Tears of the Kingdom fans (or eagle-eyed music composers) have made an intriguing discovery: by arranging Zonai stakes in a certain way, they can activate a form of 8-bit music in the game and even play popular music tracks from games like Undertale to a certain extent.
The ingenuity started with @maxotunes on Twitter, who noticed how the stakes could make little bleeps and blips, or some noticeable pulsing sounds when they came into contact with anything. Another notable factor in their discovery is that these stakes made different sounds depending on the height they were fixed at when they were struck. As we can see in their video, they crafted a rotating laser emitting device to be able to hit many of the stakes at the same time and create a composition-like consistency as if playing a real musical melody.
The interesting part is seen in the video of @bran, another talented 8-bit composer who brought the latent power of this discovery to light. In their video, we can see that you can create a wider range of pitches by stacking these stakes on top of one another. They also demonstrated their findings by playing one of the most iconic 8-bit chords in recent history, Undertale's Megalovania. If you listen to Bran's video and compare it to the original version of Megalovania, you will find the similarity quite obvious and striking.
In this Tiktok video by mostlymelbourne, we can see just about every application of this music creation technique, arranged by the tools used to produce the melodies and their corresponding real musical instruments. The first level, which the user calls the Stone Age, involves physically hitting the stakes. The second level uses a bow and arrow to produce xylophone-like sounds. The third level pushes a laser device forward to produce an effect like playing a stringed instrument, and the final wild one is literally a complete jukebox that you can control by making a laser wheel with a Zonai control stick stuck on top of it, and arranging the stakes around the wheel in a circle-like fashion.
Needless to say, this is all very sentimental, especially for Zelda fans, as many games from the series have a musical component incorporated into them in some form, such as Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker. Now it turns out that Tears of the Kingdom has a similar musical component, albeit hidden from all but the most perceptive and talented composers.