Voices

Returning to Philomel

In Philomel lies another method for uncannying the voice: distortion. The prerecorded tape is subjected to various transformations including dynamic and pitch fluctuations that defamiliarize the embodied voice it accompanies.

As with the disembodied voices in the piece, the distortion of the voice serves both a rhetorical purpose as well as an atmospheric purpose. In 1989, Susan McClary discussed the electronic manipulation of Beardslee’s voice, saying:

The violent distortions and ruptures of the singer’s voice in the piece bear witness to Philomel’s rape and to the fact that her tongue has been ripped out. The shattered fragmentation of her human voice . . . , her change from material being into music . . . , and her forging of triumph from violence . . . all serve to acknowledge the horror of the crime and yet the possibility of survival. . . . Anyone who has seen Bethany Beardslee perform this piece live—who has watched as her own shredded, electronically transformed voice is thrown back at her from loud speakers—can attest to the great theatrical and emotional power of Philomel.43

Beardslee’s voice exists concurrently with her electronically distorted voice. The coincidence of these voices relays the conflict between the horrors Philomela has been subjected to and her new hope wrought in revenge.

Voices in Reverse in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023) begins in medias res as the hero Link and Princess Zelda uncover ancient secrets in the caves beneath the ruins of Hyrule Castle. As they descend, wisps of the life-draining substance Gloom rise from crevices along the cavefloor. The volume of Gloom increases as Link and Zelda near the bottom of the cave where they find its source: the petrified mummy of the Demon King Ganondorf. The heroic duo reach Ganondorf as a seal over his power is broken and the ancient threat is resurrected. With the power of Gloom, the Demon King drains Link’s life, destroys the Master Sword, and causes the cavefloor to collapse under them. Zelda disappears, Link is rescued by a mysterious force, and Ganondorf is left to rebuild his strength and wage war against the Kingdom of Hyrule. This descent is mirrored at the climactic moment of the game in which a more well-prepared Link ventures back into the cave to confront a fully-rejuvenated, ultimately powerful Ganondorf.

Both of these descents are scored by continuous music that receives textural layers as the player journeys deeper in the cave. As they enter the area where Gloom begins to rise from the cavefloor, voices are added to the musical structure that slowly perform a melody which I call the “Gloom Theme.” This theme steadily becomes faster, louder, and more coherent as the player nears the bottom of the cave in a way reflective of their proximity to the Gloom’s source. One could easily make the case that these voices create a sense of unease due to their uncertain source—do they come from the Gloom? are they part of the non-diegetic score?44

Perhaps the most uncanny aspect of these voices, however, is that they are played in reverse. Much like the distortion of Beardslee’s voice in Philomel’s recorded vocal track, these reversed voices of the Gloom Theme unfamiliarize the human voice and render them uncanny. By tying the reversed voices of the Gloom Theme to the return of Ganondorf, the music quite literally indicates the return of the repressed, a hallmark of Freud’s uncanny. The impossible return of Hyrule’s ancient enemy becomes possible as the distorted voices cohere.

Conclusion: Welcome Uncanniness (or The At-Home “Not-at-Home”)

When we see the faces of robots that fall into the uncanny valley, we reject them. We find their nearly-humanness horrific. For whatever reason, we just cannot accept a face that tries and fails to appear human.

In their discussions on the unheimlich in everyday experiences, Jentsch, Freud, and Heidegger stress that the uncanny is a generally unwelcome feeling. It confronts us suddenly in unexpected mirrors, in bouts of angst when our own hands feel unfamiliar. In his discussion of the uncanny valley, Mori dissuades roboticists from creating lifelike robots that make us feel uncomfortable.

On the other hand, uncanny feelings become an aesthetic goal when we curate eerie experiences. The 2015 survival horror game Until Dawn, for better or worse, features some very lifeless facial models and animations—and I’m not referencing the deliberately horrifying visages of the wendigo monsters that threaten the various avatars we control. The faces of the game’s characters are by Morian and Heideggerian standards uncanny, and while this was certainly not intended by the game developers, it ultimately enhances the game’s uneasiness. In fact, the uncanniness they come to represent feels ironically at home in a game that is meant to frighten its players and keep them on edge.

This is exactly the type of welcome uncanniness that is presented in each of the above examples. When distinctly uncanny voices grab our attention, they provide commentary on their respective moments. The Sprechstimme of Metamorphosis never lets us forget how weird the game’s premise truly is. The acousmatic voices in Silksong remind us that the world is both alive and dangerous and encourages us to explore in spite of perceived threats. And the reversed voices of Tears of the Kingdom cue us into the uncanny nature of the villain’s return.

Post-Script: Towards An Uncanny Understanding of Video Game Music

The vocal methods I’ve traced are only a small part of the broader uncannying abilities of video game music, which by its nature, tends toward the uncanny. Other avenues for curating uncanny musical experiences in games have already been explored. Van Elferen, for one, has pointed to the “blend of orchestral and synthesizer sounds stressing the interplay between human and technological agencies” as a site for the uncanny.45 Elsewhere, she has written how the collision of diegetic and non-diegetic elements of a game’s sonic structure brings about a collapse of a game’s magic circle, obscuring the boundary between player and avatar, reality and fantasy.46

Along these lines, I propose unestablished or broken semiotics as another source of the uncanny in video game music. Described by Michiel Kamp, broken signals occur when a player interprets a sound or musical cue as a sign for in-game events without an obvious referent.47 As with the vocal methods I’ve described, broken signals give rise to feelings of psychological uncertainty, and while they may not put the player at unease in the same way as other uncannying methods, they may cause a confusion of the game and its implementation of audio. Like van Elferen’s half-diegesis and Juul’s half-real, this forces a collapse of the boundary between the game and reality in which the player becomes more concerned with a game’s design than the game itself.

If the act of playing a video game is by its nature partaking in the uncanny, then we must view video game music at large as uncanny. Regardless of its implementation, video game music does double-duty and obscures the boundary between diegesis and non-diegesis.

Bibliography

All websites last accessed 24 September 2025.

Adamowicz, Emily J. “Subjectivity and Structure in Milton Babbitt’s Philomel.” Music Theory Online 17, no. 2 (2011). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.2/mto.11.17.2.adamowicz.html

Anonymous. “Am 25. Don Juan.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 5, no. 34 (1803): 574–76.

Bond, Jeremy Gibson. Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game with Unity and C#. 2nd edition. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2018.

Caro, Hernán D. “The Big Laughter.” Translated by Chris Cave, Zeitgeister: The Cultural Magazine of the Goethe-Institut (2024). https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/art/25227662.html.

Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny).” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (1976): 525–48.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

———. The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Cohn, Richard. “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, no. 2 (2004): 285–324.

Crump, Melanie Austin. “When Words Are Not Enough: Tracing the Development of Extended Vocal Techniques in Twentieth-Century America.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008.

Diels, Natacha. “Art and the Uncanny: Tapping the Potential.” Leonardo Music Journal 24 (December 2014): 75–77.

Elferen, Isabella van. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012.

———. “¡Un Forastero! Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music.” Music and the Moving Image 4, no. 2 (2011): 30–39.

Fèvre-Berthelot, Anaïs le. “Audio-Visual: Disembodied Voices in Theory.” InMedia: The French Journal of Media Studies 4 (2013). http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/697.

Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unheimliche.” Project Gutenberg, [1919] 2010. EPUB. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34222/34222-h/34222-h.htm.

Fulton, Anna Jeanne. “Other Voices: Listening to Musical (Dis)embodiment.” Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2019.

Gibbs, Christopher. “‘Komm, geh’ mit mir’: Schubert’s Uncanny ‘Erlkönig’.” 19th-Century Music 19, no. 2 (1995): 115–35.

Green, Steven. “Metamorphosis (Switch) Review: Franz Kafka: The Video Game.” Nintendo World Report, August 19, 2020. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/54663/metamorphosis-switch-review.

Harrison, Thomas. 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.

Hecht, M. Bernard. “Uncanniness, Yearning, and Franz Kafka’s Works.” American Imago 9, no. 1 (1952): 45–55.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962. Originally published as Sein und Zeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1927).

Hollander, John. “Notes on the Text of Philomel.” Perspectives of New Music 6, no. 1 (1967): 134–41.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1944] 1949.

Jentsch, Ernst. “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen.” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8, no. 22 (1906): 195–98; no. 23 (1906): 203–05.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Kafka, Franz. Die Verwandlung. Edited by Marjorie L. Hoover. New York: W.W. Norton, [1915] 1960.

Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Kühn, Ulrich. Sprech-Ton-Kunst: Musikalisches Sprechen und Formen des Melodrams im Schauspiel- und Musiktheater (1770–1933). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001.

Lalonde, Amanda. “Flowers over the Abyss: A Musical Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Criticism.” 19th-Century Music 41, no. 2 (2017): 95–120.

Ludwig, Alex. Hearing Death at the Movies: Film Music and the Long History of the Dies Irae. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

Männistö-Funk, Tiina, and Tanja Sihvonen. “Voices from the Uncanny Valley: How Robots and Artificial Intelligences Talk Back to Us.” Digital Culture & Society 4, no. 1 (2018): 45–64.

McClary, Susan. “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition.” Cultural Critique, no. 12 (1989): 57–81.

Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 19 (2012): 98–100. Originally published, in Japanese, as M. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33–35.

Penney, Andrew. “How Mikolai Stroinsky and Garry Schyman Created an Enchanting Score for Metamorphosis.” The Gamer, October 16, 2020. https://www.thegamer.com/metamorphosis-interview-mikolaj-stroinski-garry-schyman/.

Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 103–28. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Roberts, Rebecca. “Fear of the Unknown.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 138–50. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Schlipphacke. “The Place and Time of the Uncanny.” Pacific Coast Philology 50, no. 2 (2015): 163–72.

Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950

Shewring, Chu-Li. “The Voice and the Uncanny.” The Soundtrack 1, no. 2 (2008): 127–34.

Summers, Tim. Understanding Video Game Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Tatar, Maria M. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature 33, no. 2 (1981): 167–82.

Weidman, Amanda. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Withy, Katherine. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Ludography

Capcom. Resident Evil. PlayStation. Music by Makoto Tomozawa, Koichi Hiroki, Masami Ueda, and Takashi Niigaki. Osaka: Capcom, 1996.

Konami. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. Famicom Disk System and Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Kenichi Matsubara, Satoe Terashima, and Kouji Murata. Tokyo: Konami, 1987.

Nintendo EPD. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo Switch. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Maasa Miyoshi, Masato Ohashi, Tsukasa Usui, and Hajime Wakai. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2023.

Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems. Metroid. Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Hirokazu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1986.

Ovid Works. Metamorphosis. PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Music by Garry Schyman and Mikolai Stroinski. Kraków: All in! Games, 2020.

Skip Ltd. Chibi-Robo! Plug into Adventure! Nintendo GameCube. Music by Hirofumi Taniguchi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2005.

Supermassive Games. Until Dawn. PlayStation 4. Music by Jason Graves. Foster City, CA: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2015.

Team Cherry. Hollow Knight. Various systems. Music by Christopher Larkin. Adelaide, AU: Team Cherry, 2017.

———. Hollow Knight: Silksong. Various systems. Music by Christopher Larkin. Adelaide, AU: Team Cherry, 2025.

Team Silent. Silent Hill. PlayStation. Music by Akira Yamaoka. Tokyo: Konami, 1999.

Visceral Games. Dead Space 2. PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360. Music by Jason Graves. Redwood City, CA: Electronic Arts, 2011.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

Regardless of what they say about judging something at first glance, the cover of a book tells a reader a lot about what kind of reading experience that book will be. Before you flip it open and read the text, you know the book shown in Image 1 is going to have something to do with a dragon its hoard of gold:

The cover doesn’t tell us everything about a book, which I guess is where the proverb originates. Unless you live under a rock, you may not know what a ‘hobbit’ is. For all you know, it could be what dragons are called in the fantasy world the cover presents. Hell, it could be what dragons call their gizzards. (Maybe this is a dragon anatomy book?)

We might not know anything about this dragon or why it’s sleeping on a gilded mountain, but we can tell from the inclusion of a dragon that the genre of The Hobbit is more than likely fantasy. Genre, therefore, is one of the things a book cover can communicate to its reader. It may also communicate mood. The grandiosity of the dragon and the warmth of Alan Lee’s watercolors intimate both feelings of the heroic and coziness. This would make sense to those familiar with The Hobbit, a book Tolkien wrote as an epic bedtime story for his children.

More than anything, book covers (and leading chapter titles found in a table of contents) invite readers to flip the page—to open the door to a new literary adventure. They give readers enough information to speculate about the story and setting, or if non-fiction, the methodology by which research was conducted.

As a book’s cover and table of contents are the door that opens the way to the text, a video game’s title screen and main menu are the threshold through which the player enters into gameplay. As such, the title screen and menu have a very similar responsibility to their text. They communicate the title of a game and present the player with an array of options, from selecting save files to personalizing game settings and controls. Below is a screenshot depicting the rather minimalistic title screen/main menu of the 2020 roguelike Hades shown in Image 2.

Video game title screens are often a little less subtle in their approach to pushing game players to walk through the threshold, generally bearing all-capital prompts such as PRESS START or PRESS ANY BUTTON.

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A Very Brief History of Musical Title Screens

By the early 1980s, arcade games and early home consoles were beginning to experiment with title screens that included music. With the rise of Nintendo’s Family Computer (1983) in Japan and its worldwide release as the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985), it became conventional for console games to open with a title screen accompanied by a short jingle. Subsequently, The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Metroid (1986) were among the first games to feature continuous title “themes” that played over their opening interfaces. The function of this music mirrors that of the screen itself: it signals the game’s genre and sets the mood. As Michiel Kamp has noted, peritextual music—such as that on a title screen or main menu—bridges the paratextual and textual, since music is present in both dimensions of a game.1 The result is a unified, top-to-bottom experience in which opening menus and gameplay feel affixed through sound.

Approaches to Musical Title Screens

In general, there are three non-mutually exclusive approaches taken when composing the music that will accompany a game’s title screen: the overture approach, the mood-setting approach, and a two-tiered approach.

Overture to a Video Game

Many games take the overture approach when setting music to their title screens. This approach borrows from the world of opera in which overtures prepare the audience’s ears and attention for the music to follow. Overture-style title themes introduce the player to the primary musical themes they will hear throughout the game and start the process of immersing them into the game’s world and mechanics.

One of my favorite examples of this approach is heard in Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2011). A strong brass fanfare composed by Studio Ghibli’s incomparable Joe Hisaishi greets the player as they launch Ni no Kuni and the game’s logo appears on screen (see Video 1 below). The music then transitions into the musical theme that one hears whenever exploring the wide spaces of Ni no Kuni’s world map.

Video 1. The title screen for Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. Shown in the video is taken from the 2019 remaster for the Nintendo Switch.

Arguably more effective, though, is the opening and title screen of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006), shown in Video 2. As the opening music of Twilight Princess introduces three key musical themes in the game,2 it pairs the music with the game’s landscapes and epic scenes of Link riding his horse Epona. The opening music of Twilight Princess blends the overture style of title screen music with another approach to title music: namely, that which establishes the game’s primary mood.

Video 2. The opening cinematic and title screen of Twilight Princess. This video shows the video demo of the game that many Nintendo games include if you linger on the title screen for long enough.

Setting the Mood

Like the epic coziness of Alan Lee’s cover for The Hobbit, the music of a video game’s titles may also set the mood of the game. The opening titles of Animal Crossing (2001), for example, establish the cozy, laid-back feel of the game. As a life-simulation game, Animal Crossing is meant to be played slowly over a long period of time. Through an avatar, the player can do all sorts of leisurely activities, such as chatting with their anthropomorphic neighbors; fishing; collecting fruit; planting flowers; and paying off their massive, predatory home loan. The chill, slow-paced gameplay of Animal Crossing lends itself perfectly to the groovy jazz that plays over its title screen.

Video 3. The title screen for Animal Crossing for the Nintendo GameCube.

The title screen for The Last of Us (2013) in Video 4 is truly special in its approach to establishing the mood of the game. Through a broken window framed by cracked paint, vines peek inside while tattered curtains drift in the breeze. Sparse music underscores the image, featuring slow bass tones and a lone steel-string guitar tracing an improvisatory melody in its lower register. In an instant, the audiovisual pairing communicates the emptiness and deep sadness of the game’s post-apocalyptic world. Notably, the title screen does not include the title of the game and shows only the prompt “PRESS ANY BUTTON” in the lower left. While The Last of Us already evokes desolation through its name, its deliberate absence here, paired with the audiovisual storytelling, frames the game less as a conventional zombie horror game and more as a reflective, artistic experience.

Video 4. The title screen for The Last of Us (2013). The 2014 remaster is shown in the video.

A Two-Tiered Approach

In the tradition of its trendsetting older sibling, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) is an early example of a game with two distinct musical cues for its title screen and main menu. In the first, the music is as pyrotechnical as the Zelda games before with a bold synthesized-brass fanfare. The second, which accompanies Player Select menu, is a more contemplative piece consisting of cascading arpeggios and a quickly moving harmonic rhythm.3 (See Video 5 below.)

Video 5. The title screen and player select menu of A Link to the Past.

This two-tiered, modular approach is used in one of my favorite games of the last few years, Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023). The module for the title screen itself, though, is not musical. The chirps of birds, the rustles of leaves, and the distant sounds of a city make up the sonic architecture of the title screen, which like The Last of Us, forgoes the game’s title in favor of crafting an aesthetic land/soundscape.4 When the camera pans underground to show the main menu, male voices likewise take a chromatic plunge in a ritualistic chant illustrative of the temple that now appears on screen. After a short while, the voices sing in unison the Baldur’s Gate leitmotif that the player will hear countless times in tracks throughout the game before moving into a more driving feel (see Video 6).

Video 6. The title screen and main menu of Baldur’s Gate 3.

All of the examples above (besides those with a dual title/main menu screen) blend the three approaches in some way. Twilight Princess is perhaps the clearest example of this, with its distinctly overture-styled structure, its communication of the game’s dark atmosphere, and its transition into the traditional Zelda “File Select” harp cue. In the following section, I’m going to look at a game with one of my absolute favorite title screen/main menu themes: Metroid Prime (2002).

Metroid Prime

The Metroid series (1986–) follows the science-fiction adventures of intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran as she tracks down Space Pirates and jellyfish-like Metroids. In tandem with the Castlevania series (1986–), Metroid helped codify the Metroidvania subgenre of action-adventure games, characterized by nonlinear exploration, interconnected maps, and a progression system built around discovering new items and defeating bosses.

Released in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube, Metroid Prime marked the series’ leap into the third dimension, blending the exploration-based gameplay of a Metroidvania with the perspective of a first-person shooter. The game opens as Samus responds to a distress call from a wrecked frigate orbiting the planet Tallon IV. On the ship, she discovers evidence of Space Pirate experiments with the radioactive substance Phazon. After the frigate falls from orbit, Samus follows it to Tallon IV, where she uncovers the sinister truth behind Phazon and the galactic threat it poses.

The Title Screen

The title themes of the Metroid series are a masterclass in introducing mood before the player starts the game. The title screen themes of Metroid (1986) and Super Metroid (1994), for example, are characterized by slow movement, low sounds, and periods of silence. This music encapsulates the eeriness of the typical Metroid setting—a dark underground world infested with monsters, aliens, and parasitic jellyfish.

The opening theme of Metroid Prime, heard in Video 7, begins with the same sparseness of its predecessors. As the game’s logo appears on screen and we begin to see what seems to be the inner anatomy of a metroid, the music becomes more active, adding a groove and regular melody. In a way, this musical action asserts an evolution of the Metroid series, announcing the transformed gameplay of a Metroidvania in the third dimension. Though the GameCube could produce realistic instrument sounds, Metroid Prime leans into synthesizers that produced what Leonard Bernstein referred to as “interplanetary noises.” The result is a track that sounds fit for a mysterious space adventure.

Video 7. The opening of Metroid Prime as seen in Metroid Prime Remastered (Nintendo Switch, 2023).

The Main Menu

Following the two-tiered approach, the music shifts as the player enters the game’s main menu, shown in Video 8. Heard in both Video 8 and Audio 1, this theme contrasts the eerie minimalism of the title screen with a sense of momentum that prepares the player for the epic journey they’re about to step into. The main menu music returns as the credits theme of the game, acting as both the front and back covers of the game’s book.

Video 8. The transition from the title screen to the main menu in Metroid Prime.

Audio 1. The Main Menu cue from Metroid Prime.

The melody, voiced by a synthesized theremin, draws on the instrument’s long association with the otherworldly. From mid-century science fiction films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) to recent series such as Loki (2021–2023) and Severance (2022–), the theremin has long been used to signal both eeriness and retrofuturism. Its use establishes the theremin as the instrumental emblem for the eerie, alien-planet setting of Metroid Prime.

Underpinning both the title and main menu themes is a wild, squeaky noise that resembles an overactive Geiger counter. Before gameplay even begins, this noise foreshadows the radioactive nature of Phazon and its centrality to the game’s narrative. During the later sections of Metroid Prime, these same sounds are heard as Samus approaches deposits of Phazon in the Phazon Mines. Even for players unfamiliar with the real-world device, the noise reads as alien and recalls the high-pitched chirps used in the Super Metroid title theme to represent the cries of a baby Metroid.

Conclusion

As far as title screens and main menus go, those of Metroid Prime communicate a lot through their music. Before the player crosses the threshold into the game itself, the music has already prepared them for central aspects of the game’s narrative. For one, the name Metroid and the sounds of the theremin together communicate the game’s genre: a science-fiction Metroidvania. The wild Geiger counter signals the game’s MacGuffin, and by extension, the ultimate antagonist, the Phazon-imbued Metroid Prime. In this way, Metroid Prime’s peritextual music goes beyond setting the mood and serving as an overture. The music at the onset of Metroid Prime introduces the stakes of the adventure, immersing the player into the narrative world before gameplay begins.

As for why it’s one of my favorites. . . I really like the sound of the theremin.

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Bibliography

Bernstein, Leonard. “Bach Transmogrified.” Young People’s Concerts. YouTube video, April 26, 2018. 5:51.

Kamp, Michiel. “Suture and Peritexts: Music Beyond Gameplay and Diegesis.” In Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, edited by Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney, 73–91. Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2016.

Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Ludography

Larian Studios. Baldur’s Gate 3. Various systems. Music by Borislav Slavov. Oudenaarde, BE: Larian Studios, 2023.

Level-5. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. PlayStation 3. Music by Joe Hisaishi. Tokyo: Namco Bandai Games, 2011.

NaughtyDog. The Last of Us. PlayStation 3 and Playstation 4. Music by Gustavo Santaolalla. Foster City, CA: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013.

Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Kenta Nagata, Toru Minegishi, and Shinobu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2001.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo 64. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1998.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo GameCube and Wii. Music by Toru Minegishi and Asuka Ota. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2006.

Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems. Metroid. Family Computer, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Arcade. Music by Hirokazu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1986.

———. Super Metroid. Super Famicom and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.

Nintendo R&D4. The Legend of Zelda. Family Computer and Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1986.

Retro Studios. Metroid Prime. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuma. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2002.

Supergiant Games. Hades. Various systems. Music by Darren Korb. San Francisco: Supergiant Games, 2020.

Player-Directed Sound Effects

The actions of a video game player have had an impact on a game’s sonic architecture since the 4-bit bloops of Pong (1972).

The age of the sound chip—a dedicated piece of hardware that processes audio files and outputs waveforms—lasted from about the time of the arcade game Space Invaders (1978) and the Texas Instruments SN76477 chip to the Fifth Generation of video game consoles that included the Sony PlayStation (1994), the Sega Saturn (1994) and the Nintendo 64 (1996).

Early home consoles pioneered the usage of sound chips as vessels for continuous music and sound effects. These consoles were fitted with specially designed sound chips that gave them unique sonic characters. The RP2A0X sound chip for the Nintendo Entertainment System (1983) presented a limited number of sound channels with which a game composer could program music and sound effects. While many would use three channels for music and reserve the fourth for effects,1 Nintendo composer Koji Kondo generally arranged music to be performed by all the channels simultaneously. In games like Super Mario Bros. (SMB; 1985) and The Legend of Zelda (TLoZ; 1986), this meant that sound effects would necessarily usurp the music-production of a channel.

Collecting coins in SMB and attacking octoroks in TLoZ would divert the attention of a sound channel from music for the duration of the actions’ accompanying sound effects. In this way, the sound effects, whether melodic earcons or naturalistic auditory icons, are woven directly into the musical fabric of these early console games.

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Modular Systems

It is incredibly hard to analyze video game music in the way that we experience it while playing. Listening to a game’s original soundtrack, official CD, streaming releases, or questionably illegal “gamerips” on YouTube makes analysis easier, but doesn’t capture the nuances of interaction. Video games are an incredibly indeterminant medium due to player interaction. Karen Collins discusses this in her definition of dynamic audio, explaining that the decisions of the player and their interactions with game rules make it impossible to replicate a play-through of a game or its audio.2

In her work in the field of ludomusicology, Elizabeth Medina-Gray has proposed a modular framework as a guide for analyzing video game music. In this framework, “a collection of modules—discrete chunks of music—goes through a process of assembly to yield the overall sounding result, following specific rules for how those modules may combine.”3

Modules may combine in any number of ways, though I often find it easiest to conceptualize them as being vertically layered and/or horizontally sequenced. When the coin sound effect in Super Mario Bros. usurps the melody for a split second, it is integrated both vertically and horizontally in the game’s sonic architecture. Vertically, it layered against the continuous countermelody and bass of the environmental music. Horizontally, it takes the role of melody, existing as a sort of ornamentation on the melody line it replaces.

This kind of integration is common throughout the Super Mario Bros. series (1985–) and is presented rather overtly in its most recent entry Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Wonder; 2023). Playing on the audio-streaming-capable Nintendo Switch, the music and sounds of Wonder were not limited by the small number of available sound channels offered on a sound chip. As such, the earcons that sound for coin collection, jumping, and performing ground pounds are able to more freely interact with the continuous background music of the game.

Modular Smoothness and Disjunction

Comparing harp performances in TLoZ: The Wind Waker (The Wind Waker; 2002) and TLoZ: Skyward Sword (Skyward Sword; 2011), Medina-Gray has discussed methods by which a modular system may be regarded as smooth or disjunct. Modules may be in disjunction if they align poorly with the modules around them. In The Wind Waker, this sounds like Link’s friend Medli’s poor performance of the harp clashing with the environmental music of Dragon Roost Island.4

Modules may also fit together smoothly, “[yielding] cohesion and continuity among modules in real-time soundtracks, and [avoiding] producing sounds that might be jarring or unpleasant.”5 Medina-Grey points to another harp performance in the Zelda series to illustrate this. In the middle of Skyward Sword, Link gains the ability to strum a harp while exploring sky islands and lands that would become the Kingdom of Hyrule. The pitches Link strums invariably follow the chordal progression of whatever environmental music may be playing at the time.6 As such, they fit smoothly within the modular system and the sonic architecture at the moment of performance.

I’ve written elsewhere on other vertically integrated modules in The Wind Waker. As in every Zelda game, Link fights with a sword in The Wind Waker and auditory icons are mapped onto his sword swings that communicate the action. Swinging the sword through the air produces a swoosh, while landing an attack on an enemy results in a slash. TWW goes further than other Zelda games, mapping musical earcons onto successful enemy attacks. As I’ve written before, striking an enemy in The Wind Waker triggers chordal stingers reminiscent of the Mickey-Moused stingers in the 1960s Batman TV series. The musical sword slashes of The Wind Waker give the player the ability to compose the melodies for the otherwise non-melodic battle music in the game. Strategic combat decisions “transform Link’s sword slashes into pen strokes, writing unique and unrepeatable melodies for every battle.”7

Not only do these chordal stingers allow the player to interact with and collaborate within the sonic architecture of The Wind Waker, but they reaffirm the cartoonish graphics of the game by drawing parallels to common tropes of comic book-inspired cartoons. As such, they lie smoothly both in the sonic and visual structures of the game. The disjunction of Medli’s harp performance similarly highlights her status as a beginner instrumentalist in desperate need of a teacher. Disjunction and smoothness of a modular system, therefore, carry with them the ability to communicate narrative features.

This kind of double purpose for a module or sound effect will come into play in our later discussion of sound effects in Donkey Kong Bananza.

Donkey Kong: A Musical Franchise

The Donkey Kong franchise (DK) began with the original 1981 arcade game that launched the arcade boom of the early ‘80s and Shigeru Miyamoto’s career at Nintendo. In the early DK games, the player plays as Jumpman, the first iteration of Nintendo’s mascot Mario.

It wasn’t until Donkey Kong Country (DK Country; 1994) that the player would be able to play as Donkey Kong himself—or rather his grandson Donkey Kong, III. (The original Donkey Kong does appear in DK Country and subsequent games as the wizened ape lovingly referred to as Cranky Kong.)

Playing as both Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong in DK Country, the player embarks on a quest to recover the simian family’s hoard of bananas from the villainous crocodile King K. Rool and his Kremling Krew. Like Mario saving Princess Peach from Bowser, recovering bananas from King K. Rool constitutes the basic narrative formula of the Kong-centered games of the DK franchise.

Donkey Kong Country and its sequels, Diddy’s Kong Quest (1995) and Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble (1996), are renowned for their musical soundtracks written by composer David Wise and Eveline Fischer. Tracks like “Simian Segue,” “DK Island Swing,” and “Stickerbush Symphony” have achieved lives beyond their respective games, becoming touchstones of the gaming industry. “Aquatic Ambience” and “Forest Interlude” in particular are recognizable by those who may not even know of the DK Country series.

Musical performance takes center stage in other entries to the DK franchise. In Donkey Kong’s first 3D adventure, Donkey Kong 64 (DK64; 1999), musical performances are integrated into the gameplay mechanics and puzzles. Each of the game’s five playable characters are afforded instruments that reflect their personal characteristics: Donkey Kong plays the bongos, Diddy Kong plays electric guitar, Chunky Kong plays the triangle, and so on. The rhythm game Donkey Konga (2003) involves the player’s performance of the DK Bongos, a controller in the shape of a pair of hand drums. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (2004) uses the DK Bongos controller in an incredibly more innovative way, challenging the player to use the bongos to navigate the game mechanics of a platformer game.8

Donkey Kong Bananza

All of this brings us to this year’s Donkey Kong Bananza (DK Bananza; 2025), a game so overtly about the power of music and musical performance that fast travel and saving the game are marked by gongs and tuning forks (see Image 1a and 1b). Incredible tracks abound in this game to communicate culture, geography, and narrative. There are many ways in which the game’s tracks interact with one another, from seamless fades from one track to another depending on player movement and location to added textures as the player progresses through a level. There are also very many references and arrangements of previous DK music from a disco rendition of the original Donkey Kong (1981) theme and an abridged version of Grant Kirkhope’s “DK Rap” to a dreamy arrangement of the DK Country theme as Donkey Kong takes a rest and countless other arrangements of David Wise’s music for the DK Country series. A game music companion for this game would be a daunting task, and likely take up as much space as a dictionary.

Beyond smashing through all the terrain in each of the game’s “Sublayers,” one of the game’s central mechanics involves the voice of Donkey Kong’s sidekick Pauline. Throughout the underground biomes of DK Bananza, DK and Pauline encounter obstacles that can only be overcome when Pauline sings. Her voice has the ability to point the player toward their next goal, undo magical barriers, and transform DK into his superpower “Bananza” forms.

There are five hyper-muscular Bananzas DK can transform into in DK Bananza: the Zebra, Ostrich, Elephant, Snake, and great ape Kong Bananza. Acquiring each of these Bananza abilities entails meeting with one of the great Elders of the above species and locating their vinyl music records. Doing so presents the player with a cutscene in which Pauline learns to sing songs that harness the power of Bananergy (Banana Energy) to fuel DK’s Bananza transformations. While DK is transformed, Pauline continuously sings the song she learned that fuels the specific form DK takes on. These songs include a hard rock jams, a Shakira-esque bop, and an EDM rap. The texts to these songs are seemingly in a form of Simlish—a language nonsense vocables that almost resemble actual language from the Sims franchise (2000–).

But the Bananza songs are not what I’m most interested in writing about for this post. Pauline’s songs occur horizontally in the sonic architecture of DK Bananza, superseding the environmental music until DK’s Bananergy runs out or the player ends the Bananza early.

What I’m interested in are the instrumental objects that DK can interact with and other earcons that sound as the player performs certain activities. These sound modules occur vertically: they add texture whatever track the player is hearing at the moment of interaction.

Fractones

There are many species that inhabit the underground Sublayers that DK and Pauline visit in DK Bananza. Monkeys are found in the Lagoon Layer, Elephants in the Tempest Layer, and so on. Two species aren’t tied to a specific Sublayer of the game: the Eelevators (eels that transport DK across the Sublayers he’s visited) and Fractones.

Made of crystal, the Fractones (shown in Image 2) are very fragile and will shatter if punched by DK. Luckily, though, they can easily reform themselves in a way that shirks the law of conservation of mass.

Fractones sing when they speak and when they shatter, making clear the portmanteau of fracture tone that composes the name of the species. As we will see with other sound effects below, when punching a Fractone, the sound module that sounds as it breaks smoothly blends into the harmonic structure of the game’s music (see in Video 1).

Video 1. Speaking with and smashing Fractones.

The Groove Layer

While DK sadly doesn’t perform the bongos in DK Bananza, there is one short episode of the game in which he may interact with objects that act as instruments. After restoring and revamping the the speaker system in the Groove Layer’s Disco Hall, a Fractone points DK toward a line of objects, imploring DK to punch them. If he does so, the objects make synthesized sounds reminiscent of the myriad sound options on a Casio keyboard. These sounds follow the harmonic progression of the groovy music in the level. I’ve performed a number of the odd instruments in Video 2 below.

Video 2. Playing instruments in the Groove Layer’s Disco Hall.

Reading Stone Tablets

As an avid gamer, I expect there to be a sound whenever I click through dialogue in a game. I’ve heard so many little tinkles talking with non-player characters in Zelda games, that I’ve learned to tune out these sound effects. It wasn’t until Sublayer 1400 (the fourteenth “World”) of DK Bananza that dialogue sound effects grabbed my attention and I became aware of how they were implemented in the sonic architecture of the game.

The music that plays as DK and Pauline explore the (honestly quite disgusting) Feast Layer is reminiscent of a carnival. The Feast Layer is more-or-less an amusement park based on fast food. The main goal of the level is to construct a mountainous hamburger (shown in Image 2) that allows DK to climb up to a towering Ferris wheel.

Where many of the tracks in DK Bananza have relatively slow harmonic rhythms, the carnival music of the Feast Layer moves from chord to chord much more quickly. Because of this faster harmonic progression, I finally realized the that the sounds you hear when reading the Exploritone’s stone-hewn verses add color to the harmonies of the background track. Video 3 below shows the very moment I came to this realization after talking with a lion-shaped Fractone.

Video 3. Speaking with a Fractone before reading a verse from Exploritone’s saga.

When DK approaches the Mane Gate Market at the center of the Feast Layer, more colorful chords begin to populate the harmonic progression of the level’s background music. Because of this, more sounds are added to dialogue that make it even more apparent how smoothly they fit into the musical structure of the level. Video 4 shows how the dialogue sounds become more fleshed out and more obviously part of the musical fabric.

Video 4. Reading a stone tablet at Mane Gate Market in the Feast Layer.

Conclusion

All of the harmonizing sound effects in DK Bananza fit so smoothly into the game’s sonic architecture, adding color to the music over which they sound. The smoothness of the modular structure is twofold. As in the cartoonish sword slashes of The Wind Waker, the abundance of colorful sound effects in DK Bananza play into narrative themes regarding music and the power of musical performance. They also illustrate the musical nature of the Fractones.

I don’t have a real conclusion other than this: if you want a smashing top-to-bottom, side-to-side musical experience, play Donkey Kong Bananza. It takes a couple Sublayers to fully understand the appeal of the game—the beginning really is just a bunch of smashing and throwing rocks around—but the music and sound design are some of the slickest in video gaming from the moment you launch the game.

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Thanks for reading! Leave a comment! Share this post! It really helps me reach out to a wider audience!

Bibliography

Collins, Karen. Game Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Medina-Gray, Elizabeth. “Analyzing Modular Smoothness in Video Game Music.” Music Theory Online 25, no. 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.25.3.2.

———. “Interacting with Soundscapes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers 176–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

———. “Meaningful Modular Combinations.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 104–21. New York: Routledge, 2014.

———. “Modular Structure and Function in Early 21st-Century Video Game Music.” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

Mosely, Roger, and Aya Saiki. “Nintendo’s Art of Musical Play.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 51–76. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Nelson, William. “Link’s Sword is Mightier than the Pen: Composing and Performing in the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda Series.” Venture: The University of Mississippi Undergraduate Research Journal 6 (2024): 106–124.

Newman, James. “Before Red Book: Early Video Game Music and Technology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 12–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Schartmann, Andrew. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack. 33 1/3. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Stevens, Richard. “The Inherent Conflicts of Musical Interactivity in Video Games.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 74–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Whalen, Zack. “Play Along: An Approach to Videogame Music.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 4. no. 1 (2004). www.gamestudies.org/0401/whalen.

Ludography

Atari. Pong. Arcade. Sound design by Allan Alcorn. Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, 1972.

Namco. Donkey Konga. Nintendo GameCube. Musić by Junko Ozawa, Jesahm, and various others. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2003.

Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Mahito Yokota. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2004.

Nintendo EPD. Donkey Kong Bananza. Nintendo Switch 2. Music directed by Naoto Kubo. Original Donkey Kong music by Yukio Kaneoka, David Wise, Eveline Fischer, and Grant Kirkhope. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2025.

———. Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Nintendo Switch. Music by. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2023.

———. Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo Switch. Music by Naoto Kubo, Shiho Fujii, and Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

Nintendo EAD. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2002.

———. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Wii. Music by Hajime Wakai, Shiho Fujii, Mahito Yokita, and Takeshi Hama. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2011.

Nintendo R&D1. Donkey Kong. Arcade. Music by Yukio Kaneoka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1981.

Nintendo R&D4. Super Mario Bros. Arcade and Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1985.

———. The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1986.

Rare. Donkey Kong 64. Nintendo 64. Music by Grant Kirkhope. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1999.

———. Donkey Kong Country. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by David Wise, Eveline Fischer, and Robin Beanland. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.

———. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by David Wise. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1995.

———. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble!. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Eveline Fischer. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1996.

I’m going to start a little series to run every other week called Musical Moments.

These posts will be lighter on research, focusing on favorite musical moments in video games. Don’t think I won’t sneak in some history and fieldwork, though!

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Minecraft!

Pretty much everyone knows about Minecraft (2009–). Since its public alpha and beta testing from 2009 to 2010 and its explosive release in 2011, Minecraft has wiggled its way into most facets of pop culture, even inspiring the incredibly self-referential (and some would say ill-advised) A Minecraft Movie (2025).

One of the most notable moments in Minecraft’s history was its $2.5 billion purchase by Microsoft in 2014. With funding from Microsoft, the developers of Minecraft, Mojang Studios, continue to update the game and keep it on the forefront of gamer’s minds.

For about fifteen years, Minecraft has been a central influential pillar of the video game industry and a paragon of the sandbox genre. Currently running on version 1.21.8 for the Java-based edition, Minecraft receives massive updates on a near-annual basis that add new functionality, creatures, and travel destinations.

Playing Minecraft

Starting a new game file in Minecraft, the player spawns in a procedurally generated world of forests, mountains, deserts, tundras, jungles, and swamps. Sprinkled throughout the almost-infinite world are small villages, booby-trapped temples, and shipwrecks. The player can explore these regions and structures, but the clock is ticking—by nightfall, these biomes will be swarming with monsters. When the sun sets in a Minecraft world, hostile creatures—zombies, skeleton archers, explosive Creepers, and massive spiders—spawn and attack the player on sight. Therein lies the goal of Minecraft in Survival Mode: survive.

To do this, players must craft equipment and build shelter. Players manipulate the blocky world around them, hacking away at trees and stone to gather materials and build tools, with which they can more effectively hack away at trees and stone.

A player’s first shelter in Minecraft can take many forms. I, for one, typically dig a small hole into the side of a hill where I can wait out the night by mining for stone and coal. For this, I punch dirt out of the way until I hit stone. To mine stone, I need a wooden pickaxe, which I can craft from the wood I’ve gotten from smacking down trees with my bare fist. The stone I mine with my pick can then be used to make stone tools and furnaces in which I can grill up some steak to stave off hunger.

Starting a New World in Minecraft and setting up my first shelter. The music during gameplay in this video is “Comforting Memories” by Kumi Tanioka.

When I’m sufficiently safe from danger—generally after acquiring at least iron tools and armor—I feel comfortable enough to explore the world for a suitable place to design and create my “Survival Base” out of which I can embark on expeditions and mine more deeply to find diamonds and obsidian.

Minecraft is far from a realistic game, though. Nearly everything in a Minecraft world is made up of 1x1x1-meter blocks and you can throw some iron ingots on a workbench to make a bucket capable of containing and transporting lava, which you can then use in a smoker to cook up some yummy baked potatoes or empty it out into a village to burn it up and possibly self-immolate. But not to worry, death is only a temporary setback in Minecraft, and is easily counteracted by clicking “Respawn” and reappearing beside your home bed.

But if the point is to survive, why can I die in a surprise Creeper explosion and press “Respawn” as many times as I have the patience for? Because unless I’m masochistic enough to play in Hardcore Mode, permanent, save-file-deleting death would be too hard and make playing Minecraft feel like a horror game.

This sort of wackadoo incoherence is an essential part of video games. As outlined by Jesper Juul in his massively influential Half-Real, an incoherent world describes a fictional setting that is, in part, only explainable by the rules of a game.1 We can click “Respawn” in Minecraft not because a wizard bestowed upon us the ability to infinitely reincarnate, but because routinely losing all of our progress would make us hate Minecraft and never want to launch the game again. We can kill a cow and pick up a perfectly-cut steak and an already-tanned piece of leather not because we’re skilled butchers or leatherworkers, but frankly, because the game lets us.

Minecraft is a game where things making sense plays second violin to the possibility of endless creativity and unique gaming experiences.

The Music and Sounds of Minecraft

There are four kinds of sound native to Minecraft’s sonic architecture: sound effects, ambient cues, music discs, and soundtrack music. Below is an outline of these sound cues from shortest to longest:

• Sound Effects: The sound effects of Minecraft comprise both the realms of auditory icons (naturalistic sounds) and earcons (abstract sounds) that the player learns to associate with certain in-game activities.

  Auditory icons include the wooden twang of an arrow hitting its target, the sounds of walking across grass blocks, and the groans of zombies. Earcons include the popping sounds that play as the player picks up blocks, the jingles of acquiring experience points, and the clicking of selecting options in the game’s menus.

  All of the sound effects in Minecraft come from field recordings and Foley work. In early releases, the sound effects were designed by the game’s original composer Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld. In recent releases, sound design has been led by Samuel Åberg.

• Ambient Cues: When exploring a cave, swimming underwater, or traversing the hellish Nether realm, short sound cues may play at random. Unlike sound effects, the ambient cues of Minecraft are very rare. The cuing of ambient sounds is based on an algorithm that measures a value named “mood” which increases as the player ventures further from sunlight. When the mood value reaches 100%, an ambient cue plays and resets the mood algorithm. In the Nether, where the sunlight value is always 0%, ambient sounds are more common. There are about 149 or 171 total ambient sounds that may be cued in Minecraft, depending on the version.

  The ambient sounds act as a sort of earcon, abstractly communicating to the player that they are exploring dangerous terrain or waters. The sounds themselves are largely unsettling and serve to put the player on edge when venturing into the monster-infested cave systems of their Minecraft world.

• Music Discs: In recent years, Nintendo games have begun allowing players to unlock access to their soundtracks via in-game interfaces. The new Donkey Kong Bananza (2025) is a prime example of this, giving players the opportunity to collect music discs from defeated enemies and play them in a gramophone in the game’s various “Getaway” checkpoints. In Super Mario Odyssey (2017), playing specific tracks for a Music Toad is central to some post-game quests.

  Since 2010, Minecraft has given its players similar opportunities to collect vinyl records and play them in a jukebox. Unlike Donkey Kong Bananza and Super Mario Odyssey, these tracks are unique from the “background” tracks heard randomly in the game. Music discs in Minecraft are a reward for a seemingly impossible task: getting a skeleton archer to kill a Creeper. Certain discs may also be found through similarly unlikely monster interactions or hidden in dangerous locations.2

  Music discs afford players the most musical freedom of any of the sound types in the game. Players may insert music discs into jukeboxes and remove them at will. (Jukeboxes may also be triggered using redstone mechanics—Minecraft’s mind-boggling system of pseudo-electronic circuitry and computation.)

  Below is a table of the 20 acquirable music discs in Minecraft, their composers, the versions in which they were introduced, and the vibes I associate with them:

  

• Soundtrack Music: The onset of Minecraft’s sparse musical soundtrack is seemingly randomized. The tracks don’t seem to arise from any player activity, and in the words of Michiel Kamp, “they fade out as indifferently to the actions of the player as they faded in.”3

  The music of Minecraft is largely minimalistic, with much of Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld’s original music recalling the ambient music of Erik Satie and Brian Eno. For the most part, each track fades in gradually, crescendoing slowly toward a climax before fading back out. Below is the track “Subwoofer Lullaby,” one of my favorites, which demonstrates the C418’s Eno-esque approach.

  Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld, Minecraft - Version Alpha, “Subwoofer Lullaby”

  There are currently about 66 tracks that may be cued in Minecraft. Much of Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld’s original music has been kept in the rotation, though recent additions primarily by Lena Raine along with Aaron Cherof, Kumi Tanioka, and Amos Roddy are also heard. C418’s original tracks bear somewhat enigmatic titles such as “Wet Hands,” “Haggstrom,” and “Mice On Venus.”

  In a recent update, Minecraft has given players the option to change the frequency at which the soundtrack plays, with options such as “Normal,” “Frequent,” and “Constant.” The player may completely turn off music by setting its volume level to zero.

  

  I have thus far tried to refrain from calling the soundtrack “background” music. Defined by Michiel Kamp in Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music (2024), background music is that which the player is invited to ignore. It may provide an aural ground, convey mood, or communicate aspects of a game, but background music is designed to be heard unconsciously.4 This is certainly possible with Minecraft’s soundtrack, as it unobtrusively fades in and out at random points, and like elevator music, it “hardly registers on [our] consciousness.”5

  The randomness of the music in Minecraft prevents us from hearing it as a sign for any in-game events or from playing along to it within the ludic rules of the game. It can, however, come out of the background if we notice it and give it our attention. The moment in which Minecraft’s soundtrack exits the background involves a mode of hearing Kamp calls aesthetic hearing.6 When we give attention to the music of Minecraft, it causes us to reflect on its implementation, sonic quality, and potential meaning: “mere experience is turned into an experience through the onset of music.”7

My Favorite Musical Moments

I’ve been playing Minecraft on a server with my sisters and brother-in-law a lot lately. I’m making a castle based on Wyrm’s Rock Fortress from Baldur’s Gate 3 and the Forgotten Realms D&D setting, and I’m planning on building a Colossus of Rhodes nearby with a huge city under its protection. It’s a grand endeavor, and I’ve already mined upwards of 30,000 stone blocks and died about 160 times. Two days ago I lost all of my enchanted diamond armor after an unfortunate ender pearl mishap in the End dimension.

“Mice on Venus”

Because of the randomness of the majority of sound cues in Minecraft, it’s hard to pinpoint just one musical moment from the game. My favorite musical moment of Minecraft is pretty much the entire time between entering a world and clicking “Quit Game.”8

I will say, though, that my favorite individual track was introduced in version Alpha. I remember playing Minecraft over a decade ago with my cousin at their house in Chattanooga. As they were showing me the dogs they had tamed and the house they had built along a river, “Mice On Venus” started to play. I stopped listening to my cousin, as I am regrettably wont to do in most conversations, and gave all my attention to the four and half minute track.

There is very little movement in the beginning of “Mice On Venus.” The vast space between notes mirrors the mostly empty spaces of Minecraft’s landscapes. The cue slowly adds more textural layers that drive the music forward, much like gathering new materials and equipment in the game allows the player to advance further and further. This half of the cue seems to me to be illustrative of the mining and crafting aspects of Minecraft.

The second half of “Mice On Venus” is faster and vastly more adventurous than the beginning. There is more rhythmic vigor, a more active accompaniment, and a more adventurous chord structure that dips more frequently into the minor mode. I have a degree in being able to talk about music, but the only way I can describe this section is it sounds like gnomes dancing in a dark, toadstool-filled forest. This half of the cue describes the exploration of Minecraft’s worlds—finding huge mushrooms, meeting silly villagers, and spelunking.

Hearing “Mice On Venus” now reminds me of my early experiences with Minecraft; playing it after school in my mom’s classroom and irritating my dad by feverishly clicking my computer mouse to place blocks.

Impromptu Composing and Performing with Sound Effects

Nowadays when I play Minecraft, I’m in constant awe of the Foley artistry behind the sound effects. Since the sound effects are taken from real-life sounds, even the most outlandish creatures sound natural. It’s also very fun to think about what C418 and Samuel Åberg actually did to make the sounds that you hear in the game. Last year, Mojang Studios produced a video featuring Åberg and his process for creating and implementing the sounds of Minecraft, which I’ve linked at the end of this post.

I’ve written elsewhere that playing with earcons and auditory icons allows video game players to take part in the sonic architecture of a game.9 This is especially true in Minecraft, where every action you take is accompanied by sound. The soundtrack itself may be sparse, but sound effects allow the player to make wall-to-wall music as they play.

(More overtly, the player has the ability to craft note blocks that they may program and trigger with redstone mechanics to composer and perform music. Note blocks have been used by Minecraft content creators to produce “note block covers” of popular music since their introduction in Version Beta in 2011.)

Micro-Conclusion

Minecraft wouldn’t be the same without the nostalgic pull of “Mice On Venus” distracting me from strip-mining for diamonds.10 It wouldn’t feel whole without the plop of cobblestones in my inventory or the sudden jolt of the ambient cues scaring me shitless. And it wouldn’t be Minecraft if I didn’t have the chance to take a break from it all, slip “Pigstep” into the jukebox, and throw a rave with my parrots.

All of the blocks that make up the sonic architecture of Minecraft create in it a living, breathing world of music.

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Ludography

Mojang Studios. Minecraft. PC and various consoles. Music composed by Daniel Rosenfeld, Lena Raine, and others. Sound design by Daniel Rosenfeld, Samuel Åberg, and others. Stockholm: Mojang Studios, 2011.

Nintendo EPD. Donkey Kong Bonanza. Nintendo Switch 2. Music composed by Naoto Kubo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2025.

———. Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo Switch. Music composed by Naoto Kubo, Shiho Fujii, and Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.

Bibliography

Brazil, Eoin, and Mikael Fernström. “Auditory Icons.” In The Sonification Handbook. Edited by Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt, and John G. Neuhoff, 325–338. Berlin: Logos, 2011.

Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong. New York: Picador, 1994.

McGookin, David, and Stephen Brewster. “Earcons.” In The Sonification Handbook. Edited by Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt, and John G. Neuhoff, 339–361. Berlin: Logos, 2011.

Mojang Studios. “How Minecraft Sounds are Made.” YouTube Video. 7:49. Embedded below.

And here it is: the last part of the Link’s Awakening game music not-so-mini-companion!1 I must apologize for subjecting you, my dear readers, to a month of my ramblings on nearly every track in Link’s Awakening. I promise, it’s almost over.

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Gameplay Peritexts and Cutscenes

When does a video game begin?  Is it when the title screen appears? When we press START? When we actually take control of an avatar and play with game mechanics?

Most pieces of media have clear lines of demarcation between the peritexts—material that surrounds a text—and the text itself. The peritexts of a book, for example, are clearly distinct from the text itself. The cover page, copyright material, table of contents, and foreword are all visually separated from the main text, which generally begins on page one. Drawing analogies between video games and novels, then, it becomes clear that the peritextual domain of a video game lies in moments that don’t constitute actual gameplay. 

This is complicated, however, when we consider diegesis as an aspect of a text. In the world of cinema, diegesis refers to the elements of a film that are native to the on-screen world. These include the characters and their actions, scenery, and diegetic sound. Non-diegetic elements, on the other hand, are those that reach beyond the fourth wall to aid in its understanding. Musical scores are among the most prominent film peritexts as they exist at the same time as the text and actively shape understanding of the text. Thus, in regard to film, the line between text and peritext is drawn between diegesis and non-diegesis.

In video games, issues of diegesis complicate the analogy of active gameplay to text. As in film, diegesis becomes a signifier of the relationship between text and peritext in conjunction with moments of gameplay. I borrow Table 1 from Michiel Kamp, presenting a sort of Punnett square of four “temporally distinct situations” based on gameplay and non-gameplay, diegesis and non-diegesis.2

The table presents two clear moments of textuality and peritextuality: moments of diegetic gameplay are textual while those of non-diegetic non-gameplay are firmly peritextual. Kamp refers to non-diegetic gameplay and diegetic non-gameplay as “liminal zones” between text and peritext.3 These zones refer to some aspects of what makes a moment textual—interactivity with a game or narrative scenes—and their inverses that make a moment peritextual.

In this final part of my game music mini-companion to Link’s Awakening, we will be looking at the music that falls into the liminal and peritextual categories. Starting with the purely peritextual, we will start with a discussion of the game’s title screen sequence: the shipwreck cutscene, title screen, and file selection menu. We will then jump to the ending sequence and the end credits before moving into sections on the game’s ocarina songs and ludic cues.

Ending the companion will be a discussion of the 1998 remaster (Link’s Awakening DX) and 2019 remake. While Link’s Awakening DX adds one track to the original game, the 2019 remake is worthy of its own companion due to its expansive reworking of the score and the greater musical meaning it allots to the original music. In spite of this, I promise our discussion will be brief!

Shipwreck and Washing Ashore

Before pressing START, the player is greeted with a short cinematic that sets the scene for the game. While sailing across a sea, Link’s ship is struck by lightning and he washes up on the shores of Koholint Island. The music in this scene begins with a stormy variation on the Legend of Zelda main theme. The most notable feature of the shipwreck scene’s music is its uneven movement between the meters 5/8 and 4/8. These time signatures present a straightforward example of text painting, using musical features to illustrate the meaning of song lyrics or on-screen events. In this case, the unevenness of 5/8 is evocative of the dangerously choppy waters Link attempts to navigate in the opening peritext of Link’s Awakening and the brief changes to 4/8 remove any sense of regularity. The cue accelerates, becoming seemingly frantic until lightning strikes Link’s ship and silence takes over.

Following the shipwreck, the cinematic transitions into the top-down perspective of the gameplay of Link’s Awakening. In this new visual style, we see Marin walk up to Link unconscious on Toronbo Shore south of Mabe Village. Another cue evocative of the Zelda Theme awakens (included in the track “Title (opening ver.)”), slowly developing the downward leap of a fifth and scalar walk-up motives that gamers have come to associate with the Zelda series. Most notable in this cue is how the fifth leap, beginning on scale degrees 5 and 1, evolves to involve the 7ths and 3rds of the underlying chord structure (around 0:15 in the audio below). While the basic contour of the melody remains the same, the focus on the colorful 7th and 3rd changes its character, beginning to develop an air of dreaminess that pervades the rest of the soundtrack.

As the virtual camera pans up to show the Wind Fish’s Egg atop Mt. Tamaranch, the Title Screen appears and we transition into an iteration of Koji Kondo’s Zelda Theme (0:25 in the audio above). After developing the motives of the theme across the opening cutscenes, finally landing on the full-fledged Zelda Theme feels like a massive payoff, and sets the tone for the heroic adventure awaiting the player.

A more toned down version of the Zelda Theme plays after pressing START and entering the File Selection menu. This version is highly anticipatory and continues to hype up the epic adventure on Koholint Island.

Waking Up at Tarin’s House and the First Search

After selecting a new save file, the game officially begins as Link wakes up in Tarin and Marin’s home in Mabe Village. In the music for Tarin’s House, we return to the developmental 7th-3rd leaps from the opening cutscenes. The dreamy melody is accompanied by an echoing arpeggio figure. While not as intense as the blurry Face Shrine cue, the echoed tones of the accompaniment figure insist on the dreamlike nature of the melody to illustrate Link’s grogginess after regaining consciousness in Tarin’s House.

Once Tarin returns Link’s shield and Link heads out to find his sword on Toronbo Shores, a new cue begins that develops the Washing Ashore melody further. In the cue called “First Search,” a galloping rhythm is added, lending the dreamy melody a feeling of heroism and recalling (or anticipating) the Zelda Theme.

As with the peritextual scenes that lead to the Title Screen, when we finally hear the full-force Zelda Theme in the Field cue, it feels like a natural progression from the opening sequence. The fragmented version of the opening Zelda Theme figure now has its sword and shield and is ready for the dangers that wait across Koholint Island. If this is a dream, it’s sure to be an epic one!

On the Beach with Marin

Following the opening sequence, cutscenes take on more emotional roles within the narrative of Link’s Awakening. Music in these cutscenes is used to heighten the emotion of whatever action is shown on screen. Silly scenes in which monkeys construct a bridge and Tarin is chased by bees, for example, are suitably accompanied by silly musical cues. 

A cutscene that stands above the rest, though, comes when Link finds Marin sitting alone on the beach. Watching and hearing the waves, Marin talks to Link about her thoughts and dreams. She wonders where coconuts come from, what lies beyond the ocean, and how meaningful it was to have found Link washed up on the shore—a sign that Koholint isn’t all there is. She expresses her wish to become a seagull, to “fly to faraway places and sing for many people.” After wondering aloud if the Wind Fish would grant her wish, she agrees to go with Link to wake up a walrus blocking the way to Yarna Desert. After the cutscene, Link “obtains” Marin, humorously holding her above his head as the “Get Item” fanfare plays.

The music that plays in this scene is the “Ballad of the Wind Fish,” a tune Link can hear Marin singing in parts of Mabe Village and Animal Village throughout the game and that he later learns to play on his ocarina. The ballad acts as Marin’s character theme, and in this cutscene, sounds remarkably wistful and dreamy, musically mirroring Marin’s longing to leave Koholint Island.

Koholint Island Disappears

After defeating the Nightmare Shadows and playing the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” one last time for the Wind Fish, the player watches as the places and people of Koholint Island disappear one-by-one. 

The music that accompanies this scene is once again the “Ballad of the Wind Fish,” and pushes the Game Boy sound chip to its limits. The ballad is performed by all eight Instruments of the Sirens. Producing the sound for all eight instruments at the same time, however, would have been impossible for the 4-channel sound chip. 

To remedy this limitation, Sounds 1 and 2 perform solo instruments (the Full Moon Cello, Conch Horn, Sea Lily’s Bell, and Surf Harp). Only two of these instruments ever sound together at one time so there would be no need to devote a third channel to these instruments. 

Sounds 3 and 4 play double duty between the remaining four instruments. Sound 3 jumps between the Wind Marimba (a funny name for a percussion instrument) and the Organ of Evening Calm. The variable wave form of Sound 3 allows these instruments to sound distinct from each other even as they are played by the same channel. Sound 4 performs the two percussion instruments of the ensemble, the Coral Triangle and Thunder Drum. The instruments of Sounds 3 and 4 respectively never sound at the same time, but rather fill in each other’s gaps to create continuous and coherent accompaniment and rhythmic figures.

Ending and Staff Roll

A final cutscene plays after Koholint disappears, showing Link waking up and clinging to the remnant pieces of his ship. The “Ballad of the Wind Fish” sounds once more. At first it is played solo suggesting Link’s feeling of loneliness after ending his dream of Koholint Island. As Link continues to awaken and looks up to see the Wind Fish flying overhead, the ballad becomes more lively, pointing to the success of Link’s mission and the joy of remembering happy dreams. As the theme for Marin, too, the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” implies a connection between the seagulls Link sees flying around and Marin’s dream to become a seagull.

The final cutscene and its music transition into the staff credits as the Wind Fish eclipses the sun above Link. The music of the credits is composed of a fanfare in 12/8 that moves between a variation on the Zelda Theme and a triumphant variation on the Ballad of the Wind Fish. The credits end with a final galloping flourish to conclude the epic narrative, gameplay, and music of the game.

Learning and Playing the Ocarina

One of the central game mechanics to traditional Legend of Zelda games is the performance of musical instruments. Throughout his journeys and incarnations, Link has been a guitarist, flutist, percussionist, harper, and conductor, using music to perform magical deeds. In the four-game line from A Link to the Past to Majora’s Mask (1991–2000), Link plays the ocarina.

While Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask present an invariably more significant gameplay role for the ocarina,4 the ocarina is pivotal to the plot of Link’s Awakening. After completing the game’s seventh dungeon, Link hears a mysterious voice call out, “. . . OCARINA . . . the music of the Ocarina leads . . . .” This cryptic message is made clear in an episode following the seventh dungeon. The wise, exposition-giving Owl explains to Link that Marin attempted to awaken the Wind Fish by singing a song of awakening for the Wind Fish’s Egg in the Tal Tal mountains. It becomes apparent that to wake the Wind Fish from its slumber, Link must play the ocarina before the Egg, leading the Instruments of the Sirens in a performance of the “Ballad of the Wind Fish.”

None of the songs Link plays on the ocarina are fully in tune, with many notes being up to a quarter tone off pitch. If this is the same Link from A Link to the Past, he has certainly gotten worse at playing the ocarina: he doesn’t play on pitch, he contracts rhythms, and performs melodies much faster than he was taught. Playing into the idea that Link is a beginner ocarina musician, the song he performs best happens to be the elementary “Frog’s Song of Soul.” 

In many ways, Link’s poor performance of the ocarina anticipates Ocarina of Time, in which the player uses the Nintendo 64 controller to perform the ocarina. Players are allowed to perform the ocarina melodies however they choose in Ocarina of Time, though this usually trends toward  playing them with no regard to tempo or rhythm to more quickly activate the ocarina’s magic.

Central to the ocarina melodies Link learns are how they function within the rules of the Link’s Awakening. Speaking about the expanded role of the ocarina in Ocarina of Time, Stephanie Lind categorizes ocarina songs into three main functions they perform. Namely, the twelve ocarina melodies in Ocarina of Time are used to advance plot, assist the player, and fast-travel/warp across the gameworld.5 Compared to their Ocarina of Time counterparts, the three ocarina melodies of Link’s Awakening have vastly fewer use cases and two are only ever necessary for very specific narrative purposes, outlined in Table 2.

With their limited functions and incredibly short performances within normal gameplay, we will be focusing here on the cutscenes in which Link learns the ocarina melodies. We have already discussed the weight carried by the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” elsewhere, so our discussion of the ocarina song will be brief!

“I don’t remember anything…”

Before we get into the ocarina songs, there is one short cue to discuss. Even though our hero is the same ocarina prodigy from A Link to the Past, when he first acquires the ocarina, Link does not know how to play the instrument. When the player attempts to use the ocarina at this point, Link quickly fumbles a few severely out-of-tune pitches with no real rhythmic or melodic structure, shown in Figure 1, much like anyone with no instrumental experience would when picking up a strange instrument. 

Ballad of the Wind Fish

After obtaining the Ocarina, Link is finally able to learn the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” that Marin has been singing throughout the game. While Marin teaches Link the ballad, the melody is carried by two pulse waves (see Figure 2). Though the timbres are the same, it is clear that the instrumentation is meant to signal a duet between Marin and Link. As they perform the duet, Marin and Link begin with a brief call-and-response structure. They then play together in parallel sixths. More than anything, this duet reinforces the game’s mission to endear Marin to the player, increasing the emotional weight of waking the Wind Fish with the very same ballad. 

Frog’s Song of Soul

About halfway through Link’s Awakening, Link learns the “Frog’s Song of Soul” from the massive frog Mamu and his backup singers in a cave. Introducing the song, Mamu says:

Ribbit! Ribbit! I'm Mamu, on vocals! But I don't need to tell you that, do I? Everybody knows me! Want to hang out and listen to us jam? For 300 Rupees, we'll let you listen to a previously unreleased cut! What do you do?

Referring to the song as “a previously unreleased cut” and the performance as a jam session would be rather absurd within typical Zelda settings, but it seems normal within the bizarreness of Link’s Awakening. What’s truly absurd, though, is charging Link 300 Rupees for a song that is essentially a scale exercise and only used twice in the game (see Figure 3 below).

Adding to the preposterousness of the “Frog’s Song of Soul,” Mamu’s backup singers croak out the melody in a canon at the minor second. These dissonant intervals, along with tritones, dense minor second clusters, and minor ninths, make Mamu’s song humorously hard to listen to. The song is so ear-achingly dissonant that it has the power to awaken the dead . . . and makes it all the more ridiculous to charge 300 rupees to hear it.

Manbo’s Mambo

Venturing into an underwater cave in Koholint Prairie, Link encounters a large fish named Manbo and two smaller fish. If Link tells Manbo he has an ocarina, Manbo will teach him “Manbo’s Mambo.” As they teach the tune, Manbo and the smaller fish dance along to the music, exclaiming “Oh!” to punctuate musical sections. (In the 2019 remake, the smaller fish shout “Manbo, Manbo!” between iterations of the mambo melody.) Manbo’s song unsurprisingly resembles typical mambo music with highly syncopated rhythms in Sounds 1–3 (see Figure 4 below).

Essential to the groove of the piece is the rhythmic pattern provided by the noise channel Sound 4. This pattern, called tresillo, involves three evenly spaced accents against a two-beat meter (see Figure 5). In simple duple and quadruple meters (2/4, 4/4, etc.), tresillo disrupts the symmetry of the measure, creating a lopsided effect that propels each measure forward. Tresillo is a fundamental rhythmic cell in Afro-Cuban and other Latin American dance music, so its use in “Manbo’s Mambo” is natural to its dancey feel.

Ludic Objects and Cues

So far, we’ve discussed location cues and cutscene music. These pieces of music help to establish the setting of Link’s adventure and comment on the narrative itself, thus falling close to the paidia dimension of play described by Roger Caillois.6 On the other end of the spectrum is ludus, the dimension of play which “deals with rules and mechanical processes of play.”7 In this section, we will look at another kind of peritextual music, ludic objects and cues, that responds to and shapes the process of gameplay extra-diegetically.

Every Zelda game since the first has made use of two common ludic objects: the “Get Item” fanfare and the “Puzzle Solved” jingle. Throughout the series, when Link opens a treasure chest and obtains the item inside—often just a couple Rupees—a figure consisting of chromatically ascending triads plays. In Link’s Awakening, the “Get Item” fanfare shown in Figure 6a begins on an F Major triad and ascends to an A-flat Major triad. A variation on this fanfare is played whenever Link obtains an important item, such as the Heart Containers that increase Link’s health points or Link’s shield. This version, shown in Figure 6b, is more punchy, using staccato articulations, and ascends farther than in the normal item fanfare to assert the greater significance of the new item.

Central to the dungeons of any Zelda game are the puzzles that the player must solve to advance.8 When Link successfully solves a puzzle, a small jingle often plays to affirm the solution. In its very brief implementation, it follows a question-and-answer structure that quickly conveys the idea of a puzzle and its solution. It begins with a rather ambiguous descending gesture answered by a clear augmented triad (shown in Figure 7). The augmented triad is not known for its consonance, but instead lends a sense of mystery and openness that illustrate the new opportunities Link has after solving a puzzle.

The “Puzzle Solved” jingle is present in every Zelda game as part of the series’s ludic identity, but sounds slightly different in Link’s Awakening, transcribed in Figure 9. This version has the same basic contour—descending about an octave before rising above the initial pitch—and similarly ends with an augmented triad. This jingle begins, however, with a clearer diminished triad on B. The intervals between pitches in a diminished triad are all minor thirds and convey a sense of dissonant closedness. Answering with an augmented triad, a sort of conceptual opposite consisting of more open major thirds (illustrated in Figure 8), creates another type of question-and-answer, depicting a quick journey from closedness to openness. This again resembles the a-ha! moment of solving a confusing puzzle.9

Boss Music

The last kind of ludic cue I would like to discuss are the cues that sound as Link fights bosses and mini-bosses. There are five cues used for these kinds of situations:

• Mini-boss cue: plays when Link faces off against a special enemy partway through a dungeon. Mini-bosses pose a greater threat than normal enemies and generally guard access to the important item Link obtains in a given dungeon.

• Turtle Rock battle cue: plays when Link reanimates and battles against Turtle Rock, the guard of the dungeon of the same name. Turtle Rock itself is a mini-boss, though more mechanically challenging than most others. The track begins with an introduction depicting Turtle Rock’s awakening before moving into the looping battle cue.

• Boss cue: plays as Link fights against the final, challenging foe of a dungeon. The bosses of Link’s Awakening, called Nightmares, guard the Instruments of the Sirens. The Nightmares all play into certain gameplay mechanics that the player must learn to exploit to figure out their particular weaknesses and win the battle. The bosses become more difficult as the game progresses and can shell out considerable amounts of damage.

• Eagle’s Tower Boss cue: plays when Link fights against the Grim Creeper and his Evil Eagle at the top of Eagle’s Tower. This is one of two battles presented from a side-facing perspective rather than top down, so it is already visually distinct from other boss battles in the game. The battle is made more difficult than the others due to the possibility of Link falling off of Eagle’s Tower, thus having to restart the battle. The body of the cue is the same as the regular Boss cue, but an introduction is added that establishes the more anger-driven nature of the bosses going forward.

• Shadow Nightmares battle cue: plays when Link fights against the final boss(es) of Link’s Awakening. The battle against the Shadow Nightmares is fought in six stages in which the boss(es) take on different forms. Among these forms are former bosses of Link’s Awakening, the evil sorcerer Agahnim from A Link to the Past, and Ganon himself. The music of the Shadow Nightmares battle is fittingly the most driving of the boss cues.

Without going too in depth on each of the five battle cues, I want to talk about the common features they share.

The most apparent commonality between the cues is their rhythmic vigor. Each of the cues is driven by repeating, propulsive rhythms provided by Sound 4’s percussive noises. While the rhythm for the Boss and Eagle’s Tower Boss cues includes an element of disruption, shifting from a simple to complex time signature, all of the rhythms repeat to maintain their drive and urgency. Apart from that of the Shadow Nightmares battle, all of the cues are also set to blazingly fast tempos that heighten the action already present in the rhythms. Table 3 below shows each cue’s rhythmic underpinning.

A second common feature between the battle cues is a bass line providing an ostinato figure. These bass ostinatos range from quite simple to super groovy. The (Eagle’s Tower) Boss cues fall on the simple end of the spectrum, sporting a repeating tremolo, oscillating quickly between two notes. The Turtle Rock and Mini-boss cues both make use of frantic octave jumps. The jumps in the Mini-boss cue are distinguished from those of the Turtle Rock music in that they provide a tresillo feel that propels the music as it would in a mambo. My personal favorite ostinato, and by far the most groovy, is set to the ironically relaxed tempo of the final boss battle, shown in Figure 10.

This final boss groove is at times harmonized by the perfect fourth below, following in the Zelda tradition of composing final boss and dungeon music with parallel fourths. The groove also rises in pitch with the chord changes through the course of the cue to add more anxiety to the battle against the Shadow Nightmares.

The 1998 and 2019 Remakes

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