Critical Hit
(Image credit: Future)
Welcome to Critical Hit, where Mollie (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle. This week I’m that “someone else”, and I’m here to talk your ear off about time signatures!
So I’ve recently given in and decided I won’t be waiting for Deltarune’s final chapter before I played it all in one go—too many of my mates were talking about it, so I sat my butt down to get ahead of the invariable, accidental spoilers and chew through chapters one to five.
You don’t need me to tell you that Toby Fox, developer of Deltarune (and Undertale preceding it) is an excellent composer. The dude made Megalovania, which has somehow survived being piledrivered into memedom, even by the Pope of all people, and still, inevitably, slaps. But the rest of his discography is flooded with bangers. The man can work a leitmotif, lemme tell ya.
Deltarune is no different, though for this Soundtrack Sunday, I want to focus heavily on one song from it: The Third Sanctuary, because this song might be one of my favourite tunes in a videogame ever. I cannot stop listening to this thing, even if it’s a nightmarish affront to rhythm.
Spoilers for Chapter 4, if you’ve not played it yet.
The Third Sanctuary plays in Chapter 4 during the recreation of the church dark world, spawned from the hands of your good time pal and occasional chalk-eating high school dinosaur friend (I promise you this makes perfect sense if you play the game) Susie.
This attempt at recreation is somewhat flawed—see, a dark world in Deltarune is a reflection of the objects around it, who turn into its inhabitants, but it’s also a reflection of the person who created it. Susie is uncertain and conflicted for so many reasons I could write a whole other article on them.
An uncertain, mysterious prophecy weighing overhead that Susie has sworn to defy. A realisation that her new mentor figure died years ago, his ashes scattered over a hammer in the next room over. The dark world she creates is a mirror to the one the chapter primarily takes place in, reflecting this—and The Third Sanctuary represents this fragile ground by, well, just give it a listen.
Even if you don’t know anything about how music is constructed, you can sense the trepidation and strangeness in it—the starting, the stopping. The next bar of the song starts just a half-heartbeat before (or after) you think it’s gonna.
That’s due to its use of unusual time signatures, which I’ll try my best to explain. A time signature is a representation of rhythm in a song, the most ubiquitous form being 4/4, four beats in each bar. The second (bottom) number represents what kind of beats they are, also known as the note value, and the first (top) number represents how many of them are in a bar.
Britney Spear’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” is a good 4/4 song to get your brain around the concept—sing the titular line to yourself while counting to four, and you’ll feel the rhythm: Hit(1) me Ba(2)-by One(3) more time(4)!
Another time signature you might be familiar with is 3/4 time, where there are three beats in a bar—this is what most waltzes are constructed out of (bum-BAH-BAH, bum-BAH-BAH). There’s also 5/4, which is most famously associated with the Mission Impossible theme tune.
I won’t go too far into the second number, but to keep it very simple: It’s always 2, 4, 8, or 16—2 is a half-note, 4 is a quarter-note, and so on. These can be interchangeable, for instance, you could write a 3/4 song as a 3/8 song, if you wanted—you’d just have to adjust the length of the notes accordingly, but because the number of beats in a bar isn’t changing, they can be functionally identical-sounding.
So, what time signature does The Third Sanctuary use? Yes. Yes is the answer.
The Third Sanctuary starts out in 9/4 time, then jolts to 11/8 time with a random 4/8 thrown in there (because why not), interludes with 5/4, back to 11/8, jumpscares you with two bars of 12/8, back to 5/4 for a bit, and then the finale: A dance between 12/8 and 11/8, alternating, because who needs to be able to keep track of anything.
You can use an excellent visualiser, created by YouTuber 17a and embedded above, to keep track—and while this might seem like utter madness, Toby Fox isn’t just goofing off here and attempting to make drum cover artists have a heart attack, he’s using it to tell a story.
This chapter’s been out for a while now, so I am by no means the only person to come up with this analysis. But The Third Sanctuary’s time signatures of 12/8 and 11/8 don’t just clash with each other, they slowly come together over the course of the song, as though comforting each other in the darkness of Chapter 4—quite fittingly, finding each other in the dark.
The melodies present in those final bars swell and grow hopeful, despite the uncertain, stuttering strangeness of the time signatures they’re trapped in. More importantly, the main melody bridges the gap between those time signatures and flows over them in a determined way, just like Susie herself after discovering the grim truth of a (yet-to-be-revealed) prophecy.
The Third Sanctuary is incredible not just because it sounds good in spite of its time signatures, but because through them it tells the story of the entire chapter. When a friend of mine showed their musician pal the track, their analysis pretty much accurately summed up the major themes of the story despite the fact they’d never played it.
And then there’s the covers and the fan songs that have spun out of it. For the former, I’d like to share this lovely rendition by the Live Videogame Orchestra—something about hearing actual, breathing musicians manage to get a handle on the track is kinda magical.
But there’s also fan-inspired renditions. The hilariously-named 5ndth Sanctuary by IamDaDogeOfDaFuture is one of my favourites, having a wild run from 11/8, up to 15/8, up to 29/8—and still somehow managing to tickle my brain in a pleasing way. Here’s the song impossibly mashed into 4/4. Here’s the song in 5/4. People are playing with time and it’s awesome.
Toby Fox has successfully created his own little genre-pod of Math Rock enthusiasts in Deltarune’s fanbase, and I couldn’t be more delighted. The Third Sanctuary is an utter mess, it’s a drummer’s nightmare, and it’s also one of the most thoughtful moments of storytelling in a videogame, one that’s inspired countless of time-signature mad renditions.
I leave you with 4rd (not a typo) Sanctuary. This actually isn’t a fan-song, it’s a version Toby put in Chapter 5. I’m not analysing it in this article, I’ve got other things to do, but I’d like you to listen to it anyway.
