What Makes Mario Music So Catchy?

{I love it!} Hello! I'm Scruffy and today I'm talking about video game

music

! It's not Pikmin

music

, not yet, I'll get to that. In this video I want to talk about the music of a different Nintendo franchise, and to tell you which one, all I have to do is play a little snippet here. Yeah! It's Mario. I mean, I assume you've seen the title of the video too... but my point is, if you've played a Mario game or two, you probably don't need the visuals or the name of the game to get you thinking. of it.

Only Mario's music can evoke the idea of ​​Mario; in fact, only melody can do it. If I play this tune and you've played a Mario game, then you've probably beaten me to identifying it as the Starman or Invincibility theme. Why is that? Why are these tunes so

catchy

that we have them waiting in the back of our minds? Today, I'm going to show you why it's so important for the most notable and memorable Mario themes to be

catchy

, and show you some music theory on how they achieve this appeal. To address the first point, we need to address the purpose of these tunes,

what

they do in a Mario game besides making them fun to listen to.

Well, the music certainly prompts you to explore the levels presented to you, or at least tries to set the mood for a particular level. But there's an additional purpose to Mario themes that harken back to before Mario, before video games, and even before electronic media. We go back to Germany at the end of the 19th century to remember an important figure in the history of music, Richard Wagner. He was a composer best known for his groundbreaking operas and popularized a technique that has become a staple of film and video game scoring. It's called a leitmotif. A leitmotif is a musical gesture that is associated with a particular character or idea in a multimedia work of art.

When this character or idea is introduced for the first time, the leitmotif is also heard and the two are presented together several times so that the audience can form an association between the concept and the audio. In the end, a successful leitmotif will be able to make us think of a previous character or idea, even without the visual elements. For example, in his opera Tristan und Isolde, here's a pretty famous cinematic example: You probably don't need me to tell you that this leitmotif represents the character Indiana Jones. Here's another example you may recognize: While this was originally a theme of the overture to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's tone poem based on "Romeo and Juliet," many other sources have made it a leitmotif of romance or love at first sight.

Leitmotifs are all around us, especially in movies and even video games. Now, do the melodies that we remember from Mario count as leitmotifs? Some do it, others not so much. The original themes from the NES classic Super Mario Bros. have stood the test of time, they are definitely leitmotifs. Once you play, you not only know the franchise, but you can also imagine the character and possibly the setting. The purpose of touching on these themes in various contexts in many Mario games is to get players to associate the music with Mario. Then, eventually someone might play the World 1-2 theme and you'd know not only that it's from a Mario game, but that it's underground, exploring the green pipes scattered throughout the Mushroom Kingdom.

And it works the other way around: if you asked someone to sing, hum, or whistle a Mario theme on a whim, the one that would come to mind first would probably be from Super Mario Bros. for NES. The music works alongside the game to spread the memory of how fun it was and the idea of ​​Mario as a character. Now, the reason I say that some of Mario's themes are not so leitmotivist is because sometimes it is not clear

what

theme he represents. Listen to this theme from New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS. If you've played, you probably recognize this music, but if it's a leitmotif, what is it supposed to be associated with?

Mario, the Mushroom Kingdom, World 1-1, the forces of good? I don't know, I don't think the topic is about anything specific. It may represent Mario, but since most of us already have a Mario leitmotif in this game, this one won't replace it. Leitmotifs don't work like that, but rather they are about first impressions. Still, this theme is very memorable because it is catchy on its own. How is it that all these melodies created by Mario maintain a transcendental margin in our memory? Mmmmmm. Well, this sounds like a sheet music job! It's time to visualize some compositional ideas that are likely to make these themes more eye-catching and easier to remember.

For these examples, I'll focus on themes from the last canonical Mario game to introduce a soundtrack of new music: Super Mario 3D World. I personally loved the soundtrack of this game because it featured a live big band to record quite a few of its songs. Not everyone watching this video may be familiar with the game, but that's okay - you don't have to be for these tunes to stick in your head. For example, here is part of a world-wide melody, which becomes the theme of the entire game: This is not the full melody, but it is the motif that will surely get stuck in your head.

And here is the theme of Bowser, which definitely becomes the leitmotif of his antics within this game. So let's look at what they do to be catchy. First of all, both melodies have a common time signature, which means that 4 beats are distributed in each measure. It is not surprising that these motifs are distributed in 4-bar phrases, so we do not feel that they are missing any rhythm. We can call these phrases "periods," since many Mario tunes follow a concept called "periodicity." In periodicity, building musical phrases is like building with building blocks. You have a block that is a musical statement like this.

It is a statement because the lack of movement and the rest in the end separate this material from other materials. You then group this block of music with other blocks to form a complete period. When do you have your full period? Well, for starters, when you get to a multiple of 4 beats like 16. You also have a full period when you end up with a clear cadence. This period has a clear half cadence because we start in F major and end in C major. The subsequent period would take us back to F major, completing a tonal journey of tension and release.

Now, if we separate this period further, we can see that two of these building blocks are very similar, down to a one-note difference. Repetition is very important to ingrain a melody in someone's mind, but repetition with variation

makes

the melody even more interesting. So let's call this block A, and then this block A', since it is clearly a variation of the first block. We can call the third block that moves for two measures B, since it does not have much relation to the material of the first block and has a different function, reaching the cadence. Another way to look at it is as a sentence: these two blocks are the subjects of a sentence, and this is the predicate that tells us where they go or what they do.

Since this phrase only has half cadences, this sentence could end in a question mark, a cliffhanger, and the next phrase would respond to it, ending resolutely in a period. That is periodicity. You'll notice this structure in many of the main motifs in Mario games, because it's a very satisfying, fluid, and consistent way of constructing melodies. The format dates back to the classical era of music at the beginning of the 18th century, when the new musical trend was gallant: natural, smooth and free of technical complications. But Mario is not in the classical era, not that he absolutely follows this galant chic.

For example, in the original Super Mario Bros. melody, we have musical blocks that repeat exactly. Shouldn't this make the motifs more tedious than catchy? Well, first of all, in the NES game, this whole tune has a time limit, so you don't spend much time listening to it. But it has other tricks to make it more pleasant to the ear, for example: syncopation. You syncopate a group of notes when you shift where they start and end, so that some notes that were on strong beats now start on weak beats, and vice versa. What are strong rhythms? Well, think about a ruler, you will 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 divided into beat subdivisions. Pessimism is at the beginning of the bars. These are the strongest, they would get the biggest marks on a ruler. Since we're dividing our measures into four beats, the beats themselves would be the next strongest, with the middle beat, beat 3, a little louder than beats 2 and 4. And then between the beats, we have further subdivisions. small ones of time that are getting weaker. But these weak subdivisions can give melodies a rhythmic appeal. Let's take just a fragment of the Super Mario 3D World melody and measure it with our musical ruler.

It's very slight, but the last two notes here are syncopated, and that

makes

a big difference. I will try to play the melody only in the strongest rhythms: there is something in it that simply loses its soul. It feels more like a machine is producing it. Not to say it can't work, but syncopation allows it to be much more memorable. Additionally, this rule does not take into account the fact that this tune has a swing rhythm, which in this case means that all the weak 16th note subdivisions are wavered to create a looser, more relaxed swing feel.

The same thing, the same swing happens with Bowser's melody: And the Super Mario Bros. melody, ugh, oozes syncopation. Check this out: all the other notes move at a weaker rhythm. Furthermore, this figure is a triplet, in which the notes follow a triple division of time instead of two. And, as this melody continues the rhythm, the drums sway. This whole melody is about playing with rhythm to make what would be an extremely complex pattern easy to remember. My theory is that these two facets, periodicity and syncopation, explain much of the appeal of these melodies. Generally this amounts to satisfying the brain's expectations on a large scale, but surprising it on a small scale.

That's not only memorable, but it also feels good. I also recognize that these facets are based more on structure and rhythm than actual tone. This is because, for humans, rhythm is more internalized than pitch. A single rhythm is easier to remember than a group of arrhythmic tones alone. But there are some details of the tones used in these 3D World motifs that I would like to detail. I said before that leitmotifs have to do with first impressions. Well, sometimes that comes down to the first few pitches chosen. To make this easier to understand, I'm going to call this leitmotif the "good theme" and this leitmotif the "bad theme." So what is it about the outline of the good theme that helps us understand it as good, in addition to being associated with Mario, the colorful design of Super Bell Hill, and the fun of Super Mario 3D World?

It starts on C, but skips D and F to get to G, which is the downbeat note. This approach helps us understand what key we are in, F major, by using notes in the F major scale. Now, although G is in the F major scale, it is not part of the F major chord, which is made up of three notes: F, A, and C. Therefore, we can call this G a chordless tone. A chordless 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 is pentatonic because it contains five notes, in this case C, D, F, G, and A. This introductory gesture covers four of the five notes, and then we get our fifth A note at the end of the second melody block. 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 humanity longer than the major scale, and just listen to it. It sounds very nice and relaxing. Now, I'm not so sure that the composers of this song were thinking about the deep 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 theme, which has a very different beginning. I'm much more sure this was intentional. Greet B♭ in the key of E minor. Now E minor is made up of E, G and B. Not only is B♭ not on that chord, but it's also a tritone away from E. That means it's as far away from me as possible, divide the octave from E to E in half. The tritone has a history of dissonance: 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 debunked) And here it is today, showing Bowser without an introductionsophisticated to give it the context as Mario had it.

Technically it is an approximation to the next note, B, which is in E minor. But that B♭ gets all the attention, listen to this version. That's a trumpet, with a plunger mute that they're opening and a fluttering tongue, an instruction to trill the tongue into the mouthpiece of the trumpet, like this. Simply put, this tune is doing everything in its power to make B♭ as challenging and funky as possible. And works. We may not think about it while playing, but subconsciously we might just nod that this tritone indicates that Bowser is an evil and dissonant character.

On the surface, we just think he has great taste in evil music. So, this is an analysis on the appeal of Mario's greatest hits. If you someday want to create a catchy tune for a pop-up video game, remember... you don't have to follow any of this. To make a catchy song evocative, it is not necessary to follow a precise periodic structure or systems of syncopation or pitch. This is just what works for the Mario franchise, creating tonal, modular melodies that fit our expectations of tension and release, but add a couple of surprises with syncopation and note choice.

That's how Mario's dramatic structure works: little surprises here and there, but overall a satisfying arc of good defeating evil. In this way, Mario and really any video game is what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of art in which many art forms, in this case digital art, sculpture, music and a bit of drama, work. together to create a unified unit. whole. But it is not necessary to follow Mario to create 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 for Super Mario Odyssey, which is coming to Nintendo Switch later this year.

Now before I end the video, I would like to give a shout out to my friend Kevin Cheek, a fellow musician and composer who provided the alto saxophone in this video. You can check out the SoundCloud page in his description or right here! And with that, we look forward to a future of fantastic Mario music. I'm Scruffy and thank you so much for watching.