While reading the Whalen essay, I was intrigued when he came across the subject of “mickey mousing”.  Whalen uses the obvious example of Fantasia to describe how the term is used since the entire film is composed of animated characters moving to the rhythm and sounds of the music.  “Mickey mousing”, in this case, felt, to me, like one person’s opinion of what may be happening while this music is playing.  I, myself,did not imagine a pegasus teaching a baby pegasus how to fly when I first heard the first movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony.  And I most certainly did not imagine a scene full of centaurs dancing in and next to a lake when I first heard the second movement.  That aside, when I watched the film, the movements of the pegasi and centaurs matched so well with the choice of music that I did not think it at all out of place.  However, were I to watch the film multiple times, I might begin to start associating Tchaikovsky’s “Chinese Dance” from the Nutcracker Suite with dancing mushrooms.

With that said, repetition and distinctiveness of a melody can allow an association between the event and the music to form for the listener.  An example Whalen uses the example of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time‘s mechanic of using the melody of the music played while within an area in order to unlock something related to that area.  This type of mechanic further reinforces the tendency to associate a specific area with a unique melody.  Not only will the player be hearing the theme, but the theme will also correlate to the related area.  Thinking of either the melody of an area or the area itself will cause one to think of the other automatically.