Almost no one aside from Lily has ever heard the ending theme I wrote for Song of Homunculus back in 2019. Despite this, Lily often says that it’s one of her favorites of my pieces. “Like one of the great works of Beethoven” she just claimed, “a great work of the soul,” etc., she went on. Now you can come to your own conclusions—here it is released to the public at last:
In preparation for posting this, I thought of writing a little variation on it to include in this post (and maybe ultimately in Song of Homunculus). To prepare, I did some timbral/spectra analysis of the track “Gift” from the 1995 Quintet/Enix SNES action RPG Terranigma, which was one of my points of inspiration for the track above:
I made this video using an audio visualizer program that I started working on in March of last year (2025), which I should probably do a whole post about on its own. It can do various things, but here I’ve set it up to provide a close view of the attack of each note, since I wanted to get a clearer understanding of where the pleasing timbre of this particular “music box” voice comes from.
These are my conclusions, based on both listening and looking at the visualization:
The sound starts with a brief broad-spectrum click, about 80 ms in length, which is hard lowpass-filtered to within about 2 ¼ oct of the fundamental pitch. The click has a slightly harmonic spectrum with regards to the fundamental despite its overall noisy character, due to the presence of the fundamental and its first couple overtones within the click. There is a considerable amount of sonic energy concentrated in a band spanning 1/6 oct of the fundamental on either side and at a similar amplitude. Its spectrum widens slightly at the outset, and narrows again towards the end of the initial attack.
After this, the sound has a long decay which is fairly logarithmic in amplitude and lasts around 1–2 s. The spectra is strongly harmonic with relation to the fundamental and also quite band-limited, mostly just featuring the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd harmonics. The noise of the click decays away almost instantaneously as this section begins.
There is also a slapback delay of around 110 ms in period, turned down to around ½ the amplitude of the source.
I can use information like this to guide synthesizer designs, and I actually have a good idea I think based on this for a synth along these lines using the “rim shot” portion of a bodhrán-like synth I wrote in 2024 for the click and a “hammered bass” FM synth I wrote using my FM synth library nonagon for the long harmonic tail. I’ll give that a try very soon…it’s getting late for me and I want to put a post up before I get too tired. :P
In any case, I was going to set up a synth like that and then try using it for the variation. I ended up doing something a bit different today instead for it, although I plan to try using a synthesizer like the above to render the MIDI data of what I wrote today just to see how that comes out.
While I was looking over that video, I just couldn’t resist doing a (classical notation) transcription of the piece, and then of course that turned into my own little arrangement of it:
I made this using the free notation editor MuseScore 4.7.1. The samples (pre reverb and stuff) come from a soundfont I have on my computer called “Touhou.sf2” that I seem to have acquired from somewhere in March 2021 and presumably has something to do with Touhou; it just had the right-sounding sorts of samples for the texture I wanted to create. As the video indicates, this is using its “Music Box” and “Dulcimer” voices from Bank 0. I’m including both the MuseScore project file and the soundfont in the download.
I’ve long thought it impressive how well Kobayashi manages to make use of the 19 s that this piece lasts for. You can easily see a few of the techniques she uses to pack musical interest into that tiny space: triplets in the m. 3 melody that create a 3:2 polyrhythm with the bass, two slurred 32nd notes rolling up to the 3rd beat of m. 4 (which I think make a lovely “knocking” sound, very nice use of the timbre), a modulation into the dominant key at the halfway point, and a slight ritardando over the last few measures enhancing the expression.
Despite the touches of syncopation, the piece is mostly half notes and quarter notes, with an original tempo of 120 bpm (I took it down a little to 118 in my version to let the slightly increased textural complexity of my arrangement breathe some). The bass keeps a steady quarter-note beat throughout, not stopping until beat 3 of the second-to-last measure. The melody climaxes on beat 2 of the last measure, just before the final note which it descends to by step, although the climax itself is approached by a minor-3rd-sized leap.
Because we stay somewhat in the dominant key after the modulation to Bb Maj instead of returning definitively to the starting key of Eb Maj, we get a sense of the music “wandering off into the heavens”, in a way that is perhaps a bit reminiscent of Mahler. Nevertheless, the final measure gives a nod to the starting key by climaxing on its tonic of Eb, although it comes to rest after that a minor 7th away on D which more reinforces the overall Bb Maj character (being its major 3rd)—a bit like glancing back for a moment before continuing on ever higher.
I was pleased enough with the sound of that arrangement that I decided to try doing a variation of “music box” along similar lines within MuseScore. This is the result:
Sorry the video cuts off the top part of the last couple measures; it’s a regrettable quirk of MuseScore currently.
Even if I ultimately decide to use my own synths for this instead of these samples, I feel like this has a nice sound as it is. I have a sense that it would work really nicely as “buildup” music just before a big boss fight, like during the preceeding dialog exchange—maybe the final boss fight in Song of Homunculus (that would be kind of extra perfect since you would hear “music box” just after the fight was over, so it would presage that).
The download includes: