Sound Analysis in Animal Crossing: New Horizon
How Audio Impact Players’ Sense of Immersion:
Sound Analysis in Animal Crossing: New Horizon
Last year, a game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released. According to Famitsu, a line of Japanese video game entertainment magazines, in the first three days after release, the game sold 1.88 million copies in Japan, which set a record for the most sales in the first week in the history of the Nintendo Switch platform. Till the end of March 2021, Animal Crossing has successfully sold 32.63 million copies worldwide, making it the second best-selling game on Nintendo Switch. Although its success has been partially attributed to its release amid global stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest reason for Animal Crossing to succeed is the well-designed game itself. Animal Crossing: New Horizon creates a vivid world and a group of humanoid NPCs. In the game, players can start a second life, a leisurely and self-sufficient idyllic life that most people can’t experience in the real world.
Time in the Animal Crossing world is synchronized with real-time and the key development points are measured in days. For example, the construction of a house starts today will finish tomorrow. Since it’s a low-paced and immersive social simulation, the number of music tracks must be huge. Although the official OST (original soundtrack) has not been released yet, around 140 tracks have been concluded by players. The music tracks in Animal Crossing can be divided into five categories: theme background music, scene music, building and area music (such as homes, museums, etc.), event and activity music, and music played by K.K. Slider. In this paper, I will mainly focus on the analysis of the first three types of music tracks and how those music tracks impact players’ sense of immersion in RPG games.
The original composer of the first version of Animal Crossing was Kazumi Totaka, a Japanese video game composer and sound director. His song has been confirmed in tons of Nintendo games, including Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Kart8, Pikmin2, etc. Interestingly, the NPC K.K. Slider’s name seems to come from Totaka. In the game, K.K Slider is named Totakeke in the Japanese version, which can be derived from how Totaka’s name is pronounced in Japanese. Totaka laid the stylistic foundation for the Animal Crossing series and served as the Sound Director of Animal Crossing: New Horizon, directing the Nintendo Sound Team (which includes five composers and four sound engineers).
Background music is one the most significant part of video games. According to Zhang and Fu (2015), “Participants with background music got significant higher scores from questionnaire, performed worse in after-game tsk and expressed more serious time distortion than those participants without hearing background music”. Good background music can improve players' immersion, which is an indispensable part of every successful video game.
The time when the sun rises and sets in Animal Crossing: New Horizon depends on what season it is. Similar to the real world, the day is longer in summer and shorter in winter. For this paper, I played Animal Crossing: New Horizon for 15 minutes from 7:50 p.m.to 8:05 p.m. The reason for me to choose this time period is in the game world, the sun sets at around 8:00 p.m. in the Northern Hemisphere in summer.
Conforming to Smith Jennifer (2020), “To involve the player in these complex environments, the game world must effectively ‘build’ itself through a combination of gameplay, visuals, and soundscape. An adaptive soundscape can build this organic game world by engaging with the player’s actions, and the agency of their playable character”. Animal Crossing: New Horizon is a pretty good example of what an adaptive soundscape should be.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon has an extensive time-decide music series. The theme music in Animal Crossing is divided into 24 versions – each hour has unique theme music – and each theme music has three versions, which are sunny, rainy, and snowy. In other words, the background music changes in different hours and different weather, which is a specific variety adaptive nondiegetic. According to Karen Collins (2008), adaptive non-diegetic sounds is “sound event that occurs in reaction to gameplay, are outside the diegesis, and are not affected by the player’s direct movements”. In general, these music tracks have several characteristics. A similar melody occurs repeatedly in different music tracks and the instruments are very uniform and concise, which sounds like those music tracks are all played by the same band. The most common instruments used in Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s music tracks are acoustic guitar and double bass. Since the game itself adhere to the concept that “maintaining immersion and not disturbing the player”, producers used only a small number of instruments when producing the music, and the speed is mainly slow.
Open the game and you can hear the theme song called “Welcome Horizon”. It is played by trumpet and ukulele. This music basically shows the musical tone of the whole game: mainly played by unplugged musical instruments, slow pace, concise instruments, and create a feeling of loveliness and warmth. As mentioned above, the music tracks change in different weather. The instruments used in different weather are different as well. As the time of the day changes, there will also be some signature music, such as "country folk" music at dusk. The overall music in mixing and loudness is also very smooth controlled.
Let’s go back to the music track at 7 p.m. The melody is a major key and the musical texture is monophonic, which means it has only one pitch. The instruments used in this track I can detect include the electric bass, drum set, and electric guitar. For the most part, electric bass holds the melody and the drum set holds the harmony. In the meanwhile, the harmonies appear to be closely aligned with the melody throughout the whole track. Although the track keeps looping, players will not feel weary or bored because the music is gentle but rhythmic and doesn’t really detract from your game experience.
Because the game takes place on a remote island, there will be an island, forest, sea breeze, and other environmental sounds throughout the game for the player to hear. In contrast to other games, there are no switches or buttons to turn off sounds, so you can't adjust the sorting volume or switch off sound effects and music on your own. In fact, this kind of design concept has a long history in the game industry. Producers don't separate music and sound effects during the gameplay for players. Maps, time music, and environmental sounds are the whole experience that the game brings to players, and we don't want to break the harmony of a whole. This is seen in in-game audio design as an overall sound design that breaks the boundaries of sound classification.
During the 15 minutes gameplay, I played most of the features in the game to interact with as many sound effects as possible. For example, shopping in the shop, fishing and catching bugs, visiting museums, walking on roads of different materials, flying to friend’s island by Do-Do airline, walking on the beach, swimming in the sea, cutting down and shaking trees, picking flowers, planting and watering trees and flowers, making tools and so on. Most of the things in Animal Crossing: New Horizon can be interacted with, and they all have their own sound effects.
Certainly, there are also different kinds of sound effects. For instance, walking into a shop should have an interactive nondiegetic sound. As stated by Karen Collins (2008), the interactive non-diegetic sound is “sound events that occur in reaction to gameplay, are outside the diegesis, and can react to the player directly”, which is slightly different from adaptive nondiegetic sounds. Some sound effects like footsteps and cutting down trees are interactive diegetic sounds, which are sounds “occur in the character’s space and the player’s character can directly interact with them” (Collins, 2008).
Although Animal Crossing: New Horizon is presented in a virtual cartoon style, it brings a deep sense of immersion to players and greatly simulates a real, natural, and warm world. The sound effect is the most essential factor. When you walk on the path, your footsteps can be heard clearly. Walking on different textures of the path have different sound effects: walking on the flagstone, the footsteps are very clear; walking on the beach, the footsteps become rustling; walking on the wooden floor, the footsteps sound like a drum. The sound of footsteps depends on whether the character is wearing sandals, pumps, sneakers, or barefoot as well. Even when you go inside a house, the room is not completely silent. Soft, calm, and reassuring while noise is filled everywhere in the game. The noise of air conditioning, heating, fans, and televisions, makes players forget that they are in the world of a game. You can stop and listen to environmental sounds at any time in the game. These never-ending sound effects always make people feel that they live in nature.
Interacting with furniture will trigger sound effects, too. Using speakers as an example, there are many kinds of speakers and radios in Animal Crossing: New Horizon such as high-end stereo, bamboo speaker, portable record player, cute music player, etc. All this furniture is able to play music. Surprisingly, these broadcasts simulate the broadcast effect in the real world: when you are facing the speaker, you will hear more high-pitched sounds and when you are facing the back of the speaker, you will hear more low-pitched sounds. Moreover, the sound quality of different speakers is also different.
In addition to the music I mentioned above, there are many other kinds of music tracks in Animal Crossing: New Horizon such as music when a mission is completed, Do-Do airport and flight music, holiday music such as Christmas and New Year’s Day. Because it’s a life simulation game and doesn’t contain elements like fighting, PK, or competitions, the overall music trend is peaceful and soothing. The only one that is a little bit speedy is the sound effect when you are chased by the swarm. Besides, all actions and elements in the UI have their own sound effects. For example, in the 'My Design' DIY feature, movements and taps in the design panel have a specific tone of the sound. The thickness of the brush affects the tone of the sound produced by the painting: the bigger the brush, the lower the sound. When the player is drawing a straight line, the pitch gets higher and higher as the line gets longer and longer. Even though the sound effects of the UI often don't draw players’ attention, but it's the small details that keep people engaged.
It is often said that the best design is the design that is invisible. The sound itself is invisible. It is the music and sound effects in the game that improve players’ sense of immersion and engagement. That’s why Animal Crossing: New Horizon become so popular worldwide.
References
Collins, K. (2008). Game sound: An introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design. The MIT Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7909.001.0001
Jennifer, S. (2020). Worldbuilding Voices in the Soundscapes of Role Playing Video Games. [Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/35389/
Kazumi Totaka. (2021, May 16). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazumi_Totaka#Totaka's_Song
Zhang J., Fu, X. (2015). The influence of background music of video games on immersion. Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy 5(4). doi: 10.4172/2161-0487.1000191
