Donkey Kong Country - Life in the Mines

While I was playing my favorite SNES game, Donkey Kong Country, on this relaxing Sunday morning, I realized that some of the music was actually interesting. Not having a notated musical score of the music did not stop me from analyzing some background music. I remembered how I used a spectrograph for musical analysis in a theory seminar and I downloaded a demo version of Photosounder (http://photosounder.com). A spectrograph comes in very handy when you don't have a notated musical score. A spectrograph notates pitch frequencies in a graphic form. The graph below shows the first 2 minutes and 10 seconds of the BGM to "Trick Track Trek" called Life in the Mines (You can enlarge the image by clicking on it).

Spectrogram of Life in the Mines
CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGE

Analysis

Key: G Dorian 
Meter: Quadruple, I'm treating it as 4/4

Form: The music can be divided into three sections. There's an 8-bar introduction. The intro's followed by the first section consisting of 13 bars (A), and continues on to a variant of A which has a slightly different instrumentation and rhythmic feel (A'). Intro-A-A' is repeated until you finish the stage, enter a bonus stage, or if you are killed by flying Neckys.

<Introduction>

This section has three musical elements:
1) Bass sustaining a D pedal tone (colored pink in the spectrogram above)

2) Synthesizer playing ascending glissandi (they look like bear claw marks in the spectorgram highlighted in yellow.)

3) Ostinato by percussion instruments. (Ostinato refers to a repeated rhythmic unit)
Percussion instruments are difficult to pinpoint in spectrograms because of its overwhelming amount of overtones. Since spectrographs notate everything that's sounding out there, the image it produces often comes out distorted because of the overtones. (I will not transcribe the percussion parts, but this visualization of a MIDI file can give you a better sense of what's going on in the music).


<Section A>

This section starts with a melody played by a pan flute-like instrument. The melody appear as purple smudges on the spectrogram, and it can be notated like this:

Pan Flute-like Melody with 'call and response' effect

Note that there is a 'call and response' effect which recalls music from ancient civilizations that reflect the mysterious atmosphere in the mine where Donkey Kong and Diddy have to jump around and collect bananas in. 

The basic chord progression in section A is Gm-Bb-C-Gm, which in roman numerals is i-III-IV-i.
It's sometimes tricky and pointless to provide Roman numerals in modal music, but here they make perfect sense. The IV-I progression is called a 'Plagal cadence.' When you sing hymns at church, you will always say Amen over this progression.

One interesting note on the last Gm chord is that there is a 2-3 upside-down appoggiatura (colored red):

Bar 1-4 of Section A

The second half of the phrase in bars 4-8 resolves on a Dm chord rather than a Gm. This creates a 'deceptive' cadence.

Bar 4-8 of Section A

The last 9 bars of this section is similar to the introduction. There is again a pedal D in the bass and in the high register we have descending glissandi (colored in green in spectrogram). The glissandi conclude the phrase and continue on to the following section A.' While this is all happening, a new melody in the background appears:

'Plucked' Sixteenth-note Melody in bars 8-11

                                                                           

At first, this melody doesn't seem to be much of a significance, but it contains two important notes that determine what the underlying chords are above the sustained pedal D in the bass — A & Bb. You hear Dm when you hear an A, and an inverted Bb when you hear the note Bb.


<Section A'>

To be continued...