Life affirming tunes
Of course ever since the days of arcades, gamers have had the need to notice when their characters get harm and then when something good, like replenishing health, happens. In many video games they can usually count on finding a box of medical supplies or similar, with which they can instantly restore their health. This moment is almost always reinforced through a combination of both visual and aural cues. And while sci-fi or fantasy games sometimes need elaborate explanations for why something works in improving health, in platform games it can be just anything desirable independent of whether it would have real life medicinal properties. From Mario’s cha-ching coin sound effect to this Appalachian bear’s love for honey; it is a unique video game consideration.
As long as you have at least one hit point left, your character will seem perfectly fine in their movements and performance, which is something that happens slightly in cartoons, much less in live action and almost nonexistent in real life. In the case of Banjo-Kazooie we are dealing with the hyperactive metabolism of honey in order to get health back; honey is of course the de facto diet of bears in media, just like fish is to cats or cheese is to mice (since Banjo was originally meant to be a rabbit, we all know what his health bar would have been Note: don’t feed that to rabbits). Unlike mice, however, brown bears being mad about honey is actually true.
People think of video game composers as making the glamorous melodies accompanied with orchestral scores. But in the early days, the work of the composer encompassed also the sound effects that signal events and states inside the game for the players. Grant Kirkhope had to do each of the sound effects of Banjo-Kazooie, from the characteristic chopped voices made with vocal samples from the Rare staff to the usual fanfares and audio cues for items, no matter how mundane.
Just like when comparing the music to that of Mario, the main sound effects for the items in Banjo are longer and more musical sounding, blurring even more the line between sound effect and music. The game always trying to one up the plumber; if the coin sound is just two notes, the honey sound will be five and so on. The sound effects presented here are those related to health and consist of featuring the banjo instrument with a simple cue that evolves in complexity depending on the value of the reward, trying to capture the level of excitedness that the player and the characters should feel. Naturally, this sensation cannot be other than overtly positive.
Musical Analysis
Structure: Section 1 / Section 2 / Section 3 / Section 4
Tempo: 170 (Section 1); 150 (Section 2); 130 (Section 3); 140 (Section 4)
Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Ionian/Major
Continuing the bluegrass motif, these sounds consist on congratulatory movements based around the standard Banjo-Kazooie key of C. They all end on the triumphant C major chord coming from the dominant G. It is what is known as a perfect or authentic cadence, a widely used cadence, common practically to the point of ubiquity, that describes a V – I chord progression that resolves a musical phrase or piece, its name deriving from the fact that for most people this movement truly feels like ‘the end’ of a composition; it is the fullest resolution possible, perfect for short snippets of music. Just like Grant does over here, a seventh is usually added to the dominant chord since that seventh would be located a half step above the third of the tonic chord, creating a stronger pull towards the I chord—two notes are now displaced by a semitone. The music overall trajectory is upward; it reinforces the common up/good-down/bad binary of kinesthetically oriented sound (The origin of this probably has to do with higher pitches physically involving more energy, and thus more lively, than lower pitches). In opposition to the up is good, down is bad dichotomy, the fast is good/slow is bad is not as present here since the ‘gain a new honeycomb cue is slower than the single extra honeycomb one. We do find the ‘more is good’ trope when it comes to orchestration though.
So the honeycomb pieces grow in structural complexity while the extra life—which here we are gonna pretend it is made from honey—grows in number of instruments. The standard honeycomb that replenishes health is just the banjo playing the aforementioned authentic cadence, then the extra honeycomb adds the I chord again for a I – V7 – I progression, with the first bar devoted entirely to an ascending movement throughout the C chord. It adds just one flute which plays a trill; the notes of this flute trill are the same opening notes from Click Clock Wood, which was the first track made when the concept for the Banjo-Kazooie game was decided (This trill is also the same as the ‘Get a Feather’ sound effect, just transposed). The main melody was probably based around the ‘Shave and a Haircut’ ending motif of the main theme of the series, a common ending that is strongly associated with the stringed instruments of bluegrass music, particularly the 5-string banjo.
For the gaining extra honeycomb fanfare we see, for the first time here, one of the usual tricks for reaching the tonic. Grant Kirkhope will employ this trick to frantically get to the tonic in some other tracks in the series no matter how far outside the key he goes. It consists on hoping around the circle of fifths, step by step until reaching the desired chord; it can be made as long or as short as the composer wants. The circle of fifths is just a way of organizing the 12 chromatic pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths. Thus it can go C G D A E B and so on; This order places the most closely related key signatures adjacent to one another. Naturally, if you move backwards you will be moving in perfect fourths. The normal version would be to play the triads born from the key. But this being Banjo-Kazooie, we are stuck with traveling to unexpected chords outside the tonality; the zany nature comes from all the chords being major, which pretty much produce a chain of overlapping authentic cadences. It gives an effect of jumping around in zigzag platforms like a caffeinated bunny, perfect for the genre to which Banjo-Kazooie belongs. The extra honeycomb cue is just the mid version off this technique which will get more ludicrous later on. The harmony is directed by the tuba playing each of the root notes, the harmony being E7 – A7 – D7 – G7 – C – G7 – C. It ends with the same music as the other versions. We get a second banjo playing in the characteristic Scruggs style from bluegrass.
As for the extra life cue, it returns to being a 1-bar tune played with more energy and celebration courtesy of the kazoo from the character and the cymbals. (As a fun fact, the bird is named Kazooie because Kazoo is a trademarked name).
As far as congratulatory music goes, they are standard fare. The extra quirkiness, the tritone and the sinister vibe will only become apparent when the bear and the bird enter the ominous villain’s lair.
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