Spooky Season witches!!!! Am I the only one who gets fall vibes from Joel Miller???
Maybe it’s the flannel…
Maybe it’s because I love fall and I love him…
Maybe it’s maybelline…
Okay I’m done!!
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So this is the project I’ve been helping my sister with for about a week.
After the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailers release with large amounts of saxophone, my sister came up with a theory that the overall saxophone content of music in Nintendo games has increased over time. (In case you are confused about what I mean, here is the TotK trailer)
But what is the best game to analyze for this theory? Preferably one that has many different musical tracks, all easily accessible and with a fairly wide variety of styles over a wide period of time.
Something like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is great for this analysis because it contains 48 tracks released in 2014-2015, and currently has 32 DLC tracks released 2022-2023. It also contains a variety of tracks from the 7 previous Mario Kart games. This allows us to use that to compare saxophone levels over a wide time period while only having to play one game (my sister was doing this as a school presentation so we were on a limited timeline).
To compare saxophone in each course’s sound track, we played all 70 tracks and coded each course following the chart below.
The main reason that “any horns” is a 2 is because there was a bit less saxophone than we anticipated, and also because neither of us are actually that good at identifying when a saxophone is or is not being played. Especially in an ensemble.
After spending a total of 5 hours playing through all 70 tracks, we had gathered all of our data and were able to determine our results.
As you can see, there was a slight saxophone increase from the courses released on 2014-15 to the courses released 2022-23.
As you can see, there is a slight positive linear trend if the cups are placed in release order. The brackets are around the cups released as part of DLC for the Switch version of the game, and with the exception of the Wave 3 courses (Rock cup and Moon cup) generally have higher saxophone ratings.
Boomerang cup had the highest overall saxophone rating. This is not entirely surprising, as all of the courses in this cup were originally remastered or made solely for Nintendo’s Mario Kart Tour mobile app. This means that both Bangkok Rush and Singapore Speedway had music written around the late 2010s or early 2020s. Additionally, the Mario Circuit in this cup was based of the DS version. As the DS had less complex audio options, when Nintendo adapted this track for Tour, they likely took some (saxophone heavy) liberties with the music. This makes this cup not surprising to have the highest saxophone rating.
Relatedly, you can see here the average saxophone breakdown by release game. Tour tracks have one of the highest average saxophone ratings. But while the two other highest categories, GameBoy Advance and GameCube courses are distributed throughout all 70 tracks, the Tour courses are confined solely to the recent DLC courses. This is most likely one of the main things that contributed to the higher saxophone rating for the DLC courses.
In conclusion: the amount of saxophone in Mario Kart track soundtracks has increased over the last 10 years. This may suggest a further upward trend in the amount of saxophone for other Nintendo franchises.
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