Zelda fans have built everything from computers to industrial-strength Korok barbecue machines using Tears of the Kingdom’s Zonai devices, and the latest innovation is a music machine arranged to play “Corridors of Time” from the SNES classic Chrono Trigger. Twitter user bran8bit posted a set of videos on Twitter showing the devices in action, and while it took four different setups and some creative arranging, the end result sounds almost identical to Yasunori Mitsuda’s classic SNES song.
Central to these and other musical efforts in Tears of the Kingdom is the stake device, a long piece of Zonaite that you can embed in the ground up to the top. Some dedicated builders discovered that if you aim a Zonai beam emitter at these stakes, they emit sounds at differing pitches depending on how deeply embedded the stakes are in the ground.
sorry zelda I was too busy making an arrangement of Corridors of Time from Chrono Trigger pic.twitter.com/TJVNMRp8oq
— bran 🔜 AX (@bran8bit) June 29, 2023
Bran8bit built several devices to make this work. The one playing the melody is a single beam emitter attached to a wheel device, which itself is on a stake attached to a wagon wheel that’s on one looks like maybe a stabilizer or a small wheel. A similar setup is on the other side for balance, and in front of the emitter is a row of 16 stakes arranged in a repeating pattern.
The second device is similar, but the stake setup is more complicated. Bran alternates between different heights and even verticality depending on which part of the track he’s at. The third setup uses a few stakes and what looks like light devices, and the fourth is even more clever. Bran put a large wheel on a spoke and attached some stakes, cooking pots, and poles in positions where they’d bump against bundles of wood placed at different heights to create a muffled thwump sound.
For the percussion, they used the sound of Link running and jumping on stone pavement.
The whole thing is incredibly clever and creative and must have taken hours of building and testing to get it just right, and the end result is impressively accurate compared to the original piece from nearly 30 years ago.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
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