Soundtrack/Commentary/Echo

## Echo

The theme of the eighth instalment of the "Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin" soundtrack commentary is "Echo," a track for wooded dungeons in the forest area.

This track is played in the forest dungeons that occupy the east side of the island, such as Hare's Nest Knoll and the Forest of Supplication.

The theme of this track can be summed up in one word: "change". If "Howling Wind" is the standard straightforward BGM, this dungeon track, which comes next, is positioned as a change of pace, and I put a lot of effort into creating it to see how much range I could add. It's easier to understand if you listen to it first, but I think it's amazing if you can figure out how many beats this BGM is on your first listen.

(See the MIDI file, 08\_kodama1.mid, attached in the article.)

The correct answer is "switching between 5/4 and 6/4 every bar". I've written songs in 5/4 in the past, such as "虚無への黙祷", but I don't think I've ever written a track this complex.

However, even though it is a strange beat, I think it is not that strange. I was careful to keep a constant sequence pattern that sounded like wood blocks and accentuate it with percussion to make it more familiar to the ear. Another point is the extensive use of instruments made of wood, such as wood blocks and hyoshigi clappers for percussion, and shakuhachi and bamboo flutes for melody.

While "Howling Wind" has a clear idea of the music from the start, "Echo" starts off in a more mysterious way, expressing the dense atmosphere of the forest. Since the difficulty level increases as the stage progresses, the chord progressions are a little more serious, but since the game is still in its early stages, the electric piano and drums are used to create a bouncy rhythm that is not too heavy.

A flute adds a jazzy melody to the B melody, and strings join in to create a relaxed melody in the chorus. Just when your ears are finally getting accustomed to a melody that uses a lot of odd time signatures....another trick awaits you.

I've excerpted the part from the chorus to the interlude on MIDI.

(See the MIDI file, 08\_kodama2.mid, attached in the article.)

In fact, the interlude section has a further change in time signature, with three bars of 21/8 and two bars of 12/8 replacing the previous 5/4 + 6/4.

To put it another way, you could say that the tempo is dropped from 165 to 110 in two-thirds, keeping the rhythm of the eighth notes in 6/4, and moving to 7/4 time, which is bouncing in eighth triplets.

If you have music production software, you may be able to understand this by opening the MIDI data above, reducing the length and start time of all notes after measure 12 to two-thirds, reducing the tempo to 110, and changing the time signature to 7/4 from measure 12 and 4/4 from measure 15.

I had managed to get lost in the beat up to this point in terms of time signature, but here I was again in a strange beat that made me lose my equilibrium.

I was walking along a familiar path in the forest, but before I knew it, I was lost in a completely unknown path, and I tried to express such a scary feeling through music.

In the next instalment, I'll introduce the track "Mayhem" for the boss battle theme mostly heard in the early game.