Games, Phoney Folk, and a Singing Dog

Just a quick disclaimer: the tune featured in the above video is from a video game soundtrack, and like many video game tunes it is designed to loop forever until a specific change happens within the game to trigger a cut-off or fade-out. In other words, you do not need to play the whole 10-minute video to hear the whole tune; the whole form, including the intro which does not repeat, plays in just the first 52 seconds.

This tune is entitled K. K. Condor is one of my favorite tunes from the soundtrack of the video game Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It is performed by the fictional character K. K. Slider, originally in the game Animal Crossing. It is influenced by South American First Nation music, specifically the tune Song of the Condor, which can be downloaded or otherwise purchased from Smithsonian Folkways from the page linked to. This influence is evident in the similarities of instrumentation and form; the forms of the two pieces are similar, with sections featuring whistling (K. K. Condor) or a high-pitched flute (Song of the Condor), though in the original these sections would alternate with ones featuring a chordophone sounding parallel thirds whereas in K. K. Condor these sections instead feature the vocables used by K. K. Slider in his many songs. Both pieces feature accompaniment on a strummed chordophone with similar rhythmic patterns, though Song of the Condor also features what sounds to me like one or more membranophones, or drums.

In addition to the structures of the two pieces bearing similarities, the tuning of K. K. Slider's whistling is used in an interesting way. As in some other video game tunes I've heard in my many years of gaming, most of the parts in K. K. Condor are very well in-tune (the guitar and vocables), but at least one part is purposefully out-of-tune (the whistling). This was definitely intended, as the digital nature of most video games makes the pitch content very easy to control and make consistent, and K. K. Condor's whistling in this tune and others is consistently out-of-tune. This suggests to me intent by the composer to fit the whistling to K. K. Slider's character; he is basically a singer-songwriter or solo folk musician, self-accompanied on acoustic guitar, and therefore is likely to be self-taught or lacking formal training as reflected by his whistling intonation being poor.

This piece is a great example of what video game soundtracks often are: pieces of music in pre-established styles or fusions of said styles. I like to think that my experience gaming since kindergarten has left me more exposed and open to a wide variety of musical styles than I otherwise would have been, even if tunes like K. K. Condor are not the most authentic settings of those styles.