__  ____                ____        
   /  |/  (_)____________  / / /___ _____  ___  ____  __  _______
  / /|_/ / / ___/ ___/ _ \/ / / __ `/ __ \/ _ \/ __ \/ / / / ___/
 / /  / / (__  ) /__/  __/ / / /_/ / / / /  __/ /_/ / /_/ (__  )   
/_/  /_/_/____/\___/\___/_/_/\__,_/_/ /_/\___/\____/\__,_/____/  
   ______            __             __    
  / ____/___  ____  / /____  ____  / /_    
 / /   / __ \/ __ \/ __/ _ \/ __ \/ __/    
/ /___/ /_/ / / / / /_/  __/ / / / /_    
\____/\____/_/ /_/\__/\___/_/ /_/\__/    
    

Transcribing "I Died Last Night"

From the DreamWeb (1994) OST

Part of the atmospheric experience of playing DreamWeb is its "game over" screen (I won't spoil it), and the melacholy music that plays each time the player loses. The music is the track "I Died Last Night" by Matt Seldon and Steve Boynton. That's about all I know about it, but I thought that the song sounded so cool, I wanted to try playing it, and, not finding any sheet music, I thought it sounded simple enough that I wanted to try transcribing it.

This is the first song I've tried transcribing, so I'll detail a bit of the process:

• I found an MP3 of the song online (included with the sheet music).
• I got the program Audacity, which allows you to process the MP3 into a spectrogram (which is not very helpful, except with the "Pitch" algorithm). (There is also a picture of the spectrogram with the sheet music.)
• I got LilyPond as a typesetting backend, with Frescobaldi as an IDE for it.
• I found a table of note-to-frequency conversions online, to help with reading the spectrogram.
• I spent a long time at a piano, listening to the same 50-second track over and over.

I learned a few intresting things about the track in the process of transcribing it, which are that it doesn't appear to be playable with only two hands, but I guess that's reasonable given that there are two authors; it is played almost entirely on the black keys of the piano; and that whatever piano they used was tuned very sharp. From the spectrogram it's nearly possible to just read off the tuning, but there are no A naturals in the whole piece! Judging from the frequencies of the G# and A#, it looks like the tuning is probably ~450 (i.e., the first A above middle C would typically be 440 Hz, but their piano seems to have had it at 450 Hz).

I had been waiting to publish this until I could find someone to check the transcription for me, but in the end I never found anyone! So, I think there are things that I could change, but I think it's fine as-is. Let me know if you think you've found some really serious error in it, or just let me know if you enjoyed playing it!

Hopefully you do enjoy playing this simple little song; below is a link to download an archive with:

• A PDF of the sheet music I wrote
• An MP3 of the song, so you can check my work
• The spectrogram from Audacity, because it looks sort of cool
• The original license from the game, so I don't get in any trouble ;)

i_died_last_night.tar.xz

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This page was last updated 2025-07-28