videogame music with unusual time signatures

King of Posters Galaxy Oddity
21

Sounds to me like it goes into duple time at 28 seconds. Everything before that is kind of ambiguous. If I had to guess it seems like it might be divisible into sections of 4/4 and mmmaybe 6/4.

22

I have to listen to some of the others but those SO4 tracks donā€™t have irregular time sigs. The second Valkyrie Profile track does, though (partially, anyway), and is very typical of Sakuraba rhythmically.

23

this one is especially confusing and disorienting

e: why does youtube embedding not always work?

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24

This rules very hard

25

No idea what this is in prior to the 34 seconds mark. 9/8??

This last one is interesting because, at least in my head, you could split the section you first hear from 6 seconds to 29 seconds into 4/4 + 3/4 + 5/4 + 4/4 ā€“ BUT: you could also easily count the whole thing as 4/4 with some weird rhythmic anticipations that make it feel irregular. So basically

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26

The intro to this one is killer

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27

more konami goodness. alternating 7/8 & 2/4

28

Brutal orch-hitz to boot

29

pretty sure they nicked the bassline from the breakdown to this:

Same key even (if the embed timecode doesnā€™t work, it starts at 3:04)

edit: oof this is broken now but the link was to Black Sabbathā€™s Into the Void

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31

Really this is true of all music! Death of the author, etc. But itā€™s easier to see the subjectivity in chip music because of the reasons you list.

32

Obviously, some pieces lend themselves to certain interpretations more easily, but yeah.

33

Has nobody mentioned Metal Slugā€™s Steel Beast/Beast of Beat?

Itā€™s now a running gag that each game (bar 2/X & 3) does this piece in a different, progressively crazier time signature, the latest being 9/8.

Metal Slug - Steel Beast 5/4

Metal Slug 2 & X - Steel Beast 6/4

Metal Slug 3 - Steel Beast 6/4

Metal Slug 6 - Steel Beast 7/4??

Metal Slug 7 - Beast of Beat 9/8

I might be wrong about any of these time signatures because good grief.

4 Likes
34

metal slug examples good, but

will never understand
dips can you put this in kenji ito terms
could this be measured with a metronome program??? hook it so starts ticking 1 nanosecond b4 any sound plays



not this right???





or this??? (takes moment)

35

Obligatory:

Iā€™m not good enough with time signatures to say for sure that this isnā€™t in 4/4, but Iā€™m pretty sure it drifts in a Shags sort of way. Kind of hard for me to follow the time signatures with the tonal dissonance and tempo changes.

36

My god, I hadnā€™t heard that Taz-Mania one before. What is happening there??

I almost forgot, my favourite standard Final Fantasy battle theme: (5/4)

37

Iā€™d say that these are 4/4 with lots of triplet work; makes them sort of sound like two time sigs at once at points.

38

They are indeed both 4/4.

39

This is my summary when linking a friend to this on Facebook:

As far as I know, itā€™s still a
total mystery as to whatā€™s going on here. Game historian Frank Cifaldi
has guessed that the music is being loaded from RAM or otherwise
algorithmicly generated in some way. Based on how close the seem to
composed songs, I wonder if there was some sort of porting issue. Like,
they were written for the Genesis soundchip and then had to be
downported to whatever the Game Gear had (which was maybe similar to
what the Master System had?).

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