His monograph considers the entire body of sound within OoT, from memorable ocarina tunes to sound effects and interface cues, drawing connections with industry terminology, harmonic analysis, and music from around the world. This is an enormous task, but Summers succeeds admirably. Summers sets out to use OoT as a case study to “explore in depth the music of a single game, to illustrate the multi-faceted musicality of gaming and to explain the musical processes of a game which has great cultural reach and influence” (2). The study is instead motivated by Ocarina of Time’s popularity and the game’s novel use of music rather than belief in its quality in any universal sense” (2). He also confronts the topic of canon formation at the outset, stating that he “is not interested in claiming that the game’s composer, Koji Kondo, is a ‘genius’, nor that Ocarina of Time has some quality of ‘greatness’. Tim Summers acknowledges the importance of both aspects in the introduction to his new monograph, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: A Game Music Companion. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998 hereafter OoT) is a frequent source of examples for ludomusicological concepts, and for good reasons: in addition to using music in a variety of ways, it was and is an extremely popular video game.
