Learning Game Melodies by Ear, Starting With Ocarina Songs

A reader wrote to me after a piece on game soundtracks and asked something I hear often in different words: "I can hum the Zelda songs perfectly, but when I sit at a keyboard I cannot find a single note. Is my ear just bad?" Her ear was fine. She had been trying to learn by ear the way most people try, by picking a long, beloved theme and hunting for it note by note until frustration won.

When I was a boy, the Persian classical repertoire in our house was taught the old way, by listening and repeating, phrase by phrase, long before anyone opened a book of notation. The lesson I took from that, and from the game music on my headphones, is that learning by ear is not a gift. It is a skill that starts with short melodies drawn from very few notes. And one of the best collections of short, few-note melodies ever written sits inside a 1998 Nintendo 64 game.

Why the ocarina songs are the perfect first exercise

In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the player learns a dozen songs on an in game ocarina, each played with the controller's A button and four C buttons. That means every song in the game is built from only five pitches. In the game's tuning they correspond to D, F, A, B and the D an octave higher: A plays the low D, C-down plays F, C-right plays A, C-left plays B, and C-up plays the high D.

Koji Kondo, the composer, worked under a strict limit and made it sound effortless. Most of the songs are three notes repeated with a short tail, so you can hold an entire song in your head at once. That matters, because the main reason people fail at learning by ear is memory, not hearing. If you cannot remember the tune while you search for it, every wrong note pushes the right one out of your head.

There is a second gift here. Because millions of people played the game, the button sequences are widely known, so you can check your answer without reading notation. You hear the song, work out the notes, then compare against the buttons.

Five songs and what each one trains

I suggest working through these in order. Each one introduces one new interval, the distance between two notes, which is the thing your ear is really learning to recognise.

Each of these phrases repeats, usually with a short ending added. Learn the first phrase only. When you can play it without thinking, the rest of the song tends to follow within minutes.

Song of Storms is the hardest of the five because of the jump from F to the high D, a leap of a major sixth. Most people undershoot it on the first attempt and land on B or A. That is useful to notice. Your ear knew the note was high; your hands just did not trust it.

A method, not a talent

The approach that works for almost everyone I have taught, including the reader who wrote to me, goes like this. First, sing or hum the phrase out loud. Not in your head, out loud, because singing reveals whether you actually know the shape. Second, decide only the direction of each note: up, down, or the same. Write it as arrows if that helps. Third, find the first note on your instrument by trial, and then use the arrows to search only in the right direction.

Any instrument works. A cheap keyboard is easiest, but a free piano app on a phone is enough to start. If you play guitar, the five notes sit comfortably on the D and G strings.

The reader sent me a short recording three weeks later. She had all five songs and had started on the Tetris theme, which is the Russian folk song Korobeiniki, and a far bigger step. That was faster progress than I expected, and I should be clear that she practised most evenings. I have also seen people take two months to get through the same five songs, and they ended up just as capable.

Learning by ear begins with a melody short enough to remember while you search for it.

The advice I would ignore

Many guides tell beginners to start ear training with interval apps, drilling "perfect fourth" and "minor sixth" on random notes until they can name them. Those apps are useful later. As a starting point, I think they put people off, because a random interval has no meaning and no memory attached. A leap you already know from Song of Storms is an interval you have heard hundreds of times and can recall on demand. Learn the songs first. Then, if you want names, attach the names to sounds you already own.

The same idea runs through how game composers use recurring themes, which I wrote about in how leitmotifs track a character's hidden story: a melody that comes back is a melody you learn without trying.

Where to go after the ocarina

Once these five feel easy, choose game melodies that are short, slow and repetitive, and that stay within about an octave. The first phrase of the Tetris theme, which moves mostly by step, and the opening of Undertale's "Fallen Down" are both good second steps. Leave the sweeping orchestral themes for later; they are wonderful to hear and miserable to learn first. If you are still choosing an instrument, Kwabena's piece on how learning an instrument deepens your love of game scores is a gentle place to start.

Your first ten minutes

Tonight, hum Saria's Song out loud three times. Then open a piano app, find F, and play the first phrase using only the arrows you heard: up, up. Check it against the buttons in the table. If it matches, you have learned your first melody by ear, and the other four are waiting. More notes on the basics live in our music basics section.