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Undertale openin12/29/2023 When composing your own game music, consider emphasizing contrast – we all know how the scariest scene of a horror movie isn’t always the part accompanied by piercing strings, but the part where a child starts singing an “innocent” nursery rhyme. The difference is that this time the player knows how evil the flower really is, and this new context gives the jovial tune a mocking, twisted quality. The melody is actually a direct quote of the cheery “Your Best Friend” theme, which the player hears when they first meet Flowey. The melody sounds like it’s straight out of a beginner’s piano book, and it’s accompanied by a textbook arpeggiated chord progression where the first phrase ends on a half cadence and the second phrase ends with a perfect authentic cadence. Let’s take a look at one more section of the piece (0:59): Just as we’re starting to get used to the mayhem, Toby Fox takes a sharp turn and introduces this cheerful, songlike tune. When writing your own scary music, try not only selecting unpredictable pitches, but pairing them with unpredictable melodic contours. What further makes this bassline so unnerving is its contour – notice how the trajectory of the notes twists and turns in a very erratic manner. Unpredictable melodic contoursĪfter a suspenseful silence and spine-chilling laugh, the piece explodes into a beatcore-driven section with the melody above paired against a bassline that looks something like this (0:22):Īnd here we were thinking the opening melody was ambiguous! This bassline is truly void of tonality as we know it, almost twelve-tone in its arrangement of pitches. The sinister mechanical sound of the synth really heightens the unsettling tone of this melody. Bb, A, C, and C# don’t belong in any major or natural minor key, which immediately throws the listener into a land of uncertainty and tension (you could maybe argue that the piece is in Bb harmonic minor if the C# is respelled as a Db, but this assumption will quickly be abandoned in upcoming sections of the piece). Let’s start by taking a look at the opening melodic idea (0:00): This melody demonstrates a popular quality of “spooky” music – tonal ambiguity (or outright atonality). Some view Undertale as nothing more than a big homage to Earthbound, but whatever your thoughts may be on the matter, it’s undeniable that Toby Fox maintains a unique voice as a composer and storyteller – Photoshop Flowey’s battle theme proves this, standing distinct from Giygas’ theme or other spooky video game pieces in general that come to mind. There seems to be an ongoing debate in the gaming community on whether the scariness of Undertale’s Flowey compares to that of Earthbound’s Giygas, considering the Earthbound franchise is said to have influenced game developer and composer Toby Fox when he was creating Undertale. More specifically, let’s take a look at the soundtrack of a more recent video game – Undertale. ![]() ![]() ![]() Does the Lavender Town theme from the Pokémon franchise give you the shivers?ĭo you remember running from the monster piano and flying books to the creepy music in the haunted house from Super Mario 64? With Halloween right around the corner, there’s no better time to dive into a piece of “spooky” video game music and the compositional techniques that elevate the fear factor of the game.
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