The issue of interactivity is particularly crucial at this early stage in the field’s development, and it raises a pressing analytical question: in short, how do we analyze music that is interactive, flexible, and dependent on a player’s individualized actions? (2) Among other challenging aspects, video game music’s source material is typically encoded, and notated scores often do not exist moreover, because video games are interactive, their sonic output is flexible rather than fixed ( Summers 2016a). (1) This scarcity of analytical methods is due not only to the newness of the field of video game music studies, but also to the many opaque and slippery aspects of this music. Although video game music has attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years, methods specifically designed for analyzing video game music are as yet relatively sparse. Select analytical examples from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Portal 2 provide a sampling of the various interpretive gains available through this method.Ĭopyright © 2019 Society for Music Theory The method allows for a comprehensive examination of smoothness in both sequential and simultaneous situations, and it includes a probabilistic approach so that an analyst can treat all of the many possible seams that might arise from a single modular system. Drawing from sources in the music theory, music perception, and video game music literature (including both scholarship and practical composition guides), this article then introduces a method for analyzing smoothness at modular seams through a particular focus on the musical aspects of meter, timbre, pitch, volume, and abruptness. This article first highlights some modular music structures that are common in video games, and outlines the importance of smoothness and disjunction in video game music. Smoothness-a quality in which two convergent musical modules fit well together-as well as the opposite quality, disjunction, are integral products of modularity, and each quality can significantly contribute to a game. Video game music is comprised of distinct modules that are triggered during gameplay to yield the real-time soundtracks that accompany players’ diverse experiences with a given game. KEYWORDS: video game music, modular music, smoothness, probability, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Portal 2ĪBSTRACT: This article provides a detailed method for analyzing smoothness in the seams between musical modules in video games.
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