DAY 1318) Charge Cycles - Welcome To Ulka!
Composer: me (Chimeratio)
The final track I have left to post from this game that I did the music to! (https://chz.itch.io/charge-cycles).
So this is what I’m picking for “Valentine’s Day” this time...because Charge Cycles was technically made for a monthlong gamejam themed around “horny games” (hosted around Valentine’s Day), even though this game was 100% SFW, submitted to that jam in a slight joke-ish sense, as it only vaguely has slight suggestive implications and barely fit that theme. Really it’s just a cute silly puzzle game about charging robots, just, “charging robots” has other potential innuendo behind it...
Man I was dreading have to take the effort to make the post for this one most of all out of all the Charge Cycles tracks, even though it’s the shortest, mostly because it’s so ambiguous and polyrhythmic, and sounds nothing like the time signatures it “actually is”
It was written at 124 bpm with no tempo changes but with A LOT of polyrhythms or odd tuplets that stretch/squash weird amounts of beats into the length of a single bar or beat or whatever given space.
As I’ve said before, when I write music, in my personal workflow I write without writing in real timesig changes in. I just keep the software in default 4/4 and just ignore barlines when I want odd time to happen. So I had to take the time and effort to figure out how to interpret this almost as much as I would any other piece that I didn’t write myself.
Something like this is going to be VERY subjective, but the way I usually personally interpret and feel this is:
(0:00 - 0:15) 8 bars of 4/4
(0:15 - 0:30) [4/4 + 9/8]x3, 4/4 + 5/8
(0:30 - 0:36) 5/4, 7/32, 15/32*, 13/16
(0:36 - 0:49) 11/16, 9/8, 15/16, 17/16, 13/16, 6/8, 9/16, 6/8
(0:49 - 0:52) 13/16, 7/8
[loop]
Now, like I said, this looks ridiculous, and mostly unfitting with what it actually sounds like...and that was kind of the point! Originally this was supposed to have an alt version with “actual drums” like the in-game songs, but we didn’t go with that since we decided just a more ambient/calm tune would better suit the way the game’s menu turned out (this is the menu music).
The version with drums would’ve brought out all of the jarring barline placements rhythmically, and made this sound entirely different from the ambiguous/smooth style this has a lot of. It’s not clear how strange the timing of everything is without a drums layer like that, so it certainly would’ve been an interesting contrast to alternate between.
LOTS of polyrhythms/tuplets and other ambiguity explanations to talk about here:
Now, first off, with no drums, instead you hear the layer where 7 evenly spaced beats are stretched out to the length of a 4/4 bar (a septuplet), throughout most of the first 15 seconds. Only the 4th bar (with that high pitched glitchy sound doing constant 16ths) and the 8th bar (with the sound from before changing up its rhythm, as well as a new added sound) do anything to hint at this “actually” being in 4/4 at 124, rather than 7/8 at ~108ish like it initially sounds.
The rhythm in the 8th bar in that first section is a tuplet where 6 notes are squashed to the length of the first 2 beats of that 4/4 bar (so a sextuplet) and the last two beats of that bar are 7 notes squashed to fit in the space of beats 3-4 (so a septuplet).
Immediately at the start of the section at :15, there’s a quintuplet taking up that first beat, this happens a number of times. It’s different at :19/:29 though, a septuplet instead, 7 hits stretched to the length of 2 beats.
At the same time, the driving pulse every quarter note has two layers that get slightly offset. It’s actually an 9 against 8 polyrhythm, where the “9″ layer is the part doing quarter note hits. It’s easier to just think of it as “the ‘four-on-the-floor’ metallic click...gets desynced from itself” or...something, maybe.
:30 - :36 is where it’s ridiculous to interpret any meter unless there’s actual drums or something, but it is how I “wrote” it, where I felt barline subdivisions, and the divisions the drums were meant to employ there if they had been included. Obviously that’s a very free/glitchy feeling section so it might seem silly to define strict meter there, but it’s intended to be felt that way, since this was written with having a version with drums in mind.
The 7/32 bar is legit intended to be 7 32nd note beats, just a very subtle cut off 32nd note at the end of that moment.
*The 15/32 bar is not ‘really’ 15/32 though, really better interpreted as a tempo change for that single bar (in which it’d be just a 3/4 bar). That 3/4 bar is squished into that 15/32 space. It’s written this way only to be consistent with not writing in any tempo changes and interpreting any non-124bpm stuff as polyrhythms/tuplets (since that’s how I see most/all of it), but yeah.
The melodic section at :36 is much simpler to explain, really just put the barlines at the chord changes. The 15/16+17/16 might seem silly to not consider just 2 bars of anticipation rhythm 4/4, but it’s in the middle of constant mixed meter and definitely is intended to feel like starkly separate bars with the downbeat on the chord change, certainly would’ve been clearly that had there been drums.
The last two bars are really just empty space with almost nothing to latch on to, but it lines up with that amount of time. It’s debatable where you put the division between the two bars if you even write it like that at all. Originally, when writing a theoretical drum part, I actually had the downbeat be 2 16th notes earlier (last note of the melody is the downbeat of the next bar) and the drums just go like 4/4 + 13/16 after that. Without that context though I think 13/16 + 7/8 makes way more sense.
LASTLY, there’s a lead-in septuplet just like at the start just before the loop point at :52.
Hopefully I didn’t forget anything, haha. This is a ridiculously hard tune to break down imo and I can only really do it as easily as I can (it was still very hard to do) in this case because I made it, knew my intents, and can just look at the project file.
Hopefully this made enough sense to understand!
Even though I’ve finished with posting the Charge Cycles music finally, there’s still plenty more odd time VGM by me that exists (some already released, some not yet out) that I’ll eventually post here. Hopefully no one minds me occasionally posting my own music as I have been.
Uh happy Valentine’s Day!
