The Mirror in the Music

Monday, January 7, 2019

The Mirror in the Music

I logged onto DeviantArt for the first time in a while, and found in my notifications a relatively new journal entry from the group Hyrule-Legends. It was entitled: “Sound Director Hajime Wakai on Zelda BoTW Music”. Posted Saturday, January 5.

Well that was.... just gourmet serendipity. For I was still full of the sweeping, rushing, desperate music from Vah Medoh. Those strings....

User MajorasMasks posted in the entry:

I recently read an interview about an underrated aspect of Breath of the Wild: its music and sound direction. I know some people complained about them, but I think they are top notch just like the rest of the game.

Among other things, in the interview Hajime Wakai explains why BotW doesn't have the canonical overworld music:
"When a composer makes a piece of music he has a plan and idea of how he wants to player to feel, but if this insistence is too strong it can have an effect on the actual game. We would end up forcing a feeling of intensity onto players. The music would be all stirring and dramatic, but then the player would think: ‘hold on a minute, all I did was throw away a mushroom…’"

You can find the complete interview on Nintendo Everything.  

The link led to url: https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://nintendoeverything.com/breath-of-the-wild-composers-on-changing-up-zeldas-music-formula-and-more/

And that was the entire entry.

An underrated aspect of Breath of the Wild? The music?

I have to admit, I just wouldn’t have known. I’ve refrained from searching out what the internet has had to say about it all this time.

But now.... with four Divine Beasts finally under my belt.... I felt no dread for many spoilers. Hence my sudden interest in trolling the art site for . . . . whatever I might find.

And lo! THIS JOURNAL.

. . . . . . .

I could contain myself no longer. I commented on MajorasMasks’ Hyrule-Legends journal entry:

I saw this journal in my inbox a few days ago. But now I'm coming back to comment on it because.... Well, I played a bit of Breath of the Wild last night. It is still my first playthrough. BECAUSE OF REASONS please no spoilers.

But last night I defeated my fourth and final Divine Beast, and.... Man, MAN, there has been something incredibly special about the music I hear in those Divine Beasts. And it has grown and shaped and arced over the course of all my adventures. The music I've heard in those places has been the telling of the entire tale; it's Good versus Evil; it's triumphing over the Darkness; it's the rising of the Light, and the striving after Hope.

Am I the only one who has heard this?

What was the music like inside your first Divine Beast? Did it start open, and neutral? But turn dark and affronted and malicious when you started activating pedestals?

Was your second Divine Beast the same?

And when you came to your third, was the Darkness waiting for you this time? Was the music already poisoned when you set foot in that place? And once you started going through the pedestals, did a spear of hope pierce through the sound, to turn the chords into something better? Something brighter? Did the influence of your Hero pull the soundtrack back from the abyss and make it shine?

And when you came to your fourth, and the heated, hot, angry poison met your incursion again, and you started activating the pedestals....

Did the Song turn to the most desperate struggle of goodness and hope that you had yet encountered?

Has this been the experience of ANY one else?
I must know.

Whoever was in charge of the sound, whoever engineered the music for those critical struggles....

That man is a Poet.

And then, some time later, my second comment:

Also I just read the article and ugh.... it's like FINDING YOUR PEOPLE.

MajorasMasks and I had a good following conversation, though he did—he?—*—she, it’s a she—

WE HAD A GOOD following conversation, though she did tell me, in response to my music-mapping, “I think that depends on which order you play the Divine Beasts...”

For with my own playthrough—Elephant, Lizard, Camel, Bird—I had been utterly convinced that there was more at play in generating those Divine Beast soundtracks. The arc was just too perfect, the progression too meaningful. The music had to have been designed to play in that order, regardless of which animal you chose first and which you chose last. It was the Legend’s Echo.

But then.... as of this writing (Evening of Tuesday, January 15, 2019).... I still have not delved too deeply into the Breath of the Wild circles of the internet. Maybe the music is set in that storytelling order I heard, and people have already talked about this. Or maybe each Divine Beast does indeed have its own set soundtrack, and other players have been taken through other musical journey arcs, stemming from all the permutations of play-order for which the game can allow.

I’ll go find out some day, but....

Not today.

I think for now.... I’d just as soon leave it a mystery. And keep riding those striving, striving strings in my heart.

“Hey Dad.”

“Yeah?”

“You saw me doing the Bird?” For he’d stopped to watch a bit here and there. “Do you remember the music?”

He had also.... doubtless.... observed me fangirling all about the music myself as I paraglided around solving the puzzles.

But his eyes lit up to remember. Had he been struck himself, or had it been a contagion from my own reaction? “Yeah,” he smiled.

“What did you think of it?” I probed as excitedly as if it had been a blockbuster film.

“It sounded like....” he slowly maneuvered a hand palm-downward into the air, “kind of a flight-music kind of thing.”

Well that tickled my whimsy all right!

Heh, and was that likewise possibly influenced by the nature of the Beast?

Or was it the Pilot in him talking?