Deconstructing: The Music of the 8 Dungeons of Link's Awakening

March 24, 2017

Original post here: http://jasonyu.me/links-awakening-dungeons

The music of the 8 dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is the subject of this Deconstructing article, where we’ll take a look in detail at a work of music and break it down into its disparate parts, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the reader’s experience with the music.

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On Reading Music for Non-Musicians

Throughout this article I use written (scored) examples to illustrate certain patterns and themes that occur in the soundtrack. I realize that many people are not able to read music—but luckily I think musical notation is actually intuitive enough that being able to see the contour of a phrase is enough to get my points across. If you don’t know what I mean, just remember this: when notes move upwards on the staff, they move up in pitch, and when notes move downwards on the staff, they move down in pitch. If you can just keep that simple idea in mind, I think you will be surprised at how easily you can follow along with the music.

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On Creativity

Something that's often said about creativity is that it thrives in restricted conditions---that is, the act of working around constraints and coming up with clever solutions is often how good ideas come about. Link's Awakening was made in 1993 and released on the original Game Boy---which meant that if you were writing music for this game, you were severely limited in a number of ways. The Game Boy's sound chip had 4 channels---2 square waves, a noise channel, and one programmable wave channel. As the noise channel is primarily used for percussion and other sound effects, this meant that as a composer, you were limited to 3 simultaneous sound channels for melody and harmony, two of which were locked into a specific timbre (a square wave). It's not a lot to work with.

And yet, the Zelda series needed to innovate. In the first two Zelda games (the original Legend of Zelda and The Adventure of Link, both for NES), there was essentially one track in each game that was used in all of the dungeons:

The Legend of Zelda - Labyrinth

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - Palace Theme

Link's Awakening was the first game in the series to have unique music for each dungeon. In order to keep each track different enough but still recognizable as a "dungeon" track, Link's Awakening chose to compose the 8 dungeons as a Variations on a Theme---that is, taking a musical idea, or "Theme" and writing various versions of it, or "Variations."

What's so impressive and creative about the 8 dungeon themes from Link's Awakening are the ways in which the composers took the limitations of the Game Boy sound hardware and formed these variations---despite, again, having lack of access to a variety of timbres and more than 2 distinct voices.

The Theme

The "Theme" in this Theme and Variations is actually not the first dungeon track, but rather the standard "Cave" track:

Cave (track repeats at 00:17)

Well-written and interesting variations on a Theme take as many elements as possible from the Theme and include them in the variation. It's easy to think that a variation is just a re-harmonization of the Theme melody, or the Theme melody with some additional embellishments (not that these are "bad" ways to write a Variation) but Variations are often much more interesting than that.

For this reason, it's important to examine every element of the Theme, from the micro note-to-note details to the larger, macro-level structure of a Theme.

First, the easy stuff: I've highlighted in blue what you could call the "melody" of the Cave theme. It's a 4-note, rising motif with the first 3 notes moving stepwise and the last jumping up an interval of a Fifth---easy to recognize.

Next, I've highlighted in red the musical response to the main melody---which is little more than a simple interval of an augmented 4th, or tritone. Let's talk about tritones real quick:

A tritone is a type of interval---the relationship between two pitches. In traditional music theory there's a concept of consonant intervals and dissonant intervals. Most chords and harmony is that you hear in most music are combinations of consonant intervals which include thirds, fourths, fifth, and sixths. (These intervals can then be qualified further, such as major or minor.) The tritone on the other hand is considered one of the most dissonant intervals---so much so, that in the early days of classical music, it was nicknamed the "Devil's interval."

As a result of this association, the tritone has a distinctive sound that is commonly heard in "horror music" or music associated with something "evil." So, it makes a lot of sense that it's used in here in for the dungeons of Link's Awakening.

Now it may seem like that the blue motif and the red tritone are all that really make up the Theme. However, there's one more element that proves to be an important recurring idea, and that happens we zoom all the way out and look at the entire track, and consider what happens when the track is looped:

Using the colors, look at the interactions of the blue melodic motif and the red tritone response. Notice how as the track progresses, the interval of time between blue and red interactions become shorter and shorter, until the end of the track is reached and the interval is reset. If you plotted out this musical interaction, it would look like this:

Of course, the question here is, what is the musical purpose of this? What does this accomplish?

To answer that question, let's listen to this very famous work of music:

To me, it appears that the Cave track is going for a similar (but more subtle) effect---using progressively shorter intervals of time between musical moments and increasing pitch to create a sense of looming danger, or that something is getting "closer." Let's call this the "Jaws Effect" and keep it in mind, next to our "blue melody" and "red tritone" motifs as we forge ahead...

Level 1 - Tail Cave (track repeats at 1:30)

Level 1 - Tail Cave begins immediately with a statement of the Blue Motif:

The way this track begins immediately makes clear the difference between this track and Cave to the player. The low repeating bass figure gives this iteration of the melody a lot more gravitas. Where the blue motif was lighter and mischievous in nature, this time the melody is almost menacing, foreboding---and as a player you immediately register that this is a much more dangerous area than your typical cave. The entire blue motif phrase goes until 0:32, where it then repeats the entire phrase again.

Then, at 1:04, we get the 2nd part of the track---a creeping, haunted repeating figure over the foreboding bass from before:

Here, outlined in red, we finally have the tritone's appearance---in the relationship between the F-natural in the repeating figure and the B-natural in the bass.

But there's something else going on here too---as you listen to this section, note the changes in timbre and dynamics to the repeating figure. The repeated notes are constantly moving in and out of focus---the composers have programmed the change in volume to match the change in note length, and the result is a great variation of the "Jaws Effect."

Level 2 - Bottle Grotto (track repeats at 0:56)

Bottle Grotto is the 2nd dungeon in the track, and for the first time, we don't immediately get the Blue Motif. Instead, we get this:

I think what's immediately noticeable here is actually the "Jaws Effect" and how the repeated high-pitched note moves in and out of focus, starting quiet and brittle before quickly building up to an almost alarm-like sound (0:00 to 0:02). Notice, too, how the repeated note starts out playing at a rate of 8 notes per beat (or 32nd notes), but when it reaches peak volume, the repeated note rate slows down by half and become 16th notes---in this case, it's the dilation of time in addition to changes in dynamics that creates the "Jaws Effect."

What's less noticeable about the repeated note phrase is this:

When the repeated note speed slows down to half speed, we actually get a 2nd note coming in below it---at the interval of a tritone, our Red Motif.

The phrase above repeats twice before we finally get our Blue Motif, this time in the bass:

Notice how, again, the rate of blue-red motif interaction here increases twofold in the last measure above, and how the blue motifs continue to move upwards in pitch to the climax at the end of the phrase. The key thing to appreciate here is how every musical element is contributing in some sort of way to the building of tension via the "Jaws Effect."

Then, at 0:35, we move into the second half of the track, characterized by the menacing bass ostinato. Again, the first immediately noticeable part of this bassline is the "Jaws Effect," this time created by gradually lengthening and shortening of note lengths in conjunction with changes in dynamics. At 0:40, we get the blue motif again, alternating with an eerie melodic figure that mirrors the bassline (and sounds suspiciously similar to the Ghost House theme from Super Mario World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fCx1m0tQT0), before the track finally loops back around to the beginning.

Level 3 - Key Cavern (track repeats at 0:39)

This time, we actually get both the blue motif and red motif together from the beginning of the track, albeit in somewhat altered forms:

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Deconstructing: The Music of the 8 Dungeons of Link's Awakening

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