Undertale OST | Toby Fox

(Hey, you! Play the music while you read!)

Listen to the cogs.

I am not the first person to be totally captivated by Undertale’s (a video game from 2015) soundtrack. But boy, am I captivated still…

I’ve really had my views adjusted lately on determining the quality of music: mostly in that I don’t really care about the stigma of its origins anymore. If it’s good, it’s good. And, at least for me, video game music is one of those last vestiges of my own thoughts shifting in realizing, “Hey, this stuff is pretty valuable, too!”

I can name a ton of soundtracks / scores from recent video games that really moved me enough to notice the music more than some background element: Journey, The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, Dark Souls…. The music of all of these games—and plenty others—meant so much more to me than an 8-bit loop to an arcade game, and yet that’s sort of how I caught myself listening to and thinking about them. So, go figure that a mock 8-bit soundtrack would be what eventually caught my eye enough to snap me out of it.

There’s so much to say (most of it already covered at least a billion times) about Undertale and its soundtrack. The undeniable connection one hears when the composer and the game developer are the same person. The cyclical coherence and practically textbook examples of thematic development. The motivic world building for each character is on par with a Wagner opera (but probably a little more fun?). And, gosh, the music is just good.

My big take away from this soundtrack is really realizing what can be stripped away from a composition and still make for good art. Especially as I float the idea of resubmitting graduate school applications for a composition degree, and sit around thinking about timbral identities and tuning systems and polyrhythms…you just can’t help but look at something like Undertale that succeeds despite lacking nearly all of those ingredients and say: Well, what am I wasting my time for, then?

Most of the tracks (which I hope you’re playing as you read) feature little more than typical 8-bit sounding instruments and drum-pad-type percussion. The harmonic development is creative and exploratory, but never complicated or beyond common occurrence. So much of what I have been taught to value in music is missing. There is no brilliance really present in any individual track. Yet, I love it. I put it on in the car and relive the feelings I felt when I first heard them. I beat the game a week ago and I’m already nostalgic!

In line with Undertale’s own message as a complete whole and story: what I’m realizing is that the one thing that’s never sacrificed here is its humanity. It’s honest, it’s vulnerable, it’s real. It’s an expression concerned with truth and less with showing off.

And, as embarrassing as something like this is, that’s exactly what I struggle with the most in my own music making. In my compositions, in my performing and practicing, even in my teaching. I look at vocal lines I’ve written to text that’s clinical and “correct” but doesn’t actually say anything. I listen back to my old recitals and even record my practice sessions now and say who replaced my playing with MIDI? And I sit and look at my students on my screen and have so many things I want to tell them and share with them and suddenly the words to do so feel like an old poem I had to memorize in high school that I could hardly recite now even if I really focused. Simplicity is beautiful and elegant. But nobody said it was easy.

I’ve taken some time to go back and listen to a whole lot of “unrefined” music from my past. My own first compositions and those of my friends or colleagues. Pieces that I saw tons of room for improvement in at the time, and probably had the gusto to label exactly what would have “made it better.” And sure, I still hear those things. I realize everyone would probably agree that the inner-voice leading could have been a bit smoother, or that the form could have been a bit more coherent.

But, do you know what else I hear, and hear with a sense of infinite admiration and jealousy? I hear the person who wrote it. I hear them sitting down at their computer and exactly what they were thinking and feeling with each note or chord or phrase. I can engage with this little doomed NoteFlight tune by hearing and cherishing something about it only evident to those who really know where it came from. I can hear the cogs turning; and I wish like hell my own music still had that, too.

Toby Fox is an amateur composer, but he is not amateurish. His soundtrack here is simple, but elegant…as is much of the game itself. The music is polished and well-crafted. But, if you listen closely, you can hear the cogs.

It is the most beautiful sound in the world.