Wake Up Juice

Getting ready for the school year to start became official last Sunday, when I turned on my phone's morning alarm tone. The particular tone I use has gone through some changes in the past year, and since I'm doing my 'back to school' special, I wanted to highlight a few of them.

When I started school last year, I didn't have a phone, so I woke up using my favorite little Bob alarm clock. I got it years ago from Brookstone, after seeing a friend use it at summer camp, and I always thought it was super cute. Unfortunately, it emits a sharp, repetitious beep in its attempt to wake me up, and listening to that day after day, year after year, was grating my nerves.

My mom sprung to buy me a phone a couple weeks into last Fall semester so we could get in touch with each other. It came with a few preset alarm tones, but I decided not to use any. Instead, still in my excitement after seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception last summer, I decided to download Edith Piaf's Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (if you don't know the song, or want a refresher, click on the link to listen).

If you haven't seen Inception yet, here's a brief description: It's about dreams. The characters in the movie go into each others' dreams, and when it's time for them to come out, the person who's still awake plays this Edith Piaf song to those asleep. It's a very famous song, by an extremely famous French singer, and it really adds to the symbolism of the movie, but sans-symbolism it's essentially the 'time to wake up' song, and I thought it would be perfect to wake up to this every day.

I played Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (which translates to 'No, I regret nothing') every school day for almost that entire semester. At first, I would wake up as soon as the trombones started to blare, and I was up before she actually started singing. It took a while to get used to using the phone as an alarm clock, but I got the hang of it before long, and I loved waking up to band music.

Edith Piaf, played by Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose."

The later it got into the semester, however, the longer the song would play before I actually awoke. A few times I didn't get up until she finished the opening chorus, and once I even slept through it (though my phone might have been on silent that time). The more I listened to the song, the more those trombones just sounded rough on my ears, and eventually, I decided that I needed a change (I cannot confirm whether this was before or after the semester ended, however).

When I got the phone, I had decided that all of the ringtones and alarms (except for my morning Edith Piaf), would come from The Legend of Zelda. It made sense to me to make sure my new morning alarm tone also came from the Zelda series, but which song? After a short deliberation, the answer became obvious: The Ballad of the Windfish, from The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (the next paragraph contains spoilers from the game, but unless you're an old-school video game fan who, for some reason, hasn't played the game, I don't think you should care).

The Windfish sleeps inside
the egg.

Link's Awakening is a pretty interesting title from the Zelda series, because it takes place on this island that doesn't seem real, and until you beat it, you're not 100% sure as to what's going on (also, there are a ton of Mario references). As it turns out, the Windfish (some sort of deity or something) is in a cursed dream, which you're trapped inside. You have to gather instruments and play a song to wake up the Windfish and return to reality, while simultaneously destroying the dream and all the people who lived in it (which made the ending kind of sad, really) (This is the version of the song I downloaded).

Since Ballad of the Windfish is another 'time to wake up' kind of song, I thought it a perfect replacement. It's beautiful, especially in context, and I loved that both of the songs I'd used up until now had a sort of double meaning. If you've listened to the song link that I posted, however, you might have noticed something else; the original song is played with old-school, 8-bit computer audio. It played well on my phone, but those hard notes, every morning, day after day? After a while, that sound became too much for my newly-awoken ears.

Finding a new song after this was a bit difficult. I wanted to stick with music from The Legend of Zelda, but I had to be careful it wasn't something that would become loud and obnoxious first thing in the morning. It took a while of careful consideration, but I finally found a song I liked: the song that plays when morning breaks over Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

If you've never played the game before, it's impossible to explain the feelings that this song gives (And no one, it seems, has uploaded a video onto Youtube of this scene from the game). At the time when this game came out, it had the largest explorable 3-D plane yet: Hyrule Field. I don't have the exact numbers, but it took about 5 minutes to cross, and triple that to go around the entire edge. The developers even programmed in night and day phases, adding to the enlarged feeling.

This is actually sunset, but you get the idea.

Dawn breaking over Hyrule Field, with the light gradually increasing and the in-game monsters disappearing, is like waking up early enough to see the sun rise over the ocean, or breathing in the fresh, cool air at the beginning of a perfect weekend off, or seeing your beautiful baby girl for the very first time. The music that plays is like the moment when everything is perfect and nothing can go wrong, translated into sound. What plays afterword, which would normally sound like your basic 'go-get-em' overworld music, now sound exactly like carpe diem.

As soon as I heard it again, for the first time in a while, I knew I wanted the Hyrule Field Morning theme as my new alarm tone. This song doesn't just say 'it's time to get up', it whispers it softly, and adds 'today will be a great day!'

I used this alarm for the last few weeks of Spring semester, and all during my Summer semester classes. It's still my morning alarm now, and it hasn't yet gotten annoying, repetitive, or scary (as wake-up alarms can get). It's nice to have something great to wake up to.

What about you - what are you guys waking up to these days?