Like a Sleigh Bell in the Wind

The Sound of Winter

It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and as of the publishing of this essay, it’s the Twelfth Day of Christmas. There’s a crispness to the air, the sky is almost always overcast, and many places are covered in snow or ice. Depending on where you are, going out is like walking in a winter wonderland. It’s a beautiful sight. In the lane, snow is glistening. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?

If you don’t hear sleigh bells around the holidays and the rest of winter, you really must not be listening. They’re everywhere. You especially can’t escape sleigh bells around Christmastime. Sleigh bells have been fixtures of wintry soundscapes for centuries. While no extensive history of sleigh bells has yet been published, the concept of sleigh bells has been attached to winter weather and Yuletide since humans began fixing bells to horses in the winter months. Writing on the history of bells in general in 1928, Satis N. Coleman offers a brief description of sleigh bells and their wintry connotations:

Sleigh bells fastened upon the horses that draw sleighs are still to be heard in all cold climates. Traveling over soft snow is so noiseless that sleigh bells are a necessary safeguard to prevent collisions. The jingle of sleigh bells is a characteristic sound in nearly all towns of Russia during the winter.1

The silence of snowy roads proved sufficiently dangerous that, in the early nineteenth century, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enshrined into law that “No person shall travel on a way with a sleigh or sled drawn by a horse, unless there are at least three bells attached to some part of the harness.”2

Sleigh bells had become a fixture of wintry landscapes by at least the mid-19th century when James Lord Pierpont composed “The One Horse Open Sleigh” (1857), now commonly known as “Jingle Bells.” While its original purpose is disputed,3 “Jingle Bells” has become a perennial Christmas favorite.

One of the earliest appearances of sleigh bells in the Classical repertoire can be heard in Leopold Mozart’s divertimento Die musikalische Schlittenfahrt (The Musical Sleigh Ride) \[1755\]. Among the instrumentation, Leopold Mozart called for five tuned sleigh bells and two whips, the sounds of which were meant to evoke the actual sounds of a sleigh ride. Following his father, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would go on to feature a set of tuned sleigh bells in his Three German Dances (1791), in trio and coda sections nicknamed “Die Schlittenfahrt” (“The Sleigh Ride”). In both of these Schlittenfahrten, the Mozartian sleigh bells maintain a steady pulse reflective of a horse’s trotting pace.

This metronomic, sleigh ride-evoking role for sleigh bells in classical repertoire extends well beyond the flourishing of the Mozarts. In line with Coleman’s characterization of Russian towns, Sergei Prokofiev utilized sleigh bells heavily in the “Troika” scene from the Soviet film Lieutenant Kijé (1934), mapping a drunken sleigh ride to the jingles of sleigh bells in his score. Leroy Anderon’s Sleigh Ride (1948) is likely the most popular instance of sleigh bells in classical literature and has become a staple of the American Christmas season. Through all of these examples, the use of sleigh bells has become a compositional shortcut for evoking not just sleigh rides, but winter festivities by extension.

Audiovisual media have long used sleigh bells to signify the holidays and winter.4 This is particularly evident in prominent films scored by John Williams including Home Alone (1990) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). Video game soundtracks in particular are well known for including sleigh bells to add festive flair to snowbound levels and worlds.

In a 2022 Music Theory Online article, Megan Lavengood and Evan Williams used informatic methods to trace common musical features associated with snowy video game areas.5 They discuss five “core characteristics” including heavy reverb, arpeggiated textures, metallic percussion (including sleigh bells), plucked/pizzicato strings, and a lack of membranophones (that is, most drums).6 They also look into the intersections of these elements with Christmas music, popular music of the 1980s, and the waltz as further signifiers of wintry game locales.7 While Lavengood and Williams define winter as a musical topic and demonstrate how video games can serve as a model for further topical explorations, their essay does not address how winter music operates holistically across aesthetics and gameplay.

In this essay, I offer a different framework for understanding the winter topic in video games by dividing winter music into two broad categories: Frigid Music, which relates to wintry environments and conditions, and Festive Music, which relates to winter holidays and celebrations. The ways in which Frigid and Festive Music are employed in games provide players with ludic signals that shape strategy and expectations, while also revealing a game’s broader aesthetic and experiential goals.

Frigid Music

Frigid Music places the environmental conditions of winter in the foreground; there is little, if any warmth embedded in Frigid Music. The sound of Frigid Music is characterized by slow (or unmoving) harmonies, sparse textures, piercing melodies, and heavy reverb. A lack of harmonic and rhythmic propulsion in Frigid Music is symbolic of icy stasis. The sparseness and slow-movingness of Frigid Music allows environmental sound effects—such as wind gusts and crunching footsteps—to take equal importance with the background music. The naturalistic sounds of wind and snow further elicit wintry feelings.

The music that accompanies the snowy Phendrana Drifts of Metroid Prime (2002) is a prime (pun intended) example of this kind of Frigid Music. The music opens with an electronic drone that immediately establishes a sense of frozen stasis and isolation. A piano enters shortly after, echoing arpeggiations—one of Lavengood and Williams’s quintessential aspects of winter music—in its upper registers. Synthesized tones enter intermittently, dissipating almost as soon as they sound like snowflakes melting as they land on a river. In the case of the Phendrana Drifts, Frigid Music speaks to both harsh and beautiful aspects of wintry environments by simultaneously eliciting isolation and the elegance of snow.

Harsh Frigid Music

In its harshest form, Frigid Music depicts winter as an active threat, scoring video game settings in which freezing conditions pose a threat to the player avatar. While the music of the Phendrana Drifts kept room for the harshness of winter, it does not really communicate a sense that the location is a difficult place to exist or traverse. After all, Samus, the bounty-hunting protagonist of the Metroid series (1986–), has a well-insulated spacesuit, so winter weather does not bother her.

Harsh Frigid Music often accompanies scenarios of Character vs. Nature, where the player is pitted against subzero conditions. This game design approach has become a staple of recent games in the Legend of Zelda series (1986–) from Breath of the Wild (2017) to Echoes of Wisdom (2024). The former was the first game in the series to introduce dynamic weather conditions for players to adapt to temperature, requiring them to put on suitable clothing or concocting special potions. Trekking through Breath of the Wild’s frozen landscapes without a warm doublet or Spicy Elixir results in Link steadily losing health to the cold.

The game’s background music likewise adapts to the climate. In Breath of the Wild’s cold climates, like the one shown above, the music is devoid of warmth and reinforces the danger presented by the freezing temperatures.

The music that plays when Link explores cold climates feels incredibly empty, even compared to other sparsely-scored locations in Breath of the Wild. There are only two main groups of instruments to be heard in the track: hand percussion and synthesizers. The hand percussion instruments are generally the first sounds heard when entering a cold area and include shaker, tambourine, and something that sounds like a pair of claves.8 The synthesizers intermittently sound stratospheric cluster chords. Each instrument, however, seems to enter at random, and there is no discernible tonality to ground players as they make their way through areas like the Hebra Mountains or the Mount Hylia. Pairing health depletion with music that offers no rhythmic or harmonic comfort, the game encourages the player to do whatever they can to ensure even the smallest bit of warmth during extended journeys in the cold.

The emptiness of the cue also foregrounds the interaction between environmental sound effects and the pre-composed music. As much as the shaker and synth clusters, Link’s labored steps through deep snow and wind are essential to the sonic architecture of snow-covered regions in Breath of the Wild. It seems, in fact, that the music was written to supplement these two environmental sounds. The timbre of the hand percussion blends with Link’s crunchy footsteps and the synth clusters are tied closely with the sound of wind. In this way, the entire sonic architecture contributes to the harshness Link faces in Hyrule’s snowy areas.

Beautiful Frigid Music

On the other end of the spectrum, Beautiful Frigid Music paints a picture of the endearing aspects of winter. This character of music takes inspiration from works Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Snowflakes” which sonify snowfall and the calm of a landscape blanketed with snow. While Yamamoto and Kyuma’s cue for the Phendrana Drifts differs greatly from anything written by Tchaikovsky,9 its sonification of melting snow nonetheless depicts the sublime beauty of winter weather.

More specifically, Beautiful Frigid Music mimics the kinds of aesthetic marvels discussed in Felix Bernard and Richard Bernhard Smith’s “Winter Wonderland” (1934), namely, the falling of snowflakes, the glistening of snow already on the ground, and the serene stillness of landscapes blanketed by snow. Where Harsh Frigid Music frames these as hazards, Beautiful Frigid Music invites players to stop and smell the snow, as it were.

"Snowy" by Toby Fox

An example of this kind of music is heard in Toby Fox’s self-published Undertale (2015), for which he also composed the soundtrack. Upon leaving the game’s tutorial area, the protagonist Frisk enters the Snowdin Forest (read snowed-in) and Fox’s “Snowy” cue sounds for the first time. Like several examples of winter music examined by Lavengood and Williams, the range of “Snowy” is limited to relatively high pitches played by piano, strings, and piccolo. The piano in particular performs with a dry staccato articulation similar to the sound of pizzicato strings. The entire track is mixed with a heavy reverb reflective of the way in which sound travels across compacted snow.

Festive Music

Festive Music exists in a separate realm from Frigid Music. In a sense, it ignores the natural phenomena associated with winter that Frigid Music seeks to sonify. Sleigh bells might still “sound” like a flurry of snow, but Festive Music idealizes motion, human presence, and social meaning behind snowy spaces and the holidays that land in the winter months. A touchstone example of this kind of music is heard in the Freezeezy Peak level of Banjo-Kazooie (1998). A sleigh bell pulse underpins the entire Freezeezy Peak cue. Lush string choirs, brass choirs, and baritone saxophone lend a sense of timbral warmth. Like many Christmas carols, too, Freezeezy’s bass line maintains a near constant root-fifth motion. All of these elements tie the cue to Christmas music classics that put you in the mood to bake cookies and pass presents around.

Sleigh Ride Music

Like Frigid Music before, Festive Music can be split into its own categories. The first approach to Festive Music is predominantly characterized by the jingling, ring, ting, and tingling of sleigh bells. Discussed briefly in the introduction, video games have long capitalized on the wintry connotations of sleigh bells. Often, game composers may simply add a sleigh bell ostinato to an existing track to make it more wintry. Take, for example, the Frosted Glacier overworld theme from New Super Mario Bros. U (2013). The music that accompanies the snowy levels in the Frosted Glacier area is a near-direct copy of that from the earlier Acorn Plains overworld music, now with sleigh bells added for a three-horsespeed rhythmic propulsion.

Many instances of Sleigh Ride Music take Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride as a compositional model. The music for the Snowball Park level in Super Mario 3D World (2013), for example, borrows many of Sleigh Ride’s characteristic musical ideas for its construction. The first, and most obvious, is a constant sleigh bell pulse that suggests a steady horse trot. Another is heard in the bass line, which follows the same lilting emphasis on beats one and four heard at the tail of Anderson’s introduction to Sleigh Ride. Harmonically, both pieces also lean on a ii⁷–V⁷–I⁷ progression typical of the jazz standards that influenced American Christmas music. The Snowball Park cue may only be 54 seconds long, but it encapsulates so much of what makes Sleigh Ride sound so energetically festive.

Many other examples of Sleigh Ride Music come from racing games like those in the Mario Kart series (1992–). Racetracks like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s (2014, 2017) version of Snow Land in particular use Sleigh Ride Music to accelerate musical and ludic momentum as racers avoid crashing into tobogganing penguins on the way to the finish line.

Hot Cocoa Music.

A final type of Festive Music evokes the feeling of sipping hot cocoa, sitting by a fire, and celebrating the season with others. Hot Cocoa Music borrows heavily from popular American Christmas music, leaning on jazz harmonies, and a vague bittersweetness. Like Sleigh Ride Music, Hot Cocoa Music has a clear major tonality and frequently makes use of sleigh bells, though as timbral ornamentation and not as backbone. Hot Cocoa music generally appears in villages and home interiors—areas safe from harsh conditions and filled with people.

Hot Cocoa Music can be heard in the track that plays during Toy Day celebrations in the Animal Crossing series (2000–). The iteration of the Toy Day music heard in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) particularly exemplifies Hot Cocoa Music through its jazz harmonies, relaxed tempo, and instrumentation (including brass, accordion, and sleigh bells). The coziness of the Toy Day cue prompts players to enjoy the day by bringing gifts to their anthropomorphic neighbors and participating in other low-stakes festivities.

A good portion of Hot Cocoa Music tends to be written in the form of a jazz waltz. While the waltz does not inherently signify holiday cheer in video games,10 it has a long-standing association with winter holidays. From the three prominent waltzes in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (1891) to Frank Sinatra’s “The Christmas Waltz” (1954) and the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Skating” from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), waltzes have become fixtures in the pantheon of Christmas music. Festive video game waltzes rely on an implicit understanding of the intertextuality to affirm their festiveness. This intertext, along with other wintry signifiers, clearly communicates a sense of intimate holiday cheer.

An example of this waltzy Hot Cocoa Music can be heard in “Snowman,” the music that serves as the snow-covered location cue heard in each game of the Mother/EarthBound series (1989–2006). Musical ideas in the “Snowman” iteration heard in EarthBound (1994; known as Mother 2 in Japan) particularly resemble those in the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Skating.” Both tracks rely heavily on modal mixture and favor mostly scalar, running eighth-note melodic passages. And of course, “Snowman” features the sound of sleigh bells.

EarthBound’s soundtrack also includes a non-waltz example of Hot Cocoa Music in the track “Winters White,” which plays in the land of Winters. Like others in the Festive Music category, the track makes heavy use of sleigh bells. The most interesting harmonic feature of “Winters White” is the interplay between the major and minor modes throughout the cue, creating a sense of bittersweetness inherent to many holiday songs since “White Christmas” (1942).11 Additionally, its bright synth timbres and pop-oriented harmonies align it with ‘80s and ‘90s Christmas pop songs, such as Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (1984) and the bridge of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (1994).

Both of EarthBound’s Hot Cocoa examples, however, introduce a form of ludonarrative dissonance. “Snowman” and “Winters White” accompany areas that are demonstrably unsafe and, at times, more difficult than much of the surrounding game. Rather than reinforcing a sense of comfort or security, the warmth of these cues softens the player’s perception of danger. In EarthBound, then, Hot Cocoa Music does not communicate festivity insofar as it reframes the relative danger of Winters through a festive lens.

Frigid and Festive Music as Extensions of Ludic and Aesthetic Goals

Both Frigid and Festive Music play roles beyond signifying winter weather. Music has been used for its ability to evoke winter since Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons concerti (1725) at the very least, so the continuation of wintry music in video games is nothing special.

What is special is how winter music shapes the way in which players interact with game worlds and rules. At their core, Frigid and Festive Music function similarly to the danger- and safety-state music first described by Zach Whalen in 2004.12 Like danger-state music, Frigid Music generally warns players to stay safe while facing the elements. Festive Music, on the other hand, communicates safety, social presence, and permission to engage playfully with winter environments.

As we saw above, Harsh Frigid Music urges the player to properly equip themselves for freezing temperatures or find shelter in Breath of the Wild. Beautiful Frigid Music functions differently, encouraging players to consider the connection between snowy sounds and visuals. This is aligned with Michiel Kamp’s definition of aesthetic hearing, which causes players to pause and consider the connection between a game’s audio and diegetic environment. By way of example, Kamp points to unauthored moments of beauty in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) when musical cues serendipitously accentuate the visual beauty of Skyrim’s snowy landscapes and mountains.13 Beautiful Frigid Music affords players the ability to move slowly through frozen landscapes while enjoying both music and graphics.

Sleigh Ride Music, like what we heard in Super Mario 3D World, simultaneously encourages frivolity and haste. After all, Mario generally only has 400 in-game seconds to finish each level before time runs out and he has to start over. The forward momentum of Sleigh Ride Music pushes the player to finish the level in time while still enjoying the winter wonderland they find themselves in and skating in an oversized shoe. This approach is probably most apparent in racing games such as those in the Mario Kart series that routinely score wintry racetracks with Sleigh Ride Music.

Different modes of winter music also reveal the overall affective goals of a video game. By highlighting naturalistic sounds in and around its Harsh Frigid Music, Breath of the Wild affirms its commitment to immersing players in the realistic environments that make up its massive open world. Likewise, the whimsy of Snowball Park’s music matches with the imaginative whimsy and relative absurdity of the Super Mario franchise (1985–).

Earlier we looked into the dissonant relationship between Festive Music and ludic challenge in EarthBound’s wintry zones. The game’s narrative hinges on a conflict between childlike innocence and corruption, as its four young protagonists traverse a game world that is at once quirky, wondrous, and genuinely disturbing. The ludomusical dissonance players experience in Winters, therefore, affirms the innocence–corruption dichotomy at the core of EarthBound’s narrative.

Conclusion

Of course, the separation between Frigid and Festive Music is not a hard and fast border. As with the EarthBound examples, there will be instances of Festive Music mapped to dangerous game worlds. There are also games that opt not to score their cold zones with typical winter signifiers. This is true for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), which sporadically cues contemplative tracks when exploring its open world that don’t necessarily communicate anything about how dangerous its snow may be.

When video games do use winter signifiers, they invariably relate to their aesthetic goals. From Breath of the Wild and EarthBound to Undertale and Metroid Prime, the way in which composers employ festive and frigid musical ideas advances the goal of their respective games in regard to player experience.

A final example that affirms the relationship between winter music and broader aesthetic goals can be heard in Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (1999) in a level titled “Totally Scrooged.”

Based on hearing the track, let me know what you think they were going for with that one.

"It's pretty, alright. Pretty cold. – Gex the Gecko (1999)

Bibliography

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• Atkinson, Sean E. “Soaring Through the Sky: Topics and Tropes in Video Game Music.” Music Theory Online 25, no. 2 (2019).
• Coleman, Satis N. Bells: Their History, Legends, Making, and Uses. Chicago; New York: Rand McNally, 1928.
• Hamill, Kyna. “‘The Story I Must Tell’: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire.” Theatre Survey 58, no. 3 (2017): 375–403.
• Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Lavengood, Megan, and Evan Williams. “The Common Cold: Using Computational Musicology to Define the Winter Topic in Video Game Music.” Music Theory Online 29, no. 3 (2023).
• Schartmann, Andrew. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack. 33 1/3. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.
• Whalen, Zach. “Play Along: An Approach to Videogame Music.” Game Studies 4, no. 1 (2004).

Ludography

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• Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory. EarthBound. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.
• Bethesda Game Studios. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Various consoles. Music by Jeremy Soule. Rockville, MD: Bethesda Softworks, 2011.
• Crystal Dynamics and Gratuitous Games. Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko. PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Music by John Baker, Jim Hedges, and Burke Trieschmann. London: Eidoes Interactive; Newport Beach, CA: Crave Entertainment, 1999.
• Fox, Toby. Undertale. PC. Music by Toby Fox. Boston: Toby Fox, 2015.
• Nintendo EAD. New Super Mario Bros. U. Wii U. Music by Shiho Fujii and Mahito Yokota. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2012.
• Nintendo EAD and Nintendo EPD. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Nintendo Switch. Music by Shiho Fujii, Atsuko Asahi, Ryo Nagamatsu, Yasuaki Iwata, and Kenta Nagata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017. Additional downloadable content added from 2022–23.
• Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Super Mario 3D World. Wii U. Music by Mahito Yokota, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, and Yasuaki Iwata. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2013.
• Nintendo EPD. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo Switch. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yuma Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi, and Masato Ohashi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2020.
• ———. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Wii U and Nintendo Switch. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.
• Retro Studios. Metroid Prime. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuma. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2002.
• Rockstar Games. Red Dead Redemption 2. Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Music by Woody Jackson. New York: Rockstar Games, 2018.