How Melody Expresses Harmony in Cave Story

[Music] as the story goes a young man once approached Mozart and said to him have Mozart I am needing some advice I want to make a videogame a big Metroidvania game with platforming and shooting mechanics compelling characters and multiple endings no no no mozart replied this is much too ambitious for one amateur such as yourself to do alone why don't you work on something easier like a short flash game or a walking simulator the young man was quite taken aback yes Mozart gave the young man a sly look but I never asked anyone how to do it that Mozart's name Cave Story is undoubtedly one of the most influential games of the last 20 years predating both the start of the mid-2000s indie movement and the trend of retro inspired pixel art games that we've been showered in for the last decade most impressive is that everything about this game was made by one man from the programming and art all the way down to the music and even the program used to create the music since music is why we're all here I wanted to talk about a concept that I find really interesting that the Cave Story soundtrack displays really well the harmonic implications of a melody the idea is that a melodic line if constructed properly can convey a harmonic progression entirely on its own the reason why this is important is because it's very easy for a melody to meander or lose its sense of purpose and fail to grab the listener and focusing on creating tension and release from a harmonic perspective when writing a melody can keep this from happening the same way that it would be tough to keep a song interesting if you only ever used one chord it's tough to keep a melody interesting if it doesn't convey any sense of harmonic movement on its own so how does a melody imply harmony it's all about taking the sound of a chord and creating that sound with a single melodic line the most blunt approach would be to just to use notes from the chord in question take the track access from cave story it's just a single melodic line accompanied by a drumbeat there are no chords being played at all and yet you can still hear the implied harmony this Dida f-sharp is just a leap up of a major 3rd but that's enough to generate the sound of a D major chord with the following leap of a third between C and E we hear an implied C major chord alternating these two intervals back-to-back therefore implies a one two flat seven progression in the key of D even though no chords are actually being played if you want to test my theory just listen to me play this progression and then compare it to the tune in question it sounds the same right this melody is clearly implying this harmony a slightly more nuanced way of doing this is through scaler motion the same way that one small interval can invoke the sound of a chord as few as three notes of a scale played in succession can invoke the sound of the chord that is tied to that scale walking up from A to B to C clearly implies a C major tonality whereas walking down from a flat to G to F clearly invokes the sound of F minor it's all about what note or notes in the line feel like they're being resolved too though you could say that this ABC was outlining in a minor chord or that a flat G F was derived from a D flat Lydian scale but when these fragments are played in isolation our ears take the path of least resistance interpreting these notes as implying whatever harmony is the simplest or most obvious take a look at the melody from cave story's main theme the first phrase runs up an E flat minor scale from the root to the fourth and then comes back down to the root this on its own plants the sound of an E flat minor chord in our ears if we look at the next bar we see immediately the notes of a C flat triad followed by the notes of a D flat triad this is pretty obviously implying a C flat chord moving to a D flat chord which if we take the melody as a whole gives us the sound of a 1 flat 6 flat 7 progression in the key of E flat minor clears de this harmonization is confirmed or reinforced when we bring in the other parts of the tune notice that even with all the parts playing there are never any actual chords being played in the strict sense of the word most of the harmonic information is being conveyed by the melody with the bass and accompanying line just reinforcing what the melody is already telling us this type of harmonically explicit melody was vital to early game music composition as the early game Hardware simply couldn't produce enough voices at once to handle a melody and a chord progression at the same time cave story clearly draws a lot of inspiration from this early era of gaming and you can see that inspiration reflected in the soundtrack in this way when taking a more nuanced melodic approach than just arpeggiating each chord in a progression things can get a little more interesting remember how I said that our ears take the path of least resistance when interpreting a melody harmonically this generally means that we'll hear melodies as outlining either tonic sub-dominant or dominant chords as these are the most fundamental ways of creating harmonic motion for example if a melody lands heavily on the second of the established key you'll most likely interpret that subconsciously or not as expressing the five chord of that key as this note is found in the five chord and inherently wants to resolve down to the tonic the same way that the five chord wants to resolve to the one chord you could obviously harmonize this melody in any number of ways but in lieu of any harmonization this is the conclusion that our ears will most likely jump to now let's take this idea to the tune plant if we isolate the melody we see that each two bar phrase alternates between implying the sound of the tonic chord D major and the dominant chord a major or a seven this creates a continuous push and pull from the one chord to the five chord and back a continuous tension and release so instead of a melody that meanders or gets stuck in place we get this you notice how each phrase is based off of the same motif just adjusted to fit the intended harmony this is a very classical approach and it makes for such a strong melody now instead of simply reinforcing this 1 to 5 movement with accompanying voices pixal plays around with the harmonization a little bit we start with the obvious one in five chords to clearly establish the key before moving to each chords relative minor afterwards we trade out the one cord for a for cord making the whole section into one extended progression it's still a simple progression for sure but it's solidly written and it's backing up such a solid melody that it makes for a really well solid tune Amiga towns music makes the use of a chord progression that's a little more complicated than a simple exchange of one and five the melody starts off by establishing a clear F major tonality before landing squarely on a b-flat note in the fourth bar this implies a move to the four chord the next two bars see the introduction of an out of key note this B flat to D flat to B flat implies a b-flat minor chord and as the b-flat resolves down to an A in the following bar we can hear the skeleton of a major four minor for one progression this is as everyone knows the most romantic of all of the cadences [Music] no but it really is a nice progression and this melody manages to capture the sound of it entirely on its own [Music] after this resolution we just get a pretty simple walk down to our tonic before moving down to the seventh which implies a five chord setting up the next section of melody just this melody alone has managed to imply a decently interesting progression but the addition of a bassline makes things even more interesting one thing that you'll find scattered all over this game soundtrack is a chromatically descending bass line the bassline pumps out some eighth notes starting on the tonic and descending chromatically all the way down to the flat six this both reinforces the melodies inherent harmony and adds some new and interesting colors this e in the bass in the second measure could be heard as an F over E or an E minor over E which would be the most technically accurate definition but I hear it more as a C over D since the seventh in the bass carries such inherent tension and the melody emphasizes the C note so strongly the following a flat is also interesting implying a secondary dominant f7 chord that moves to the subsequent b-flat over D chord if you looked at this bar in isolation you could think of it as an e-flat major nine chord but taking the melody as a whole into account these two bars sound to me like an f7 over E flat moving to a b-flat over D the next two bars are a similar situation you might be tempted to label this as a D flat major seven or something but in the context of the melody my ears hear a b-flat over D going to a b-flat minor over D flat going to F as this is a much stronger cadence [Music] I love the added color of the B natural in the base here turning this melody from implying a basic 1/5 1/5 to applying a much more colorful gum than 2 to 5 sus to 5 chord [Music] it's interesting to note that this is the whole tune without any parts taken out it's just these two voices with a pad doubling the bass notes an octave up and yet it implies such colorful harmony [Music] what's interesting about all of this is that pixel reportedly didn't know anything about music and just followed his ears when making the soundtrack I think this just speaks to a level of genius that he must have I mean he did make this entire game from scratch himself going so far as to program his own music creation software and as far as I know he never had to ask anyone how to do it so let this be your final lesson don't ever ask anybody how to do anything I hope that was this fun for you to watch as it was for me to make big thanks to mark Starr vagi and vice for the suggestion if you want to ignore my advice and ask people for advice on writing music come check out our discord server there's a lot of very cool smart and helpful people there and I'll leave a link in the description also in my description you'll find links to my Twitter which you can follow here and my patreon which you can use to support this channel if you so desire thanks so much for watching the video and I'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 166,402

Keywords: How Melody Expresses Harmony in Cave Story, Melodies imply harmony, Music theory, Cave Story soundtrack analysis, Cave Story music analysis, How to write a melody, How to write interesting music, Chord scale theory, Mimiga town music, Video Game music theory, 8-bit Music theory

Id: t4VR9y_Da-A

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/2Lainz]

I really enjoy this channel, he breaks it down and actually gets the sheet music out and talks about harmonic structure and why sounds make us feel the way we do,

[u/[deleted]]

Cave Story is my all time favorite game ost. That title theme always takes me right back to 2007 (when I first played the Cave Story freeware after someone suggested it to me in an IRC).