{What I Love!}
Hello! I'm Scruffy, and today I'm talking video game music!
Not Pikmin music, not yet, I'll be getting to that.
In this video I want to talk about the music in a different franchise of Nintendo's, and
to tell you which one, all I have to do is play a little snippet here.
[piano music starts playing]
Yep! It's Mario.
I mean, I suppose you also may have seen the video's title... but my point is, if you've
played a Mario game or two, chances are that you don't need the visuals or the name of
the game to think of it.
The music of Mario alone can evoke the idea of Mario, in fact the melody alone can do it.
If I play this melody,
[xylophone music plays]
and you've played a Mario game, then you probably just beat me to identifying it as the Starman
or invincibility theme.
Why is that?
Why are these melodies so catchy that we have them on standby in the backs of our minds?
Today, I'm going to show you why it's so important for the most prominent, memorable Mario themes
to be catchy, and some music theory behind how they achieve this catchiness.
To tackle the first point, we need to address the purpose of these melodies, what they do
in a Mario game if anything besides make it fun to listen to.
Well, music certainly spurs you on to explore the levels laid out for you, or at least it
tries to set the mood for a particular level.
But there's an extra purpose to Mario's themes that calls back to before Mario, before video
games, and even before electronic media.
We're heading all the way back to late-19th-century Germany to recall an important figure in music
history, Richard Wagner.
He was a composer best known for his innovative operas, and he popularized a technique that
has become a staple of film and video game composition.
It's called a leitmotif.
A leitmotif is a musical gesture that becomes associated with a particular character or
idea in a multimedia work of art.
When this character or idea is first introduced, the leitmotif is also heard, and the two are
presented together several times so the audience can form an association between the concept
and the audio.
Eventually, a successful leitmotif will be able to make us think of a previous character
or idea, even without the visuals.
For instance, in his opera Tristan und Isolde, Here's a pretty famous example from film:
[melodica and ukelele play]
You probably don't need me to tell you this leitmotif represents the character Indiana Jones.
Here's another example you may recognize:
[melodica and ukelele play again]
While this was originally a theme in the Overture to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem
based on "Romeo and Juliet," many other sources have turned this into a leitmotif of romance
or love at first sight.
Leitmotifs are all around us, especially in films and even in video games.
Now, do the melodies we remember from Mario count as leitmotifs?
Some do, some not so much.
The original themes from NES classic Super Mario Bros. have stood the test of time, they
are definitely leitmotifs.
One play of [underground melody] and you not only know the franchise but you can picture
the character, and possibly the scenery.
The purpose of playing these themes in various contexts across a lot of Mario games is to
get players to associate the music with Mario.
So eventually someone could play the World 1-2 theme and you would know not only that
it's from a Mario game, it's underground, exploring the green piping that strews the
Mushroom Kingdom.
And it works vice versa: if I asked someone to sing, hum, or whistle a Mario theme on
a whim, the one they'd come up with first would probably be from Super Mario Bros. for
the NES.
The music works together with the game to spread the memory of how fun it was, and the
idea of Mario as a character.
Now, the reason I say some Mario themes are not so leitmotify is because sometimes it's
unclear what a theme is portraying.
Listen to this theme from New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS.
[World 1-1 theme from NSMB plays]
If you've played the game you probably recognize this music, but if it's a leitmotif, with
what is it supposed to be associated?
Mario, the Mushroom Kingdom, World 1-1, the forces of good?
I don't know, I don't think the theme is going for anything specific.
It might be representing Mario, but since most of us already have a leitmotif of Mario
going into this game, this one isn't going to replace it.
That's not quite how leitmotifs work, they're all about first impressions.
Still, this theme is very memorable because it's catchy on its own.
How do all these Mario-made melodies maintain a momentous margin in our memory?
Hmmmmmm.
Well this sounds like a job for sheet music!
Time to visualize some compositional ideas that probably make these themes more striking
and easier to remember.
For these examples I'll be focusing on themes in the latest canonical Mario game to introduce
a soundtrack's worth of new music: Super Mario 3D World.
Personally I loved this game's soundtrack because it introduced a live big band to record
quite a few of its tracks.
It's possible that not everyone who watches this video will be acquainted with the game,
but that's okay: you don't need to be to get these tunes stuck in your head.
For instance, here is part of an overworld level melody, that becomes the theme of the
whole game:
[Overworld theme plays on saxophone]
This isn't the whole melody, but it is the motif you're most bound to get stuck in your head.
And here is Bowser's theme, which definitely becomes a leitmotif for his antics within
this game.
[Bowser's theme plays on saxophone]
So let's break down what they do to achieve catchiness.
Firstly, these melodies are both in common time signature, which means 4 beats are distributed
across each measure.
Not too surprisingly, these motifs are distributed across 4-measure phrases, so we don't feel
like they're missing any beats.
We can call these phrases "periods," as a lot of Mario melodies follow a concept called
"periodicity."
In periodicity, constructing musical phrases is like constructing with building blocks.
You have one block that is a musical statement like this.
[a piece of the overworld theme]
It's one statement because the lack of motion and the rest at the end separate this material
from other materials.
So you group this block of music with other blocks to form a complete period.
When do you have a complete period?
Well for starters, when you reach a multiple of 4 beats like 16.
You also have a complete period when you end on a clear cadence.
This period has a clear half cadence because we begin in F major and end on C major.
The period after this would bring us back to F major, completing a tonal journey of
tension and release.
Now if we pick apart this period even more, you may see that two of these building blocks
are very similar, down to a one-note difference.
[the musical pieces play for comparison]
Repetition is very important to ingraining a tune in someone's mind, but repetition with
variation makes a tune all the more interesting.
So let's call this block A, and then this block A', since it's clearly a variation on
the first block.
The third block that moves for two measures we can call B, since it's not really related
to the first block's material and has a different function, to get to the cadence.
Another way to think of it is like a sentence: these two blocks are the subjects of a sentence,
and this is the predicate telling us where they go or what they do.
Since this phrase only half cadences, this sentence could end in a question mark, a cliffhanger,
and the next phrase would answer this one, ending resolutely on a period.
That's periodicity.
You'll notice this structure in a lot of Mario games' main motifs, because it's such a satisfying,
smooth, and uniform way to construct melodies.
The format dates back to the Classic era of music in the early eighteenth century, when
the newest trend of music was galant: natural, smooth, and free of technical complications.
But Mario isn't in the Classic era, it's not like he's following this galant chic absolutely.
For instance, in the original Super Mario Bros. overworld melody, we have musical blocks
that are exactly repeated.
Shouldn't this make the motifs tedious rather than catchy?
Well firstly in the NES game, this whole tune is on a time limit, so you don't spend a prolonged
amount of time hearing it.
But it has other tricks to make it ear candy, for instance: syncopation.
You syncopate a group of notes when you displace where they start and end such that some notes
that were on strong beats now start on weak beats, and vice versa.
What are strong beats?
Well, think of a ruler, you see how a standard ruler has large markings for centimeters or
inches, smaller markings for the midpoints, and even smaller markings for the increments
in between.
This is how a measure is split into beat subdivisions.
The downbeat is at the beginning of measures.
These are the strongest, they would get the biggest markings on a ruler.
Since we're splitting our measures into four beats, the beats themselves would be the next
strongest, with the midway beat, beat 3, slightly stronger than beats 2 and 4.
And then beat-ween those we have smaller subdivisions of the beat that are weaker and weaker.
But these weak subdivisions can give melodies rhythmic appeal.
Let's take just a snippet of Super Mario 3D World's tune and measure it on our musical ruler.
[a snippet of the overworld theme plays to a metronome]
It's very slight, but the last two notes here are syncopated, and that makes a world of difference.
I'll try playing the melody only on the strongest beats:
[a snippet of the overworld theme plays on piano, with minimal syncopation]
Something about it, it just loses its soul.
It feels more like a machine is producing it.
Not to say it couldn't work, but the syncopation allows it to be much more memorable.
Plus, this ruler doesn't account for the fact that this tune has a swing rhythm, which in
this case means all the weak sixteenth note subdivisions are hesitated to create a looser,
more easygoing swinging feel.
Same thing, same swing happens with Bowser's melody:
[Bowser's theme plays with a swing rhythm]
And the Super Mario Bros. melody, whew, it oozes syncopation.
Check this out:
[a snippet of the SMB overworld melody plays on piano]
Like, every other note is displaced on a weaker beat.
Plus, this figure is a triplet, in which the notes are following a threefold division of
the beat rather than twofold.
And, while this melody is going on straight to the beat, the drums are swinging.
This whole tune is all about playing with rhythm to make what would be an extremely
complex pattern easy to remember.
It's my theory that these two facets, periodicity and syncopation, account for a great deal
of the catchiness in these melodies.
Generally this amounts to meeting the brain's expectations on a large scale, but surprising
it on a small scale.
Not only is that memorable, that also feels good.
I also recognize these facets are based more on structure and rhythm than on actual pitch.
This is because, for humans, rhythm is more internalized than pitch.
A rhythm by itself is easier to remember than a group of arrhythmic pitches by itself.
But there are some details of the pitches used in these 3D World motifs that I’d like
to detail.
I said before that leitmotifs are all about first impressions.
Well sometimes that comes down to the first couple of pitches chosen.
To make this easier to understand, I’m going to call this leitmotif the "good theme,”
and this leitmotif the "evil theme.”
So what about the contour of the good theme helps us understand it as good, besides being
associated with Mario, the colorful layout of Super Bell Hill, and the fun of Super Mario 3D World?
It begins on C, but sort of jumps up D and F to get to G, which is the strong note on the downbeat.
This approach helps make sense of what key we’re in, F major, by using notes in the
F major scale.
Now, while G is in the F major scale, it’s not part of the F major chord, made up of
three notes: F, A, and C.
We can thus call this G a non-chord tone.
A non-chord tone on a downbeat?
It’s strange from a classical music theory perspective, but from a jazz perspective,
perfectly acceptable.
And what’s more, this whole approach to G outlines a special scale of its own called
the pentatonic scale.
It’s pentatonic because it contains five notes, in this case C, D, F, G, and A.
This intro gesture covers four of the five notes, and then we get our fifth note A at
the end of the second block of melody.
Why is this scale so important?
Well some of the oldest musical instruments we’ve discovered, bone flutes dating back
tens of thousands of years, create a pentatonic scale when played.
The scale has been with humankind longer than the major scale, and just listen to it.
It sounds so nice and relaxing.
Now, I’m not so sure the composers of this theme were thinking of the profound history
of the pentatonic scale when they came up with this, this is more of a subconscious
indication that Mario is on the good side.
Compare that to the evil side’s theme, which has a much different beginning.
I’m much more confident that this was intentional.
Say hello to B♭ in the key of E minor.
Now E minor is composed of E, G, and B. Not only is B♭ not in that chord, but it’s
also a tritone distance from E. That means it’s as far away from E as you can get,
it splits the octave from E to E in half.
The tritone has a history of dissonance: back before and even during the Renaissance the
tritone was associated with the devil because it sounded so harsh.
(Editor's note: this has since been discredited)
And here it is today, showing off Bowser with no fancy introduction to give it any context
like Mario had.
Technically it’s an approach to the next note, B, which is in E minor.
But that B♭ gets all the attention, listen to this version.
["Bowser Land" excerpt plays]
That’s a trumpet, with a plunger mute that they’re opening up, and a fluttertongue,
an instruction to trill your tongue into the trumpet mouthpiece, [trills tongue], like that.
Bottom line, this tune is doing everything in its power to make that B♭ as defiant
and funky as possible.
And it works.
We may not think of it while playing the game, but subconsciously we might just nod that
this tritone indicates Bowser is an evil, dissonant character.
On the surface, we just think he has a great taste in evil music.
So, that’s an analysis on the catchiness of Mario’s greatest hits.
If you someday want to create a catchy melody for an up and coming video game, just remember…
you don’t have to follow any of this.
In order to make a theme catchy or evocative, you don’t have to follow precise periodic
structure or syncopation or pitch systems.
This is just what works for the Mario franchise, creating modular, tonal melodies that fit
our expectations of tension and release, but throw in a couple of surprises with syncopation
and note choices.
That’s kind of how Mario’s dramatic structure works: little surprises here and there, but
overall a satisfying arc of good conquering evil.
In this way Mario and really any video game is what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk,
a work of art in which many forms of art, in this case digital art, sculpting, music,
and a bit of drama, work together to create a unified whole.
But you don’t have to follow Mario to make a Gesamtkunstwerk.
With some effort and experimentation, there are many ways to create something expressive
and memorable, even catchy.
But it's still a good idea to listen to Mario music, especially what I imagine will be an
incredible soundtrack to Super Mario Odyssey, coming to the Nintendo Switch later this year.
Now, before I end the video, I’d like to give a shoutout and kudos to my friend Kevin
Cheek, a fellow musician and composer who provided the alto saxophone in this video.
You can check out his SoundCloud page in the description, or right here!
And with that, here’s looking toward a future of fantastic Mario music.
I’m Scruffy, and thank you very much for watching.