So I'm listening to this week's This American Life and there's a piece of background music that I know I've heard before, but I just can't identify it. Here is the episode. The piece is playing exactly at minute 12.

I feel like I might have heard this in a video game... Perhaps FF6?

Can anyone identify it? I've tweeted to TAL and one of the episode's producers, but who knows if they'll get back to me.

It resembles old horror film soundtrack music played on calliope or pipe organ. It is a modern synthesizer rendition though. I'm thinking it closely resembles "Carnival Of Souls" but I'm not sure if it's the same piece or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtM41M5uNs
http://www.amazon.com/Verne-Langdon-Carnival-Souls-Collection/dp/B000K2UW42

Hmm, that doesn't sound like the same melody to me...

I agree that they are likely two different pieces, with the TAL piece being merely stylistically similar (perhaps deliberately).

So specifically, the *exact* piece being played in the This American Life piece is what you're after? Or are you just trying to figure out the original piece, the one that you think it was reminding you of, the one you've heard before that you can't quite place?

Those might be two different things, they were for me: When I heard the bit in This American Life, I also thought it sounded like something I'd heard before, and after a bit of googling, as soon as I heard Carnival Of Souls, I realized that *that* was the one I'd been thinking I'd heard before.

As far as the exact piece goes: Something in the back of my brain is saying Decemberists, but I don't know exactly why. I have no information or examples to back that one up.

Yeah sorry, I was looking for that exact melody. I don't know if that's the precise performance of it that I've heard before, but I'm 100% certain that I've heard that exact melody before, and I feel like I heard it in a setting where it played over and over again, which leads me to believe that it was a piece used in a video game, the most likely culprit being something like Final Fantasy 6, probably from the second half of the game when the world goes to pot. I feel like the characters were in some sort of carnival-type setting. Possibly the opera house portion of that half of the game.

But it could be a different game entirely, or not a game at all. It's just driving me crazy not knowing where that piece is from, and I'm actually rather surprised that a show like This American Life wouldn't credit their musical sources. I find that strange.

I've sent an email to the show, too. Hopefully someone over there will get back to me about it. Like I said, it's driving me crazy not knowing...

Mystery solved! I posted my conundrum to Facebook, and sure enough one of my dorky friends came through. It turns out that I was very close with my guess: it's from Final Fantasy IV/2!

It's titled "Dancing Calcobrena"

I believe it's music that you would hear toward the end of the game, when your team is on the moon. I really loved that game but I haven't played it through to the end in about a decade (I've started it a dozen times one various emulators).

I'm still annoyed that not a single person involved with that episode of This American Life would respond to me about that. My guess: they didn't pay for the rights to this particular piece

Nice catch!

Sad that it was Facebook that got the answer instead of EmpegBBS though.

Comparing the pieces more closely, I can tell that the composer of the FF4 music was likely going for a very close stylistic tribute to Carnival of Souls. Which, in turn, was probably doing a stylistic tribute to something earlier. (Having done that very thing, I know from which I speak.)

It just means that he has more dorky friends on FB, then there is on the BBS :p

Haha! Not a chance. Both the percentage and extremity of the dorkiness here far exceeds that of my Facebook friends list*.

It just so happened that I was able to find just the right dorky friend on Facebook who is a big video game nerd and super into classical music. He has soundtracks to tons of video games and was a fellow music major in college.


*That said, I do have some very dorky Facebook friends. An exec at Square lived next door to me growing up, and I went to high school with a couple Google employees, and the brother of one of the co-founders of Yelp (he now works there too as the VP of Engineering).