Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Potion Shop

Enjoying the Eastern fumes and benefits of Oriental medicine

The weird side of Hyrule. Welcome to the back alley where the black market that does not pay taxes subsists via shady business. Starting with Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy, the development team behind the Zelda series made a conscious decision to start including characters that feel slightly off; the suspicious types. These are guys and gals whose intentions are not absolutely clear and might help or harm the hero. There are some locations on Hyrule where it is definitely better to not ask too many questions. These exotic locales offer items that are out of the ordinary; buy at your own risk.

This needs to feel esoteric all around because what is being brewed here are all kinds of medicines made by either old witches, crazy scientists or underground sellers. We all know in what kinds of establishments we would also hear this tune. It does not matter whether made by magic or science, the beverages found here certainly are not conventional. You often have to bring your own ingredients in order for the seller to craft what you are looking for, no questions asked.

If normal shops have the Latin inflected musak for you to have a satisfying shopping experience, then Koji decided that these eccentric characters would be accompanied by Eastern traditions associated with mysticism and new age in the collective imaginary; it’s almost tongue-in-cheek in the way it parodies the music you would presumably hear at your local tarot reader while she is on a spiritual journey or some kind of trance.

Musical Analysis

Structure: Section 0 / Section 1 / Section 2

Time Signature: 4/4

Tempo: 94

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: G Double Harmonic Minor

Most likely composed first and foremost for the Potion Shop and then reused for all kinds of uncanny places, the cue does not shy away from using the trademarks that characterize music associated with all kinds of drugs and trips (of the spiritual kind, of course) — The wind chimes are used, no doubt with the intention of bringing to mind the cliched Hindu-style doors that always appear at the fortune teller venue or the esoteric chimes hanged all around for all kinds of superstitious purposes.

The conga glissando, coming back from Goron City cue, appears here in the low pitched register to emulate a different instrument: the Indian tabla or maybe a mridangam. What’s more, Koji Kondo probably uses the dulcimer in similar fashion to conjure up a sitar or maybe a veena. Being the closest timbre found in the instruments at his disposal, he uses the bass notes as a drone in similar fashion to how a sitar is performed. The djembe speaks for itself, being one of the go-tos instruments for an exotic world music sound. The drum patterns can be classified as a cyclic tala and the melody as a raga which are Indian musical frameworks for improvisation.

Though the instrumentation and rhythms suggest Indian classical music, for us the melody can also be more associated with a Middle Eastern, or Arab sensibility. When you learn the harmonic minor scale, you notice that its last bit sounds Middle-Eastern. This track doubles down on this sensation by using a scale that includes in it two of these harmonic tetrachords, the head and tail are the same as the tail of the harmonic minor scale. unsurprisingly Westerners simply call it the double harmonic scale. In this case, it is the double harmonic minor because it starts in the fourth mode of the double harmonic scale.

The melody part of the dulcimer seems to be playing a long form phrase around this scale with ornamental notes apt for the instrument in question and some irregular timing going on. The bass stays as a pedal G note.

Specifically, this genre of music would be the Hindustani classical music of north India—India has two different styles of art music— You can check a little of the style here:

The santoor is their dulcimer equivalent. We will encounter another kind of dulcimer for the Water Temple

The wacky mixture of influences continues thanks to the characteristic propensity that Japanese game developers have for disregarding a consistent tone in favor of communicating instantaneously what’s the deal with the place you are visiting.