Behind the Music

There are hours upon hours of music in the Pokemon games, but they rarely go commented on. The Pokemon games are not renowned for their music, though fans are of course fond of the tracks. Despite this, I find there are a lot of layers to these tracks, and a variety of compositional techniques on display that deserve attention. In this section, I want to talk about interesting bits of music theory as they relate to the music in the Pokemon games. (Soundtracks for other media, such as 2.B.A. Master, will be treated separately.)

Battle Themes in Gen 1 and 2

Listen to all the battle themes for gen 1 and 2 and you'll notice they all have something in common - no percussion! I've always wondered why this is, since percussion is usually a typical part of most games' battle themes. It hit me as I was playing Pokemon Crystal. The sound effects for Pokemon's moves are made using the noise channel, which is the same channel that would be used for percussion. It would interrupt the rhythm of the songs if the percussion would randomly cut out to play the move sound effects.

Another interesting observation along these lines - if you use an attack with a pitched sound effect like Hypnosis, the top voices will drop out and only the bass will be audible.

Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal

The Gameboy Color has 4 sound channels available - two square waves, one programmable wave table, and a noise generator. Note that this is not 4 channels for the music, but 4 channels for all sound, period. If you've ever paid close attention while gaming, you'll have noticed that parts of the music briefly drop out when sound effects such as the menu opening sound or the text continuation sound are played. This is because they have to 'borrow' that channel to make the sound effect! (For more detail on how the Gameboy Color's sound chip works, check out this documentation.)

As a result of this limited chip, you basically have 3 melodic voices available and one percussive voice. This means that you cannot get complex chord pads. However, the composers used this chip to the best of its abilities. Instead of writing one melody and using the other voices to pad out the chord progression, they often gave each of the three voices their own melody. This means each of the three melodic channels usually has a pretty singable melody in it, even if it isn't the main one. Sometimes one of the voices will break from its melody in order to harmonize with the main voice or the bass, but this usually doesn't last long. In short, the composers had to borrow from polyphonic techniques as opposed to homophonic techniques. This means listening to these tracks is like a tapestry.

In addition to overcoming the basic technical limitations of the Gameboy Color, the composers also had to represent the mood of different cities, routes, and characters. I suspect that many of these tracks go ignored because they are short and the sound technology is so primitive, but if you go back and listen to them, you may find they surprise you. I remember being surprised at how fun and sassy the theme for facing the Girl trainers was. It's extremely short and I probably never listened to it in full the first time I played the game, but on a new playthrough I decided to stop and listen to the different trainers' themes before battling.

This page will likely always be a work in progress, as analyzing even a short piece of music takes time and I will likely never cover all the songs I want to cover. All the same, I still invite you to come along with me as I try to unearth some interesting and perhaps ignored details of this soundtrack.

New Bark Town

This piece demonstrates how to take advantage of the 3 voices the Gameboy Color offers. Each of the 3 voices is in a solidly different register, making it easy to tell them apart. The lower and middle voice also have obvious patterns that they repeat, which focuses our attention on the melody. At around 0:09 and 0:18 seconds into the track, you can also hear another trick the composers used: the same voice will use a different wave form, which produces a different a timbre. This can give the impression that there are more than 3 'instruments', as if another player had just stepped in to play the transition to another part. In the B part, the middle voice also takes advantage of volume control to fade in every time the note is played. Finally, the melody in the B part has some subtle vibrato introduced by using the fine-pitch control. These techniques - waveform switching, volume control, and pitch control - are used throughout the soundtrack to add variety with limited means.

Violet City/Olivine City

Like New Bark Town, this theme uses waveform switching to give the impression that different instrumentalists are coming in at different parts of the song. Part A of the song uses very "round" sounding synths, possibly a triangle wave or a square wave with a high duty cycle. Part 2, where the main melody is harmonized, switches to square waves with a very low duty cycle, which makes them sound sharp and edgy. This is a great example of another principle of waveform switching, which is to contrast two sections with two different waveforms.

Sprout Tower

Sprout Tower's scale uses the following notes: F Gb Bb C Db Eb F. It is obviously based on some form of Japanese music, but it is not clear which scale it is using. It seems to be using a combination of the In scale (the same scale used in the song 'Sakura Sakura') and the Hirajoshi scale. You can see a comparison below:

Sprout Tower	F	Gb	Bb		C	Db	Eb
Sakura Scale	F	Gb	(A)	B	(C)	Db	Eb
Hirajoshi Scale	F	Gb	Bb	B			Eb

National Park

This melancholy song uses a surprisingly small number of chords to create a mood that is both pensive and optimistic. The song is in the key of Db major.

    DbM7 Gbm DbM7 Gbm
    Gb Gbm Fm Bb
    Gb Gbm Fm Bb
    
    DbM7 Gbm DbM7 Gbm
    Gb Gbm Fm Bb
    Gb Gbm Fm Bb
    
    Gb Gbm Fm Bb
    Gb Gbm Fm Bb
    

Let's do our roman numeral analysis. The chord progression is IM7 iv IM7 iv for the vamp in the opening, and then IV iv iii V/ii for the rest of the song. Outside of the opening vamp, the song avoids resolving on the tonic (Db). The main chord progression instead focuses on moving from low-tension chords to high-tension chords. IV is relatively stable, but iv is not, begging to have that minor 3rd resolve down. And it does resolve, but instead of to the expected I, it resolves to iii, which is just I with the root note moved down half a step and then inverted. This is a stable chord, but it's still not the tonic, so we've released the tension without having the chord progression feel finalized. We then up the tension again by using a secondary dominant, V/ii. If the IV->iv movement always has a sad, nostalgic quality to it, the secondary dominant V/ii instead has a triumphant, optimistic quality. This doesn't resolve to ii but to IV, which shares two notes with ii. As such, you can see that the song relies on using substitute chords that are similar to the expected resolutions to create a sense of stability while not quite resolving the underlying tension. This makes it a great chord progression to loop in the song.

This short piece also has a marked difference in mood from the first half and second half. The first half has no percussion and the bass uses a syncopated rhythm to mark out the chords. (Note that these are just examples of the rhythms, not the pitches!)

The second half introduces some percussion and a different rhythm in the bass. It's actually a rhythm from Afro-Cuban music, the 3-2 clave:

Without the languid movement of the bass in the first section, the same chord progression takes on a different feeling, emphasizing a sense of determination as opposed to reminiscence.

Ecruteak Dance Theater

This song expertly imitates two traditional Japanese instruments: the shakuhachi (a type of flute) and either the shamisen (a guitar-like stringed instrument) or the koto (a zither-like instrument). The upper flute voice plays an unharmonized melody and sticks to the upper register. Then broken intervals of a third, fourth, and fifth play, imitating the stroking pattern of playing a koto. The quarter note pattern of fourths in the bass has a percussive feel to it, and it's no surprise that the HG/SS renditions added percussion imitating this pattern. In the B section, the flute switches to a slightly lower register, accompanied only by unharmonized low notes in the bass. Afterwards, the imitation koto comes in, harmonizing in fourths.

Ruins of Alph/Union Cave

This song has the melodic parts in 4/4 but the percussion in 5/4. This means that the length of the measure for the percussion is longer than the length of the measure for the melody, and so the downbeat (first beat) of the melody and the percussion go out of sync throughout the song. This is a polymeter not a polyrhythm - a polyrhythm would be if the measures were the same size but subdivided differently. Here, the same quarter note pulse is shared by the melody and the percussion, but the length of the measure is different because each has a different time signature.

You can see this in the following sheet music (piano parts courtesy of Th3Gavst3r at Ninsheet Music). I've added the percussion as a snare. Unfortunately, Musescore won't let you use polymeter when annotating, so ignore the fact it says 4/4 for the bottom staff. Focus instead on the length of it - it repeats every 5 quarter notes. Over time, it starts drifting away from the downbeat of the melody, only syncing up again after 6 measures.

If you listen to the song the whole way through, you will notice that when the song loops, the percussion does not restart to share the downbeat with the first measure of the loop. This means the percussion must be programmed independently of the melody!

The final section before the song loops again features two voices playing the same notes, but one of the voices is detuned using the fine pitch control. This means it doesn't sound quite as out of tune as if we shifted it a semitone, but it is noticeable that the two voices are not playing the same pitches.

Ice Path

This song's harmonic progression is based on a series of fifths where the outer voices descend by a half step each time. The chord progression used is Ab - Gm - F# - Fm. The song begins with just the bass riff, which makes you think it's going to be in C phrygian, but the introduction of the arpeggios to the descending fifths progession changes the mood.