Everyone was wrong about the Strong One (Masked Man) Time Signature 

the literal example of "every music is 4/4 if you don't count it like a nerd."

YOU THOUGHT IT WAS 29/16, BUT IT WAS ME 4/4

I have to say, "4/4 with vomit inducing, horrible, puke-summoning Rubato" was not what I expected.

Shogo Sakai made a song so fucked up people are still debating its time signature nearly two decades later. That’s crazy

Feels really in character for a Siivagunner joke to say that the one VGM song that nobody can agree on its time signature about was actually a 4/4 piece. Makes sense that they'd be the ones to know about it, too, considering they'd have had to actually try and fit this onto a timeline.

This is even more proof of the joke “Everything is in 4/4 if you don’t count it like a nerd”

I like how you say "verified by the official earthbound wiki" when it's just some fandom page lol makes sense silvagunner's wiki would know since it's actually full of musicians

3:42 "It turns the otherwise familiar tune into a counterintuitive abomination." No spoilers, but that is just... saddeningly appropriate given the Masked Man's circumstances.

I DM'd Shogo Sakai on Twitter asking about the meter of Strong One recently, and he told me he was thinking of Strong One in terms of *additive* time signatures: 3/4 + 3/8 + 1/4 + 1.5/4 (spicy!) It makes sense when you're focusing on the pulses in the combos driving the time signatures by themselves, but it also affirms the idea that Shogo Sakai *was* thinking about decently "regular"/"clean" meters, and therefore 15/8 and 29/16 kinda fit those conventional vibes. For even more context by the way, the mp2k/Sappy sound engine -- the engine sent out to GBA devs by Nintendo which was used in Gen. III Pokémon *and* MOTHER 3 -- has a tempo "resolution" of 2 BPM, meaning the next smallest tempo change above 120 BPM Sappy supports is 122 BPM, *not* 121 BPM. Also, excellent job accounting for the 3:5 16ths tuplet at the end of (Masked Man) ❤

I think the whole issue is that we're trying to notate this song with a time signature even though the real, true intent of this song is to make drummers take confusion damage. Yknow, since following the rhythm that's literally the gameplay mechanic, it forces the encounter to be one against an opponent that you can't get a solid read on. I think the REAL most accurate way to notate this song is to put a note in front of the drummer section that says "have fun LOL". And put question marks behind the time sig. If a notation of this song doesn't appear on the "threatening music notation" twitter, then it's not accurate enough.

As a drummer, the video just got more and more horrifying just imaginating having to play that. Very interesting tho !

this is like how in Master of Puppets the entire song is in 4/4 but then there's that two hit measure that people describe as 21/32

Game dev here. My explanation for the weirdness you're seeing: Games run at 60 FPS or 30 FPS or whatever, but audio doesn't follow frames. It's handled separately, and constantly gets out of sync with the frames. (I'm making a rhythm game and MY GOODNESS it causes so much trouble.) Recordings of MOTHER 3 will have imperfect timing, but never enough for anyone to detect unless they check - like you did. For gameplay purposes though, it's accurate enough. Based on your video, it's a safe bet the heartbeat is handled automatically by the code based ONLY on tempo - which explains the quarter notes. Shogo Sakai possibly wrote these songs at 15/8 or 29/16... but converted them afterwards to be 4/4 with appropriate tempo changes. I bet MOTHER 3's team wrote a tool specifically for converting all songs to 4/4, to save time. Which makes sense: This way, every time they revised the music during development, the heartbeat wouldn't need to be manually corrected to match - it's already part of the song! This would explain why all MOTHER 3 recordings are slightly out of sync, and why technically all battle themes are in 4/4 time signature. It was probably the solution that was the least trouble. Hopefully you didn't pull out too much hair trying to decipher the time signature! There's always multiple ways to solve a problem when making a game; sometimes you just pick one that's good enough.

mother 3's battle system is so cool, the complexity of the music being tied to the difficulty of the battle is so creative and it helps that shogo Sakai is a mad genius with making creative vgm

So, interesting math note: You were able to notate Dry Guys using both a non 4/4 time signature and using tempo changes because both represent the same ratio: 2:3. You can get this ratio by dividing out the common factors from each of the prime factorizations of the tempos until none remain. In Dry Guys, dividing out the common factors of 96 and 144 leaves us with 2 and 3. And 2x3=6 -> 6/8. The issue with Strong One and Strong One (Masked Man) is that their tempos don't share many common factors, leaving a lot of numbers to be multiplied together to get a ratio that can represent each song. In Strong One, from 120, 172, 224, and 80, you can only divide out 2 twice. This leaves 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 43. 2x2x2x3x5x7x43=36,120. Thus, the smallest time signature you can accurately represent Strong One with is 36,120/65,536. In Strong One (Masked Man), from 126, 180, 236, and 102, you can only divide out 2. This leaves 2, 3, 3, 5, 7, 17, and 59. 2x3x3x5x7x17X59=631,890. Thus, the smallest time signature you can accurately represent Strong One (Masked Man) with is 631,890/1,048,576. Both of these time signatures are very unfriendly to humans, so approximating with 15/8 and 29/16 or using tempos to represent these songs is probably the way to go. (p.s. The slowdown you mentioned at the end of the video would not change these time signatures, since a uniform slowdown would not change the ratio.)

the fan translation has its own dedicated website. using reddit is just asking for malware, lmao.

My friend just shared this and I said to her, "this game taught me polyrhythms I swear".

The way it's programmed to handle the heartbeats is fascinating to me, I know that several other games have sound engines on the GBA that use MIDI files in this way (hello everything at Game Freak), so it's unsurprising that they'd use them for this. But I didn't expect the *hard coded* use of quarter notes, that Shogo Sakai and/or a sound engineer assisting him would then have to convert into something the game could then use for its own system. The fact that this also makes the nightmare of Masked Man into 4/4 makes me wonder if Sakai *was* also the sound engineer at the same time he was composer (which would track, as a lot of older soundchip hardware for NES and SNES had the same thing going on) because this is too elegant to be handled by two individual people for how monstrous it is to our ears. I don't know Mother 3's internals, but as a programmer... I think it's hardcoded and less of a limitation, as being able to effectively listen in for different note types isn't theoretically hard to do if you have access to a full MIDI track on actual hardware. It's more of a "build to scale" thing - Mother 3 has a lot of tracks, like over 200. Not all of them are used in battle, but many of them are or can be at certain times, so your beat tracking system needs to be robust to account for all of them. It was probably just a shortcut and the creation of a 0 volume MIDI track with exclusively quarter notes appended to the end of each bit of music data, that every song then needed to be engineered around after the fact. It's for a similar reason that all the instruments used by the Bash command are in C minor - though that also has both lore reasons and limitations on what kind of battle themes could be composed. Sakai is a wizard. I think Strong One's variants are supposed to *sound* like 29/16 and 15/8 respectively, and I agree with the conclusion that we can treat them as "approximants" of these time signatures. Less because of the limitations of the GBA, but more because that was the artistic intent to be "just off" of them to make them harder to follow! After all, if we approached Dry Guys *not* as 3:2, musically that makes no sense, even if the game's actual data speaks otherwise. These slight tweaks are intentional because of Strong One's purpose - if Sakai wanted to make them 29/16 or 15/8 as opposed to...whatever this tempo map is, he could've, clearly. (I'm not in the man's head, but yeah lol) He wanted to mess with us a bit :) ...WAIT HUH LOL THE REFRESH RATE JUMPSCARE Great overview, this was a joy to watch!! EDIT: Thanks for the like :) Saw a typo I had to fix but RU-vid gets rid of it on edited comments, ah well

"The difficulty of the battle, apart from damage and health pools, is also dependent on how cracked you are at rhythm games." *_DICKO MODE JUMPSCARE_*

I cannot *believe* the thing about the heartbeat tracks all being 4/4 quarter notes and hacking together anything else with tempo changes. What the hell.

I love how everytime you talk about something in music theory you then add that to your outro music because it makes me realize that without you explaining it I am STUMPED

I love how the footage is you beating Lucas up, rather than playing as him 😂

79107/40120 is mathematically equivalent to the 4/4 beat changes. With 79107 beats in a bar, heartbeats 1,2,3 and 7 get 10,030 beats each, heartbeats 4 and 5 get 7,021 beats each, heartbeat 6 gets 5,355 beats, and heartbeat 8 (which gets divided into a triplet) gets 12,390 beats. It doesn't actually matter what the beat denomination is, but if you choose 79107/16384, the tempo (whole note) is the same BPM as the framerate in FPS. I don't know what the other math guy is thinking.

Oh my God this is one of those times where you come across a video and feel like it was made specifically for you and you alone. This was fascinating, thank you so much

I chuckled a bit when I heard “verified by the official earthbound wiki.” =P It’s a fan-run wiki, so it really has no authority to verify anything. They just curate information that’s believed or discovered to be true by superfans.

Idk what you're talking about disappointed, this song being in 4/4 with wild tempo changes is such a great rug pull, and also much less common in the context of avant-garde music, and ALSO more nicely responsive to the affordances of computer-played music. Loved this video to bits! Thank you!

5:52 Hey, it's me! I added those a long time ago. Quick note about the wiki, it's not official by Nintendo, and even then the wiki and its community have abandoned Fandom ages ago and are now an independent place, WikiBound. Years ago I was playing with the game's memory addresses and found the address for the current BPM -- I have a video showcasing the value and what happens if you change it. That is where I got the BPM values I added to the wiki from. I do however remember that they never exactly matched real life; I think I vaguely remember checking that Zombeat is internally at plain old 120 BPM but when you actually hear the song the BPM is slightly different. Most likely because of the GBA's clock like you said, but also misc. stuff like limited decimal place calculation capabilities and lag frames. I have not looked into how the game works very deeply, but I did gather some conclusions back then, and have made use of them to developed a since-abandoned project, PK Rhythm, which mimics Mother 3's combo system. In both Mother 3 and PK Rhythm, the system is pretty much what you describe: whoever made the song specifies BPM changes and then the game just checks if the player's hit is on-beat or not. Both are completely ignorant to the concept of time signatures, off-beats, etc.

Sadness and Sorrow in that time signature at the end killed meee

Sounds to me like Strong One was written in 15/8 but as they were putting it into the game somebody messed up the tempos, and they thought "hey wait that kinda sounds cool, what if we use that for a harder enemy encounter?" The best creative decisions are often the ones found completely by accident.

I was JUST listening to this song and counting along and while counting I knew something felt off about it allegedly being 29/16. I feel so validated.

Ah.. I never even thought about changing tempo within the groove of the song. Holy cow that's crazy.

This song is the true embodiment of how it feels to sightread for honor band auditions...

9:59 Imagine you're a composer writing for a videogame and suddenly you have to do weird time signature, speed and rythm calculations so that it's percieved as written above

Edit: my theory is that the creator had that specific music in his head or had recorded It previously and just found some tricky way to aproxímate It with the software that they were using and make It sound similar to what they wanted and It somewhat worked Hey i just wanted to comment that your videos are super super interesting. I subscribed from another video but since then you published a few more and didnt disappoint at all!

What’s insane is that even though the timing in this song is so strange after enough listening the groove starts to make sense! Repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes

Cadence, as a former musician (I say former because I never get to gig or teach anymore), this is exactly the kind of content that me and so many other aspiring music professionals wanted to make and watch when we were younger. The fact that you are actively researching, making content, and experimenting with music so earnestly means that you are on your way to great success as a content creator and musician. Keep improving, keep learning, and keep writing. Great video!

Well I'll be damned! I was a little salty to not hear you talking about this in your "weird time signatures in Nintendo Games", but with this whole video dedicated to this specific song, I'm more than happy and, more importantly, completely wrong in my comment on your previous video! I'm sorry for the strife and thank you for making this video! I absolutely love mother 3 and hearing you walk through the technicalities of this song was a blast, please keep up your amazing work!

I'm not convinced that the interpretation of "it's 4/4, just speeding up and slowing down" is a useful one from a music theory perspective. Sure, that's how it's implemented in-game, but as you point out with Dry Guys and all the other tracks, you can really do any beat that way, even ones that are obviously intended to be in a totally different metre. That said, the fact that the ratios make it a good distance from 29/16 is pretty convincing. But you also raise a good point at 11:15 in that it MIGHT have been meant to be 29/16, although the extent to which it's off makes me wonder if it was actually meant to be something different even from that. It does make me wonder what might be a good compromise between the somewhat-off 29/16 and the patently-ridiculous-but-technically-correct 71907/40120 I've seen floating around.

This is insane! And SiIvaGunner gets woven in as well lol

[5:16] you feel like you're going to have a bad time... signature

Now I want to see 8-Bit Music Theory’s reaction to this lmao. Also Adam Neely. This is like landmark musical bullshittery

Hahaha the siivagunner wiki was NOT what I was expecting when I clicked on this video randomly, got my sub now

This helps really illustrate the function of tume signatures. Its so easy to just wonder "why?" as a person who only ever dabbled in music and who was good at learning by ear. I mean, you show how most people are wrong, but you show how you can be so precise and represent something that feels like ear chaos succinctly on paper and for a machine with a purpose, which is cool

Having ripped a fair amount of MIDI data from games, I can tell you that much of the time a time signature isn't even programmed and it's technically 4/4, even if the music itself is just in 3/4 all the way through. I also actually saw someone point this out about "Strong One (Masked Man)" somewhere, but people just got mad and insisted "well it's still effectively 29/16", which this video demonstrates is false. Side note: that is not the "official EarthBound wiki" and just a fansite hosted on Fandom (blech). But the SiIvaGunner wiki is edited by people associated with the channel, so that one could possibly be considered official- for SiIvaGunner of course, not EarthBound.

i think the reason why the heartbeat notes are straight quarter notes with changing tempo is so that the combo sounds of the characters will flow seamlessly-ish into the next combo sound

it's disappointing that this video blew up in less than a week but you only have 33.5k subs, this is great video essay content!

You know, i just thought of your other video on this game, around a day ago. And then THIS SHOWS UP?!? Love your content!

I may not be the first I am not the last When I see Cadence hira I click very fast

Man I always wondered about this song when I was playing, it was so weirdly out of tune but somehow in-tune at the same time, so I never got the timing right Great video! Love to see some Mother 3 videos and that little reference to Rhythm Paradise at the end

Honestly this is such a great video. I know nothing about music stuff but I’m a huge Mother 3 fan and I’ve always thought something wasn’t quite right about that song.

i remember finding out about the battle songs being 4/4 with different tempos when i dumped the midis for the songs when i wanted to remix them, it was super interesting to hear fate/serious as it was programmed and i remember i talked about it in a random youtube commend like 7 years ago (will never ever find it again though). that said i don't really think it's very useful to just say "in the end, it's 4/4 but with tempo changes!" (even if it's technically correct) especially considering that applies to literally every battle song in the game. the datamining of the music files and seeing how the tempo behaves surely gives some very interesting insight and it would have helped here, had the game not had that rhythm mechanic. like some other commenter said, shogo sakai clearly had a time signature in mind and i think creator intent should be what matters here. hell, for all we know it might have been his intention to make the song not fit in any steady tempo just to throw the player off even harder (after all it's considered to be notoriously harder to combo on than regular strong one). if things don't sync up, especially in an old console, that can just be attributed to hardware inaccuracies, just as you said; after all you'll find that even NES games had trouble keeping a consistent tempo at all let alone a tidy whole number one. the fact the song seems to sync up really well at 29/16 at first tells me that 29/16 is a perfectly valid time signature to classify this song and i don't think it's worth diving into why it doesn't *perfectly* line up. lastly i have a feeling that the programmers simply felt like it was way easier for them to program the heartbeats to be in sync with the tempo and just told shogo "hey you'll have to play with the tempo lol sorry" who knows they probably wrote a script for him that generated tempos for him so he didn't have to manually calculate the ratios, but i don't think it was a hardware "limitation" but rather a "this is the easiest thing to code lol". tl;dr for me this song is still 29/16 and if it doesn't line up exactly at that it can just be attributed to hardware and it's not really that important. p.s. 5:14 fucking killed me you're hilarious

people saying "all music is 4/4 if you don't count it like a nerd" as if changing the tempo multiple times per bar isn't some advanced music nerd shit lmao

You can approximately count it as "quarter, quarter, quarter, triplet, triplet, eighth, quarter, quintuplet quintuplet quintuplet" at 123.6 bpm, and it should loop nearly perfectly with the worst note being only 1/50 of a second out of place. In this interpretation, the time signature would be 211/120 (as 3/4 + 2/6 + 3/8 + 3/10), or ~7.033/4, which is only so complex because of the unresolved tuplets.

This may be one of the most pointlessly pedantic music theory videos I've ever seen on RU-vid. I love it. Thank you for your commitment to quality.

Okay that Rythm Hell part at the end sent me flying, all in all a great one, your video :D

I feel vindicated. There was a period of several days where I would spend 30 mins-1 hr listening to this piece at a time, trying to figure out its time signature in light of inconsistant claims, and the conclusion I reached by listening to the music was that it was in either 4/4 or 8/4. 4/4 seems correct to me - there is more emphasis on the fifth note of the tempo cycle than I would expect in 8/4 (beats 1 and 5 seem equal in this piece, where they wouldn't be in 8/4), but I can see the argument for 8/4, being that each measure now contains one full tempo cycle & it is no longer awkwardly split across every pair of measures. Thank you for making this video. Hopefully this will set the record straight on how this piece works, in a musical sense. (minor edit improving readability)

12:07 shit has me on the edge of my seat

Indie game dev here. Chances are the reason why it's not exact is because you have a variable amount of time that each frame is being processed before it gets to queueing up music. Let's say Frame 1 it starts immediately, then 30 frames later it's time to queue up the next bit of music. Before it gets to the music, it may be processing some other chunk of data such as player input that takes some milliseconds. So then the music gets queued slightly later. If the code is looking at the projected end of a string of notes, the next sections all get pushed out slightly each time this happens.

Thank you, now I finally have a video to link when I see people being wrong about strong one's time signature.

This channel never disappoints me. Way to do an insane amount of homework on this one

44 seconds ago is insane

This is a great crash course on how time signature and notation kinda isn't real. By which I mean it's not set in stone and you can make up whatever notation you want as long as it works for you. A typical 4/4 song could be written as 2/4 or 4/8 at half the tempo, or at 8/4 or 16/8 at double the tempo. Or you could write it in 8/4 at the same tempo with double-length measures. Or you could write it in 6/8 and just put measure markers in the middle of the "normal" mesaures. Or you could write it in like 864/4 where the entire song is one measure. Or you could write it such that it constantly changes tempos and time signatures in just the right way to sound like nothing's happening. The music does not change, only the notation. With a complex song like Masked Man, it makes much more sense to just "feel" it rather than trying to count everything, at least when you're trying to perform the song.

Shigesato Itoi: ok this is gonna be one of Nintendo's darkest characters so we need to make sure we give Music nerds anyuerisms.

The outro of this video is HILARIOUS LMAOOO excellent stuff!! Quickly becoming one of my favorite YT channels!

Just found you channel through recommended and I love it. New sub fs

I have a feeling it wasn't so much a limitation of the console as much as it was probably easier for the developers to program a combo system that only counts hits on quarter notes, which in turn meant they had to use tempo changes to simulate funky time signatures.

You have a way of talking where I can never guess what or which syllable you'll stress next and as a result I have a fun time listening to your voice.

i talked to one guy who liked earthbound and RU-vid brought me to this video a week later, wild stuff

I cannot express in words how even though I’ve been into music with weird time signatures my whole life, I experienced severe psychic damage after hearing the drum part to this. I can’t even imagine it would sound good played by a real drummer

ur videos are so good, i have nearly 0 music theory experience and enjoy them all

That's a 14 minute video explaining how this extremely cursed sounding soundtrack is... ACTUALLY CURSED!!?!?!?!?!?!

Imagine thinking SIlvaGunner is from "yesteryear". Their April Fools Day event was phenomenal.

Incredible video! I've never heard this song before this and it's so fun and interesting! After some thinking and messing around I actually found a way to count it that FEELS quite nice. Alternating between 1 bar of 5/4 then 1 bar of 7/12(counting 7 eighth note triplets) :)

The "everything is in 4/4"joke was actually correct, cant belive it

AAAAAAAA LOOK MOM I'M FAMOUS Amazing video as always, I can't believe the siiva wiki actually had the correct answer lmfao

This might just be the closest approximation of "cursed knowledge" I've ever come across. Thank you for tainting me with this.

Great video! I never heard any of this music before, but this was super interesting. I also can't get over that Shostakovich-ass Audacious March lol. (From the 5th Symphony, 1st Movement.)

SiivaGunner reference!!!!!!!

Now, we need Stronger One. A song with an actual absurd time signature.

Well, it could be said that time signatures in general tend to be approximate anyway. Classical music notation was never meant to exactly match the performance (nor the data from the game in this case), and neither using time measures (not talking about the 29:16 though, as it's still kinda manageable) nor precise BPM changes that are impossible to intuit feels satisfactory for a transcript, as like you said - it isn't helpful for performance - but I'd go further and say it isn't helpful for musical analysis, nor for any case in which the staff notation may be needed. I'd treat it similarly to other stuff that such notation doesn't usually notate (and even if so - never precisely), such as timbre or other things that appear only in a recording

Ive been arguing about this time sig with people online for a while. I love weird time sigs, and masked man is like the poster child of weird time sigs. I also read about the whole heartbeat thing and it really interested me. The way I see it, there's two ways to argue the time sig of masked man: 4/4 or 29/16, which IMO the correct answer depends on whether it was composed accounting for the heartbeat changes or they just composed in 4/4 then played around with weird slowdown. I reckon the composer did intend it to have the slowdown the way it does and worked backwards, but the console simply couldn't handle the mathematics to make it EXACTLY 29/16. That said, I couldn't find any interviews or anything from the composer and especially given masked man is a variation on the regular strong one, they could've very well composed both in 4/4 and then played around with slowdown not as a stage of composition but as a stage of game design... If that makes sense. Edit: yeah this seems to align with the point you made in the conclusion of the video before the final discrepancies. bonus note I think NummyGD was one of the people I argued with about the time sigs, as he argued BOTH were 15/8 because masked man was the same base as strong one and just sped up differently but I argued that logic would just make both 4/4 if you accounted for the speedup for both and it's weird to only account for the speed difference between the two.

It's so cool how different representations in sheet music can give the same sounds! It's also neat how the music is *programmed* can end up very different from how one would write it for, say, actually making it playable for a live band, or comprehensible to laymen otherwise. Like, I doubt you'll have more people able to mentally conjure how rapid sudden tempo changes sounds compared to weird time signatures and odd note notation.

Id take it as 7/4 and leave it and never worry abt it ever again tbh. It sounds a lot cooler with that kind of meter anyways

Ok, this is what I understood from this piece. I think the melody was thought of as two groups of three notes. In the first version, the first group is a triplet of quarter notes and the second group is three eighth notes. In the second version the two groups of three notes of the melody have been altered in tempo, leaving the fragments without melody unchanged. The first three notes can always be thought of as a triplet at 120 on the metronome. In fact, this makes it clearer that it is a very small change and is well conveyed by the small difference between 126 and 120. The second part at 126 "without melody" does not come in after the triplet has taken place regularly, but a a little earlier, giving the idea of ​​two "overlapping pieces". After that, the third part at 102 can be seen as a very rushed version of the group of three eighth notes, in fact I would write it as 3 eighth notes at metronome 204, rather than as a triplet.

I feel like even without knowing the underlying programmatic reason, the song really does make a lot more sense from the perspective of tempo changes I think. It honestly feels like that triplet of eighth notes at the end of the bar is sped up in a way that just doesn't fit a time sig change. Of course, this is all off of vibes, so take with that what you will

I have noticed that same song from the same file on different audio players, even on the same device, tend to play slightly slower on one than the other. Part of it may be the format and the program used to play the song itself.

If someone gave me the 4/4 version sheet music with the funky tempo changes and asked me to play it, I'd quit on the spot. That's obviously not readable to a human, and since we notate stuff for humans to play, and humans don't play in perfect time down to the ms, I'd say the 29/16 version is way more usable. I sometimes exhange 8th triplets for dotted 16th for a bit of fun, and I wasn't aware of that way of writing em. Neat!

Halfway though the vid, I was starting to sniff sound card and CPU clock weirdness. I'm really glad you also thought of that and addressed it because I wasn't expecting it haha

Nice! Good stuff. The reveal of 4/4 is funny as hell. Can't say I'm shocked by it, it's as the old adage goes: "anything can be 4/4."

This is such an amazing example of phasing ( minimalism)

My knowledge of music theory was 0 before watching this, and i somehow feel like i know even less now than i did before...

Maybe the added final descrepancy could be from the recording software? Or the audio exporting, since if its done with a diferent number of Hertz in the refreshrate, it touches the speed ever so slightly

As a computer science major, I'd say this may be a case of how time is calculated in the game's programming. To my understanding, some games in the past counted cpu clock cycles to time things right. If you go back far enough, you see games where the programmer had to literally calculate how long each instruction would take to execute, which is why many games in the 80s lacked background music during gameplay (think Galaga and pacman), because you can't predict what instructions specifically will execute, and thus can't time out music. Now, later on, counting clock cycles became a subprocess ran by the hardware itself, and all the programmer would have to do is check how many cycles have passed. However, there remains two problems: 1. The cpu clock on a Gameboy advance only has to be consistent enough to execute instructions. Beyond that, there's no need to make sure all manufactured cpu clocks run at precisely the same speed, which could explain why your recorded audio is different. 2. The point in the code at which the programmer checks the number of clock cycles may differ for the same reason as before: whatever actions the player takes may cause the check to occur earlier or later in the game loop. Now, in modern computers, we have much more precise clocks, better methods of checking cycles, and can even synchronize with remote atomic clocks. But back in the day, that kind of effort just isn't worth it when the yield is a perfect time signature, especially when the bottleneck is fitting the music in the cartridge itself. So I think your last theory was most likely correct, and you can chalk the unsyncronized nature of your last recording up to either programmer or manufacturer error, not musician. Great video btw! Edit: I almost forgot, many games synchronize the gameplay to the display refresh rate. Same principle, except instead of counting clock cycles, we're counting frames.

Every time I hear someone talking about time signatures, at least as they relate to video games, I am brought back 15 years to a top 10 list from GameFAQs, top video game songs in weird time signatures. The number one place was attributed to Tor, the final boss theme of Iji (one of the greatest, most underappreciated indie games of all time), being in something like 27/16. I may not remember it exactly, but its something I have been haunted by these last 15 years.

To do the fan translated rom you first need the original japanese rom and then you patch it with the file you get off the fan website (the fobby website). Then you can play as normal.

For those wondering where the 71907/40120 time signature came from: In the actual sequence data, the tempo is not consistant at all. The tempos are: 3/4 at 126 bpm 2/4 at 180 bpm 1/4 at 236 bpm 1/4 at 126 bpm 1/4 at 102 bpm The total length of time for this sequence, is precisely 23969/7021 seconds (that's the simplified fraction). It should be assumed that the intended tempo of Masked Man is 126 bpm. Now, if something is playing at 126 quarter notes per minute, and each measure is 23969/7021 seconds, how many quarter notes is this? At 126 per minute, each quarter note lasts precisely 60/126 seconds, which simplifies to 10/21 seconds. Now if we divide 23969/7021 by 60/126, we get 3020094/421260 quarter notes. This simplifies to 71907/10030 quarter notes. Dividing 71907/10030 by 4 gives us 71907/40120. Even the regular Strong One isn't _exactly_ 15/8. It's something like 14.88/8.

5:07 I literally GAGGED when i seen that

The heartbeats being handled in 4/4 quarter notes at different tempos makes sense, since it makes it easier to program in the timings for the rhythm based hits. If you are allowed to be off by 1/16 of a beat, then it makes sense why it's harder to hit them on the fast bits.

Great video! what might actually be going on is that the GBA quantizes the BPM differently (probably only taking integers) and when converted to actual BPM are not an integer value, but something in between. so it might have been written as described in the video but converting it to the GBA mightve turned it into something like actually 126.953 BPM [this is all speculation and extrapolition from how it would work on a SNES]

I've experienced the effects of slowed down old VGM music cuz some sonic tracks have a funky tempo like 130.3 or whatever