Super Mario Bros.

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.

“Jump” (Super Mario Bros., NES)

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:

Coin sound effect in musical staff notation (Source: Andrew Schartman — Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack)

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:

Star Bit collection sounds: 4:04–4:20 in the video above

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:

Star Ring shooting sound: 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:

Centipede sound: 5:12–5:57

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:

Electric Wire travel “music: 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.