I’ve come across so much great music in the video game medium. Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett created beautiful and reflective work for Transistor, and while I have yet to play Chrono Cross, the tracks I’ve heard from it (by Yasunori Mitsuda) are dazzling. Nobuo Uematsu’s work for Square has stayed with me to this day: Roses of May is as charming a tune as its name implies, while there is a menace to Succession of Witches and a subtle, disturbing feel to Listen To The Cries of the Planet.
While I liked music, I never really tried to actually play it myself; I had no real experience with instruments outside of music classes in school, lessons that never caught my interest for even a quarter beat. Perhaps the only detail that stuck with me, when it came to instruments, was my sister learning to play a simplistic portion of Aerith’s Theme on her keyboard at home, and then teaching me to play it.
Oddly, I still remember the sequence of notes now, many years later. There were twelve in total, starting at the far right end of the board: C-B-A-G / D-D / D-E-F-E-D-C. That was the extent of what I could ‘play’, and this didn’t even begin to change until just a few years ago, when I decided to finally try the 3DS port of one of the most celebrated games ever made – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Nintendo 3DS – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D Reviews Trailer Watch on YouTube
The game features an intriguing mechanic where you must play certain notes on an ocarina – a real instrument – using console buttons. You only needed to press them each briefly, but if you chose to hold any of them down, you could (if I recall correctly) elongate the note. I would play the pieces differently sometimes, stretching some notes, or using different timings, and I realised something that probably occurred to most children during their first instrument lessons – I could play the same piece in very different ways. There was a creativity to it and self-expression even when you were working within the framework of a tune that had been composed by someone else. Shigeru Miyamoto, the producer of the game, has actually spoken about his interest in combining music and video games, referring to the idea of introducing people to the experience of playing music in a convenient fashion. While he was talking about the Wii, it seems as if this same desire was already evident in Ocarina of Time.