Musical Sound Effects in the Super Mario Series
Today we’ll have a deeper look at musical sound effects in the Super Mario series.
I guess everybody has heard sounds from the original Super Mario Bros. such as the “Jump” sound, “Coin” sound or “Mushroom” sound before. But I believe most of us don’t exactly know how these were constructed and what efforts were taken in later instalments of the series to produce sound effects that even harmonise with the game’s music. And in case you don’t know what “harmonise” means, we’ll get to that later.
As there’s so many titles and countless spin-offs, we’ll just focus onto three games of the series: First, the game that started the 2D jump’n’run genre we know today, the original “Super Mario Bros.” released in 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Wii title “Super Mario Galaxy” and the most current game “Super Mario Odyssey” released for the Nintendo Switch in 2017. The audio for the original NES game “Super Mario Bros.” was entirely created by Koji Kondo, but he took over the position of an audio advisor with compositions and sound effects mainly done by other people in later games.
Let’s dive right into the first of the three games, “Super Mario Bros.”. All of the sound effects here are made by notes pitched very high and usually played fast. These notes are, like all other sound from the game, played by one of the five channels of the NES sound chip.
Most of the sound effects in the Mario games are done in a way sound people from the film industry would call “Micky Mousing”. This means they directly comment on an action happening on screen such as the iconic jump sound we know and love. When listening closely you can hear an increase in pitch of this sound.
Another classic is the equally iconic Coin sound effect. It loosely sounds like that “cha-ching’ sound from a cash register. This sound effect consists of the two notes B and the higher pitched E to give that acoustic impression of your coin counter moving upwards with every one of them collected. In staff notation the Coin sound looks like this:
After taking a look at the sound of the great grandfather of all Mario games, now let’s turn to the third dimension with “Super Mario Galaxy”: The iconic jump sound had to go away for voice effects of Mario when he made the switch to the 3rddimension beginning with Super Mario 64. But from Super Mario Galaxy on, we can find a new audio trend in the series. The sound effects are harmonised to the music playing in the background. Harmonisation in music means: The individual notes of a melody or in this case the sounds of a sound effect are taken from the key the music plays in. By doing this the developer ensures the music and sound effects don’t feel out of key in case a note which is in strict contrast to the music’s melody and harmony is played in a sound effect.
There’re several examples where sound effects are harmonising with the music. The collection of Star Bits is one of the most striking ones here. Listen to these scenes from different levels of the game, where the background music is in a different key each time [4:04–4:20 in YouTube video].
When shooting through a Star Ring, the sound effect playing out is in sync with the music not only in pitch but also in timing. The harp melody blends in with the background music nicely as you can see here [YouTube: 4:35–4:44].
The most recent main title of the Mario series takes this concept of harmonisation of musical sound effects even further. Quite a lot of the sound effects in this game harmonise with the music. And they not only adapt to the key the music is playing in but also to the music’s tempo and sometimes they even follow the chord structure! Let’s look at this accordion-like centipede creature sound [5:12–5:57 on YouTube].
When transcribing this to musical notation, it looks like this:
By changing the background music to another piece, the sound effect changes and harmonises with the music.
But Odyssey takes this concept even further when travelling on an electric wire. As these are used to shorten long distance travels within a world the music can change based on the part of the world you are travelling to. And it also adepts to chord changes [YouTube: 6:15–6:31].
This will have taken a lot of time and effort in order to program this into the game but it is one of the things that make me smile and show the incredible attention to detail.
Summing up, sound effects definitely have to work on a visceral level. The classic Super Mario Bros. emphasises motion by using sound effects with ascending notes to show upward movement of the character.
Kondo and Miyamoto ensured that sound and music are syncing up as good as possible. Miyamoto sees sound as an integral part of the gameplay experience according to interviews. Composer Kondo played the original Super Mario Bros. to get the rhythm and timing of the gameplay. Only after that he was finally able to write a tune fitting for the game, the famous World 1–1 music.
For “Super Mario Galaxy”, sound designer and audio programmer Kawamura developed a special synchronisation system between the music and some of the sounds. In order to be able to have this system work, the live players of the orchestra had to play to a click while recording. A technique that became quite common in recent game music.
According to Koji Kondō, Miyamoto is very picky when it comes to sound effects. He oftentimes wants “sound effects you can feel”. This is a foundation kept throughout the Mario series and Koji Kondō himself puts it this way:
“Game Music is made up of the many pieces that appear in the game, but it’s essential to think of all the music as one piece for the entire game, not simply a collection of individual pieces.” “… [the sound effects department] has to work very closely with the soundtrack people to make sure … that the sound effects don’t get into the way of the music but [that] they complement the music and vice versa.”
And who could put it better than Koji Kondo himself?
References
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5-YDxH6It8
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnSjJUC7z38
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ftqX6fQCOc
· http://shmuplations.com/kojikondo/
· http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/super_mario_galaxy/2/3
· https://www.usgamer.net/articles/koji-kondo-interview-nintendo
· http://www.originalsoundversion.com/sound-director-kenta-nagata-talks-new-super-mario-bros-wii/
· https://www.usgamer.net/articles/koji-kondo-interview-nintendo
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WsP4lnFq9w
· https://youtu.be/WE_I3TgufPA
· https://youtu.be/rlx29hKQSkc
· http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/super_mario_galaxy/2/1/
· http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/super_mario_galaxy/2/3
