Category: Guest Contribution

We are proud to publish original articles from authors across the community here. If you wish to share news about your research, an event you are running or if have an article you would like us to feature, please contribute here or email us at ludomusicology@gmail.com.

Guest Contribution

The Cognitive Dissonance of Classical Music with ‘The Grotesque’ in Video Games

by  •  • 0 Comments

This is a guest post from Vivaswath Rao.
Viva is a postgraduate student at Royal Holloway, University of London. He recently hosted and chaired William Gibbons’s guest talk at Royal Holloway, which was part of the inspiration for this essay. Here, he investigates how classical music interacts with the idea of ‘The Grotesque’ in games.

Content warning: violent images.

Introduction

The Save Room in the horror video game Evil Within, is a place of contradictions. A washroom within a mental asylum, the safe haven of the game, the room is crawling with cockroaches and pullulating flies. In the midst of the grungy and decrepit enclosure, a large grandiose mirror gleams out with extravagant beams of white light, leaving the protagonist Sebastian silhouetted. What stands out about this mirror is that its prophetic light is accompanied by a looped version of Debussy’s Clair De lune. The situation brings up an interesting prospect, one that extends far out into the real world. Video games have long attempted to push boundaries towards increased player engagement, along with greater intellectual and emotional reward. As illustrated by Michele Dickey, a careful blend of physical, environmental, temporal, ethical and emotional dimensions enable “…a sense of suspended disbelief and provides players with a sense of immersive engagement in the gameplay environment”.[1]

One of the ways by which games have done so is to utilize real world subjects and objects to create intertextual systems. The above scene is one such example. In a world torn apart by bloody conflict, supernatural forces, and exaggerated violence, Classical music is an uncanny misfit. It stands at odds with its surrounding predilection for death, symbolizing on the contrary serenity, virtue and peace. It is this fascinating co-existence of the ‘grotesque’ with ‘Classical music’ in video games that I seek to understand further. Given that terms such as ‘grotesque’, ‘classical music’ and ‘video games’ rest on a shared cultural definition, it is worth investigating what its reactionary cognitive dissonance might suggest about us, or our relationship with the game on a psychological level.

The term ‘grotesque’ has for very long elucidated various explanations and definitions. An idea emergent from European Renaissance interest in antiquity, the term has itself drifted along etymological tides from era to era.[2]

Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915) begins with the main character, Gregor Samsa, waking up to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. The book is at once surreal in its premise, yet set in an otherwise apparently realistic world. Kafka’s creation is often judged as a benchmark of the modern ‘grotesque’. Describing Samsa’s transformation as ‘grotesque’ reveals not only what the term approximates but also where it is ambiguous. This story that takes place in a strange world that for the most part, appears natural, Kafka’s subject of mutation displays tensions that mingle together horror with humor. While the protagonist insect represents an amalgam of unsaid fears, nightmares and biological deviations, it remains unclear (perhaps intentionally) as to what definitively marks out the grotesque. While some argue that the grotesque lies in the construction of the symbol itself, i.e. ‘the grotesque’ (giant insect), others argue that the identification of ‘grotesque-ness’ depends on its affective response. Following Kafka’s odd and unsettling combination of fantastic and realistic elements, we might consider grotesque to be partly a result of our psychological reactions to juxtaposed, ‘dissonant’ elements.

Cognitive Dissonance in Video Games

A new field of empirical psychological research (VGTx) has begun to explore the potential of commercial video games as therapy,[3] resulting in a growing body of literature that studies relationships between gamers and how they view the game themselves. Anthony M. Bean’s book Working with Video Gamers and Games in Therapy looks into this area of study with the primary theoretical framework being that of a Humanistic and Jungian/Archetypal paradigm.[4]

In this tradition, we can consider video games as a medium of a controlled confrontation of the unknown, which involves frequent instantiations of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is defined as a psychological state where an individual’s cognitions—beliefs, attitudes and behaviors are at odds. This is immediately followed by a motivation to resolve inconsistencies between disparate cognitions. Marc Prensky explains, “Electronic games require active engagement in environments, which supports discovery, observation, trial and error, and problem solving.” While video games have constantly strived towards greater artistic realism and narrative nuance, the importance of ‘accomplishing the challenge’ and ‘undertaking the task’ make for its psychological currency and a medium of positive reinforcement.[5] Research reveals that part of the appeal of video games may be attributed to its relatively risk-free goal-oriented tasks.[6] Thus games might offer grounds for studies on affective responses, not only in psycho-therapeutic endeavors but also ludology and game designing experiments. Where video games align with the grotesque in this sense, is best summarized in Wolfgang Kayser’s view of the grotesque, “The grotesque is a game with the absurd, in the sense that the grotesque artist plays, half laughingly, half horrified, with the deep absurdities of existence. The grotesque is an attempt to control and exorcise the demonic elements in the world”.[7] As discussed by Rune Graulund, the grotesque in some way rests in opposition to sophistication. Sophistication lies in the intellectual validation of the ‘known’, symbolized by knowledge, order, control, balance, life. The Grotesque, however, is the demon from the ‘unknown’ that leaps through the cracks of existence, threatening to topple it, i.e. chaos, disorder, or even death.

Classical Music in Video Games

Classical music has long been frequently invoked as an agent of sophistication in video games. While most commonly Classical music and video games have occupied opposing ends on the cultural spectrum of high art and low art, the relationship between the two is by no means a simple one.[8] To evoke the term ‘Western Classical’, brings along with it the suggestion of a canonic body of works. Most often referred to as works by highly regarded European composers between the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. These works retain a status in popular culture as unquestioned artworks.[9] In this regard, collaborations between video games and classical music through the last few decades have revealed a multitude of consequences. A recent resurgence in the game Assassin’s Creed due to its representation of the historical Parisian cathedral Notre Dame in the aftermath of its destruction, gives an insight into one such collaboration between video games and a monument of the ‘classical’.

A news report on the story claimed, “With so much details poured into the game, it’s hard not to see the benefits of video games in how they can also preserve history, even in its own way”[10].

Below, I look at a few examples of popular single player video games where Classical music acts as a propeller of cognitive dissonance in order to intensify player experience of ‘the grotesque’. In all the examples below, Classical music is used as an agent of the civilized, the peaceful, and the victorious. As such, it serves to enhance and articulate the ‘grotesque’ when this emblem of civility is put in tension with other horrific or otherwise dissonant elements. Like Kafka’s juxtaposition and the self-other psychological confrontation that underpins games as therapy, Classical music is here used as a potent agent for forging a grotesque aesthetic experience by representing a symbolic anchor against which horror and irrationality can be contrasted.

Catherine

The involvement of Classical music in the game is best demonstrated by the above sound disk and artbook cover of the game score.

The game is set around protagonist Vincent Brooks, who is caught between an emotionally dormant long-term relationship with his girlfriend Katherine, and a second new relationship with young, attractive Catherine. He must confront in his dreams the demonic manifestations of his real-life insecurities and win over them in order to wake up alive the next day. As William Gibbons has described, remixes of famous Classical pieces are prominent features of the nightmare stages of the game.[11] A combination of normal life depicted through cut scenes, and nightmare in the form of gameplay, it is the latter in which complete manifestations of the grotesque are revealed. Classical music in the nightmare scenes are marked out through an action-film style of scoring. While the rest of the game features music in a piano based smooth jazz-style, the nightmare remixes feature strings and brass — rock-style arrangements. Irrespective of player knowledge of the repertoire, the element of the ‘Classical’ is made unavoidable through the repeated recurrence of the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus and extensive use of orchestral instruments.

The game’s narrative teems with allusions to psychological theories in its observation of dreams being a mediation ground between conscious, subconscious and unconscious, and in Jungian terms, the dwelling ground for archetypes. Dreams become the playground where the Freudian id, ego and superego must resolve Vincent’s insecurities. The unconscious impulse, the id, is clearly manifested through demons, with Vincent playing the part of the ego, or the decision maker, while the superego, or the moral center remains un-manifested in material form. This void is filled by Classical Music. Remixed nonetheless, it represents that part of Vincent associated with reality, conscience, order, balance and victory. On completion of each challenge, Vincent opens the ‘door of faith’ to the sound of the Hallelujah Chorus. Each demonic form represents a twisted representation of the central subjects of the Vincent’s fears, sexuality, marriage and child bearing. While each of the three form essential symbols of life, joy and pleasure, in other words sources of positive emotions; in Vincent’s dreams they are manifested as enlarged disembodied forces of destruction, capable here, of taking a life. They emerge from within the darkness of the unknown below the surface of reality and wield not only an instinct but weapons to slay – sharp teeth and sharp knives. With contradicting ideas of the sophisticated and grotesque, battling it out, the player is left guard-less in the line of fire, reaping in return maximum psychological rewards.

The Evil Within

On few occasions in the game The Evil Within, the player witnesses chilling occasions when famous pieces of Classical Music not only meta-diegetically underscore the scene but add to what would have otherwise been intensely cognitively dissonant.

In Chapter 1, hanging upside down from the ceiling, the lead character Sebastian is about to be hacked to death by serial killer Sadist. Sadist is a large and muscular man with a metallic mask, bloody outfit and gory appearance. Sadist, much like Catherine, represents a human form of a demon except this time, the weapon is a chainsaw. While Sebastian hangs alongside rotting hacked bodies and putrid carcasses, a nearby gramophones resonates with an orchestra, the tune of Bach’s Air in G. Playing on the pun with the name Sebastian, the music itself has nothing more to do with the narrative than to intensify the already horrific and disgusting visuals into an articulation of artistic irony. The music in the scene symbolizes the death of civilization itself. The game takes place in Sebastian’s home town where all inhabitants have either perished, mutated or have turned into evil monsters.

In The Evil Within, we see another common theme across a multitude of video games, including GTA, Fallout, Bioshock Infinite and the Far Cry series. This is the old radio machine or gramophone that is the mouthpiece for Classical music. The two symbolize not only the ‘archaic’ but also something of the prophetic. Seen across both futurist and historical period games, the radio is something of an artificial conjunction of human machine and transcendental classical music, in other words it is the object of grotesque, often tattered in appearance and giving the sound a distorted and desolate quality.

Conclusion

The grotesque is a term that defies a clear definition. It bears a place in common usage that stretches across object and subject, noun and adjective, video game stimulant and human respondent. What may be observed throughout these cases is that even ‘the grotesque’, exists on a spectrum of ‘grotesqueness’. Outside the question of intention and authorship, lie strong reasons to suggest that any combination of Classical Music and video games is in itself something of a “grotesque” and places it on this spectrum of grotesqueness. Games like Catherine and The Evil Within exploit this triumvirate, to place themselves higher on the grotesque spectrum. As audiences for video games continue to grow, with more individuals voluntarily engaging with video games at deeper levels of emotional involvement; as the influence and usage of Classical music in/on video games continue to grow; cognitive dissonance becomes an increasingly important factor in putting each video game on the spectrum of grotesqueness and thus, putting Classical music itself on various spectrums of modern human experiences.

Notes

  1. Michele D. Dickey, ‘Engaging By Design: How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design’, ETR&D, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2005, pp.  76
  2. Geoffrey Harpam, ‘The Grotesque’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp.461
  3. Matthias Jaeger, ‘Commercial Video Games As Therapy: A New Research Agenda to Unlock the Potential of a Global Pastime’, frontiers in Psychiatry 8:300 (2018)
  4. Anthony M. Bean, Working with Video Gamers and Games in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2018), pp. 2
  5. Michele D. Dickey, ‘Engaging By Design: How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design’, ETR&D, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2005, pp. 78
  6. Ibid, 70
  7. Philip Thomson, ‘The Grotesque’ (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1972), pp. 18
  8. William Gibbons, ‘Ultimate Replays: Video Games and Classical Music’, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 4
  9. Ibid. pp. 174
  10. ‘How Assassin’s creed could save Notre Dame’, Stuff, https://www.stuff.tv/my/features/how-assassins-creed-could-save-notre-dame
  11. William Gibbons, ‘Ultimate Replays: Video Games and Classical Music’, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2018), 101–113.

Guest Contribution

French ludomusicology today: Something that was born some time ago, but we are not quite sure of what is it yet

by  •  • 0 Comments

By Fanny Rebillard and Antoine Morisset

What is French ludomusicology? It is kind of difficult to define a field yet to discover. This observation is what actually led to the French bibliography project that recently joined the SSSMG bibliography page. Strangely, the French ludomusicologist tends to be a wild species that never seems to cross his fellow’s path. This is connected to the fact that there is actually no official stronghold for this discipline: we came from all kinds of musicology faculties. Each of us had to deal, at some point, with a feeling of isolation within the great world of musicology. Are you studying the sacred XXth century field, its inner revolutions, or the birth of electroacoustic music? Do you prefer the popular music studies point of view? Or maybe you are a specialist in medieval analysis that has gone mad/an intuition and is now madly searching for occurrences of Landini cadences in adventure games? Can it be that you chose a new unrelated research field, such as records management or the sciences of education, and try to study videogame music from this unexpected perspective?

Sadly enough, all these fields within French musicology tend to be folded in on themselves. Our links are even more stretched as “la Musicologie” covers a wide range of disciplines and approaches once you are preparing a master’s degree or a PhD: a musicologist, in France, is not necessarily a music theory specialist. There are historians, sociologists, psychologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists… Without any French rendez-vous dedicated to the matter of music in videogames, most of the ludomusicologists will have only two choices when it comes to meeting people from the same sphere. First, they can attend meetings from their musicological field of origin and try to explain how game theory can be of interest from this point of view – if explaining the basis of ludology doesn’t take up all the speaker’s time. They also can go to global game studies conferences where every field is welcome, such as the annual MiG (Montpellier in Games) show, or one of the many activities in Lausanne and Liège University, in Swiss and Belgium.  But the legend says that there never were two ludomusicologists at the same time in one of these events (the « why » of this curse is still to be answered…).

“Why don’t they join us?”, you say? Well, if you never see any French ludomusicologist at the NACVGM or at any other English-speaking conference, there is actually two reasons. The first, and the saddest one, is that the French research field is in bad condition. Many universities are regularly on a strike because (amongst other problems) they lack money : most of the lecturers are never paid on time, if they are paid, and research grants are becoming increasingly rare. In this gloomy atmosphere, humanities and art programs are the most neglected, so there is little chance for a ludomusicologist to be funded for their PhD or any expensive symposium trip (and if a grant opportunity exists, there is a 75% probability that they’ll hear about it after they come back). The second and most laughable reason you don’t see many of us outside a French-speaking country is that we do have a problem with foreign languages. Most of us have cold sweat at the simple idea of speaking English in front of an audience. This is probably an early educational problem, but it is quite real: if you are not able to have a perfect accent (but which one? No one knows…), and to make complex puns and not a single grammatical mistake, you are convinced that you are an embarrassment and that everybody will despise you as a researcher.

Further, there are not many publications from French ludomusicologists, and if they exist, these ones are hidden in some obscure journals that are not easy to guess, and difficult to obtain. For example, we’d never heard of Arnaud Saura-Ziegelmeyer’s  article on the acoustic representations of Antiquity in videogames (https://books.openedition.org/momeditions/3359) until it was brought to us by people who attended the symposium. It was published as a special issue in a journal about popular culture and Antiquity, by authors close to archaeology, that are not very well-known in our field. Besides, until now, we can say that most of the French ludomusicologists had no idea that others exist, or if they did, they were nothing but distant figures to cite amongst a vast majority of English-speaking references. Some of us use small personal websites to talk about our work (such as Mickael Blum’s website, or some articles by Fanny Rebillard on www.musicaludi.fr), but most of the time, they are not well known and we don’t communicate much on social media. Most of the actual broadcasts and podcasts speaking on the subject are run by people who don’t necessarily relate to the academic research field. There is actually an important community of VGM lovers, who have a great knowledge of this world, but will never dare to dip their toe in this intimidating perspective that is ludomusicology. However, these people have been very important, in France, for promoting and upholding this musical culture. These last years, some events (such as the videogame music concert cycle at Paris’ Philharmonie in 2017) elevated videogame music to a higher status in the musical field. It is gradually coming out of the “beep-boop (not be-bop) funny but somewhat very nostalgic” zone and has garnered consideration as something complex and worthy of interest. This year, some of us have been contacted to speak about ludomusicology and the basis of videogame music history in front of academic and non-academic audiences. We realized that there is a strong interest in ludomusicology, not only in France but in other French-speaking countries and districts: Belgium, Switzerland, Québec, etc.

Maybe, thanks to these people and events who set out the whole thing, the French ludomusicologists are finally coming out of their den. Beyond that, the fortunate meeting of a few of us, and the common finding that our references in our native language were completely split between us, led to the brilliant – and very late – idea to gather and to share the latest news in the field. That is why we put all of our bibliographic references into one Google-doc, opened a Discord server, and sent messages to our musicology-related email lists, hoping to reach for as many interested French-speaking people as possible. We wished to stay open-minded. That is why we also included publications from non-specialized authors, or video interviews and websites of composers. We believe that these elements can be of great value to study the late rise of French ludomusicology. So far, the operation is a success, but the vast majority of the titles we listed until now are yet to be read by many of us. There is currently no state of the art, but we hope it is a matter of time before we learn more about it. Finally, our wish is that all this will motivate young French ludomusicologists to stand out, collaborate abroad, and to reveal their work.

Guest Contribution

What is 1-bit-music?

by  •  • 2 Comments

By Nikita Braguinski and ‘utz’

On November 20, 2018, the musicologist and media theorist Nikita Braguinski and the musician, programmer and historian of computer sound working under the assumed name of ‘utz’ convened in an IRC chat channel to discuss a musically and technically intriguing question: What is 1-bit-music?

NB: You are, as a musician and as a programmer, actively working in the genre of 1-bit music. Can you give a first, non-technical explanation of what it is?

utz: Sure. Let’s talk about 1-bit sound first. The subject sounds quite esoteric, but actually 1-bit sounds are more common than one might think. For example, if you’re a bit older you may remember that when switching on a PC, it makes a “beep”. Another common example that many people may be familiar with are those birthday greeting cards that play a simple melody when you open them. Or, a more annoying example: the alarm in smoke detectors. All these sounds share a common principle in that they are produced by repeatedly switching the current that goes to the built-in speaker on and off, or in other words, they are produced by toggling a signal between two states. These two states can be expressed by a number containing a single binary digit (bit). Basically, 1-bit music is music made using this principle of sound generation.

NB: We’re only talking about electronically produced sounds, right?

utz: Pretty much.

NB: Great. We’ll return again to this definition to discuss it in more technical terms, but let’s now take a look around this musical practice. It exists within the specific culture of chiptune artists, the demoscene and the retrocomputing scene. Can you give a kind of a first working definition for each of them?

utz: I’d somewhat argue with that statement, actually, but yes, there’s definitely a strong connection with these scenes. “Chiptune” is probably the hardest one to define. Generally, it’s a culture revolving around music made with old home computers and gaming consoles, or music that sounds like it would come from one of these machines. In 1-bit, we often use machines from the same era. The sounds can also be quite similar, though they can also be radically different. Furthermore, there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of people active in the chiptune and 1-bit scene. As a matter of fact, there are hardly any “pure” 1-bit musicians. There are also differences regarding technology. The machines commonly used by chiptune musicians generally have a sound chip, a dedicated piece of hardware that produces sound. Machines used for 1-bit music generally don’t have that.

NB: That’s a huge difference! How do you make sound without sound hardware?

utz: There are different ways to go about, though commonly we look for something like an data port. For example, many old computers can load and save data from/to tape. That’s something we can hook into. If you remember old modems, they make these gnarly sounds, right? That’s pretty much the same idea. Basically, these data ports can be active or inactive, on or off.

NB: If I decode correctly what you describe, the 1-bit-culture is all about difficult, “gnarly” sounds.

utz: A lot of the fun, for me at least, comes from how to get it to make meaningful sounds in the first place. But yes, it often has this very gnarly aesthetic and that’s something that’s very appealing to 1-bit folks. At the same time we strive to make it sound less crude, and make it produce more complex sounds. There’s a kind of very immediate “you vs. the machine” aspect to it.

NB: Does this also apply to retrocomputing and the demoscene?

utz: For retrocomputing, yes. For the demoscene, it’s mostly true for the “oldschool” part of the scene. The demoscene is a culture that focuses on producing non-interactive, realtime-generated audiovisual computer art. Retrocomputing is a movement that uses supposedly obsolete computer hardware in various different ways. As a good portion of the demoscene (the so-called “oldschool” scene) revolves around old computers, there’s significant overlap between the two, of course. Personally I don’t like the term “retrocomputing” very much. It carries this implicit connotation of “obsolescence”, which I find inappropriate. For me, these old machines aren’t obsolete at all, they’re valid contemporary musical instruments. Also, the software being developed for these machines is very much about exploring new possibilities and finding new algorithms, so “retro” isn’t a good fit in that respect either. Also, the thing with 1-bit music is that there are people in it who aren’t connected to either of these scenes. There are for example people who come from the calculator scene. There are these graphing calculators that are being used in school, right? Well, there are people who dig into these machines, and coincidentally they can make 1-bit music. Also, 1-bit music existed before chiptune/demoscene/retrocomputing.

NB: And all these cultures seem to emphasize technical restrictions. Is that right?

utz: Yes, there’s definitely some truth to that. I think there are actually two different aspects related to that, though. One is challenge: It’s a challenge to make something on these old machines, even more so to push the boundaries of what can be done. The other side is that paradoxically, restrictions can be artistically liberating, in a creative sense.

NB: I totally agree. But I have a question: If the term “1-bit music” is really only about 1-bit sound then any kind of music can be “1-bit” if it is played using this specific technology?

utz: I don’t think anyone ever gave too much thought to a solid definition of 1-bit music so far. But yes, I’d agree with that. In fact, it’s possible to employ 1-bit techniques on sound chips, for example. This contrasts it with the term “8-bit music”, where “8-bit” generally refers to the type of CPU used to make the music. 1-bit music can be 8-bit music, although it doesn’t necessarily have to be. There is a general-purpose music editor called Sunvox, which has a 1-bit mode, so you can make 1-bit music without actual 1-bit hardware. There are 1-bit VSTis (sound plugins) as well.

NB: So, unlike algorithmic composition it is not primarily about generating music, but the generation of sound.

utz: In a sense we have the same problem as with chiptune: everybody has their own idea about what qualifies as a chip and what doesn’t.

NB: Well, now that we have taken a look at the cultural environment in which 1-bit music is being created, could you give a more technical explanation of how it works?

utz: Ok, so, as mentioned before, 1-bit music is made by switching signals on and off. If you switch a signal at regular intervals 440 times a second, you get a 440 Hz note. These are the basics. The gist is that by switching in more complex patterns, one can produce more complex sounds. This includes polyphonic sound (containing several independent melodies or effects played at the same time). Modern 1-bit music is generally about polyphonic sound. There are a number of techniques that can be used to achieve polyphonic sounds, and there are a lot of different implementations of these techniques. By the way, that’s also something that sets 1-bit apart from, say, chiptune. If you take Gameboy music for example, at least 90% of it is made on one of 2 editors, LSDj and Nanoloop. In 1-bit, on the other hand, we use tons of different software regularly. So, there are two main approaches to generating polyphonic sound with a 1-bit signal. One is called Pulse Frequency Modulation (which is actually an established thing, we didn’t make that up), and the other one goes by a bunch of different names, I usually call it Pulse Interleaving. Say, we switch our signal at a rate of 440 Hz. Or any rate, as a matter of fact. One would assume that the signal is on for half of the time, and off the other half of the time (which is what’s known as a square wave). But it doesn’t need to be that way. We can also create a signal that’s on for 1% of the time, and off 99% of the time. As long as we switch at 440 Hz, we still get a 440 Hz note. However, we now have a lot of space between the “on” pulses. Within that space, we can render a second train of pulses at adifferent frequency. The result will be that both frequencies are audible. This gives a very characteristic sound. This is pulse frequency modulation. Funny side node, that’s actually how your brain cells communicate with each other. Anyway, Tim Follin’s early works on ZX Spectrum are typical examples of that. See, for example, this video.

NB: How do you know this specific technique was used in this tune?

utz: The sound is very characteristic, 1-bit musicians will instantly recognize it. Also, we know because some clever people analyzed the music driver behind it.

NB: Yes, that’s a fascinating story how people reverse-engineer other musicians’ programs.

utz: The Follin driver is also legendary because it was the first to do 5-voice polyphony on a 3.5 MHz machine with no sound hardware. The pulse interleaving technique on the other hand tackles the problem at hand from a completely different angle. Generally, pulse frequency modulation makes it possible to render a lot of voices even with slow hardware. The record is at 16 voices for the ZX Spectrum. Pulse interleaving has more constraints in that respect, because it requires tighter timing. The idea behind it is that loudspeakers have inertia. The hardware components in a computer have inertia as well, but to a much lesser degree. Generally, a CPU is much faster than a loudspeaker cone. So, when we switch our 1-bit signal from off to on, the speaker cone will (slowly, from the CPU’s perspective) start to extend outwards from it’s current, contracted position. While this is still happening, the CPU can already switch the signal off again. Which means that before the speaker cone has even reached full extension, it will start contracting again. By precise timing, we can therefore control the speaker cone position, or in other words, we can produce different volume levels through our 1-bit signal. With different volume levels, we can of course produce polyphony. Generally, this technique will result in a more typical “chiptune” sound, though other applications are possible.

NB: It certainly requires a more complicated calculation than the previous technique.

utz: Yes, and what fascinates me the most is that it can be implemented in so many different ways. The funny thing is that for a minimal example, the actual code is nearly identical. Finding this similarity was a big “Aha!” moment for me. But generally pulse interleaving code tends to be more complex than pulse frequency modulation code.

NB: If I understand correctly, by creating cone movements of different amplitude, you basically make your own digital-to-analog converter which you can use to play anything, including polyphonic music (but also speech, for example).

utz: Yes, exactly. Speech is very simple, actually. Another way to put it is to say that for 1-bit sound, within a fixed interval time equals volume.

NB: Now, there is also a prehistory of 1-bit. There were mechanical devices that, to a degree, worked in the same way. For example, in the 17th century there were experiments with toothed wheels: in 1681, Robert Hooke presented to the Royal Society in London his experiments where a rotating wheel created individual “clicks” with its teeth. If rotated quickly enough, it produced not a pulsating rhythm, but a tone. This was later called a Savart wheel. There were also mechanical sirens. With an arrangement of holes, tones were produced by interrupting the stream of air going through it. Different machines existed that were based on this principle, one of them (already in 20th century) was the Rhythmicon, built by Leo Theremin and working with light instead of air. Sometimes, people would also put holes representing different frequencies into the same circular pattern, which basically corresponds to the “pulse frequency modulation” technique in 1-bit. This specific experiment was carried out in 19th century by Friedrich Wilhelm Opelt.

utz: That sounds very much like an application of PFM. So, they could do polyphony?

NB: Yes, by combining holes referring to two different tones (or teeth in the case of the wheel). Of course, you could not switch tones as easily as with the computer.

utz: Hmm, if they would’ve used a tape instead of a wheel it might have been possible.

NB: Too bad they can’t hear us! Now, coming back to 1-bit: during our conversation, I was listening to your album of 1-bit music, published under your artistic name “Irrlicht Project”. What was your own, personal experience in the creation of such music?

utz: Now that’s a long story… I’ll try to be brief. I started experimenting with computer music back in 2003-2004. I used the Fruity Loops software back in the day (a so-called digital audio workstation). I didn’t have any clue of what was going on in the outside world back in the day, since I had no internet. So, I just made music with sounds that I liked. Which happened to be mostly the sounds based on simple waveforms, such as pulse/saw/sine etc. Then, some years later I discovered that there’s a whole scene revolving around that kind of aesthetic, called chiptune. I also discovered that there are these old computers that you can use to make this type of music. At the same time I was running into a sort of a dead end with my digital-audio-workstation-based workflow. As these got more complex, and the synthesizers and effects started to arrive, I found myself more and more busy with tweaking sounds, rather than doing actual compositions. At that point I tried making music on the Atari ST computer, and it was a revelation. Suddenly, I could focus on composition again, because there’s only so much you can do to tweak the sound of the Atari’s sound chip.

NB: So, it was again all about the self-imposed technical restriction.

utz: Oh yes, absolutely. Though, for me it always felt like a liberation. However, as time went on, I discovered more and more ways to tweak the sound, and that became an issue again. At that point I discovered the works of a certain Mister Beep, who was pretty much the only active 1-bit musician at that time. That must have been around 2008-2009. Then, the available tools for making 1-bit music were decades old, and extremely limited. Basically, they didn’t facilitate tweaks to sound at all. Obviously, those old tools had proven to be a lot of joy, even though they were crude and super clunky to use. A few people started getting into 1-bit around the same time. Also, some new tools started to pop up. First, they were mainly ports of old drivers (versions of the musical software that were made compatible with a different computing environment), equipped with new, better user interfaces. Then, we got the first “new” drivers (most of them by Alex “Shiru” Semenov), and also PC-based editor called Beepola. It was a cross-platform program which means that it could run on different systems. At some point, I became interested in making my own driver.

NB: For that, you already must have been a programmer, not just a musician.

utz: Well, that was the problem, actually. I wasn’t. I hardly knew anything about programming. I’ve had only 3 years of computer studies in school, mostly dabbling in the Turbo Pascal programming language, which I had all but forgotten at this point. Also, there’s pretty much only one way to implement 1-bit drivers (at least on the usual 8-bit hardware), and that’s by using the Assembly programming language. I tried to wrap my head around it for ages, with no success. But I had this vision. You see, other kids, they’d have Gameboys and whatnot at school, and a Sega or NES video game console at home. Well, I didn’t. I was the dorky kid who had… a graphing calculator. Everybody had one because it was mandatory, but I was one of the few people who actually spent a lot of time exploring the thing. Now, going back to 2011 or so. I still had that calculator, a Texas Instruments TI-82. At some point I realized that it has the same CPU as the ZX Spectrum home computer (for which many 1-bit tools where available at that time). So, I had this vision of porting one of the ZX drivers to the TI. And after many attempts, I finally succeeded in making the thing beep.

NB: That must have been a special feeling, given that you returned to a tool from your teenage years.

utz: Yes, very much so. As time went on, I became better at this Assembly thing. I made my first own drivers. Of course, they were bad, but, hey, I was making progress. Then, some friends found out about this thing I had done with the calculator, and started asking me about a music editor, a one which could natively run on the TI. And so I sat down and did that. It took me about 6 months, I think, and the result was… hardly usable. Then, a couple of years later I re-did the whole thing, and this time it was somewhat decent.

NB: Do you have an example of this calculator music?

utz: Yes, here’s the “introductory video”. This one uses the pulse interleaving technique, by the way.

NB: Did you modify the calculator to give it an audio output?

utz: No, not at all. It has a “link port”, which is normally used to communicate between two calculators, or between a calculator and a PC. I’m using it for sound.

NB: A beautiful hack! I am sure that, for many people, making music on a calculator symbolizes the ages-long relationship between music and mathematics (and time, I would add, since this is also all about the correct timing).

utz: Oh yeah! So, over time, this programming aspect of the 1-bit universe has become increasingly prevalent in my work. This goes to the point that I now regard it as kind of an art form in itself. It’s not even so much about the music anymore, though I do still enjoy making a good tune. I guess that somewhat sums up my experience in 1-bit.

NB: That’s a great story of going from making music to making tools for making music.

utz: Let me try to find one more example perhaps, just to show what’s possible. This is one of my later drivers, called zbmod. It was used by Tufty, one of the most talented 1-bit musicians (who, by the way, has a new album coming out soon). This works on the classic Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. I’ve written many different drivers (or “engines”, as we call them in the 1-bit world). They are all open-source, by the way – including the calculator editor. The code is currently available on Github.

NB: Great! Well, there are so many things that we could add to this discussion of 1-bit, for example the early mainframe computers sounds that you have collected and presented in your recent talk in Berlin. But the nature of this phenomenon, which is still unfolding, is that we would need an infinite amount of time to fully describe it. Thus, I’d like to thank you very much for this conversation, and I am looking forward to hearing about novel creative approaches coming from this technology, which is both new and old.

utz: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about my favorite subject!

Further reading:

Victor Adan, Discrete Time 1-Bit Music: Foundations and Models. PhD thesis, Columbia University (2010).

Kenneth B. McAlpine, “The Sound of 1-bit: Technical Constraint and Musical Creativity on the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum”, GAME 6 (2017).

Chipmusic

See also the PhD project of Blake Troise and the recently published book Bits and Pieces. A History of Chiptunes by Kenneth B. McAlpine.

Nikita Braguinski’s research has been focused on the notion of unpredictability in game sound during his PhD work. His dissertation has been recently published in German. At the moment, he works on the predigital history of algorithmic music and on the mathematization of music in the Soviet musical avant-garde. His recent publications include an article on the notion of 8-bit in music and a discussion of the Speak & Spell electronic toy.

‘utz’ is a developer of sound drivers and music editors, with a passion for low-level synthesis algorithms. He is also an avid composer and performer of 1-bit music. He maintains a personal website with all his works.

Conferences, Events, Guest Contribution, Reviews

Ludo2017 Conference Review by Ivan Mouraviev

by  •  • 0 Comments

Ludo17 Conference Report: Highlights and Themes

Ivan Mouraviev [1] reviews Ludo2017 for us, offering his thoughts on the experience.

Ivan is a student at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he specializes in game music. Ludo2017 was his first Ludo conference, where he presented a very well-received paper ‘Textual Play: Music as Performance in the Ludomusicological Discourse’.

Independent scholar Mark Benis, writing in his report for the 2017 North American Conference on Video Game Music, recently remarked that “video games have a way of bringing people together.” Indeed they do. This is how I felt at the sixth annual Ludomusicology conference held over 20-22 April at Bath Spa University. The event was hosted by Professor James Newman and organised by Ludomusicology Research Group members Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, Mark Sweeney, and Melanie Fritsch. [2] As a student and newcomer to the world of academic conferences, I did not entirely know what to expect at Ludo17. However, delegates and organisers alike were superbly welcoming. Being at the conference was a fun and intellectually stimulating experience from start to finish. With 40+ attendees across three days, 30 diverse papers were presented that ranged from musicological and music-theoretical investigations of music in video games to studies of game music history, composition, technology, and performance. Indeed, diversity of approach and subject matter was a hallmark of the event. In what follows I report on the conference via a series of personal highlights, summarising what I found to be among the most significant research presentations; I also tease out emerging trends, questions, and possible points of departure for future research. The report is organised loosely around four themes rather than by presentations chronologically. Please forgive my inevitably many omissions.

 

  1. Constraints and affordances: game music technology and composition

Blake Troise opened the conference by presenting his research on the technological and creatives affordance of 1-bit music: a sub-category of chiptune based on a single square wave. [3] As the name of 1-bit suggests, the synthetic process of 1-bit music imposes binary limitations—a square wave can only be produced at either a high or low amplitude (that is, and on or off signal). However, through a live demonstration, Troise showed how sophisticated polyphony, timbral variation, and even supra-binary amplitudes can be achieved with 1-bit chiptune—for example by exploiting the limits of perception (since discrete transients less than 100 milliseconds apart are perceived by the human brain as a single sound), and using techniques like pin-pulse modulation (which can help avoid the mutual cancellation of two overlapping signals).

Composer Ricardo Climent offered a different flavour of research on a similar theme, also on the first day. Climent presented his fascinating use of the freely available game-design software Unreal Engine to unfold musical narratives ludically. [4] Specifically, this took the form of an interactive work titled s.laag, which serves as a game-level replica of the World’s Fair held in Brussels in 1958; primarily the player-character takes on the role of a bass clarinet to navigate through various mini-games and around architectural icons. Kevin Burke’s presentation was also retrospective but took a different, more analytical approach, examining how composer Hitoshi Sakimoto—of Final Fantasy and Valkyria Chronicles fame—utilised a custom Terpsichorean sound driver in the 1990s to produce musical results that significantly surpassed late-twentieth-century expectations for 16 bit sound synthesis. Come day three, Richard Stevens and Niklos Stavropoulos dealt with video game music from a more explicitly design- and implementation-focussed perspective, presenting some valuable techniques for manipulating and performing pre-composed sound in games (also using, like Climent, Unreal Engine). [5]

Ultimately it was Kenneth ‘Kenny’ McAlpine, though, the first of Ludo17’s three keynote speakers, who most compellingly synthesised the many diverse strands making up this broad theme of game music technology, composition, and affordances/constraints. [6] McAlpine showcased some of the research behind his forthcoming Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes (Oxford University Press). He discussed the various affordances of technologies like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and more, presenting a broad range of historical and conceptual themes in a captivatingly personal way. Especially memorable was McAlpine’s emphasis on the idea that the near-total freedom of musical production available to us today, not least through digital audio workstations such as Apple’s Logic Pro, can be “crippling”. The goal of contemporary artistic practice—both within and beyond the realm of video game music—may not so much be a matter of “freedom of choice” as “freedom from choice”.

 

  1. Rule-bound musical play

What defines the “game” in “video game”? This was a question addressed by James Saunders, who highlighted Jesper Juul’s work on the topic (2003) as well as Huizinga’s important theorisation of play (1955), to pinpoint some insightful correspondences between rules in games and indeterminate music. [7] Saunders also noted how the structuring, constraining, and sometimes not immediately perceptible effects of video game rules can (re)present models of social interaction, and facilitate players’ agency by offering both choices and goals for game and music play. Two-way engagement between Twitch streamers and their often expansive audiences was raised as an example of such interaction in the discussion following Saunders’ presentation. Indeed, web audiences can significantly influence—and at times even determine—the structure and content of a streamer’s gameplay. Many streamers also publicly perform their musical taste by playing popular music as a kind of trans-diegetic underscore, that can be structured by audience interaction and be experienced as both external (non-diegetic) and integral (diegetic) to the streamer’s ludic performance. The 2015 article “From Mixtapes to Multiplayers” by Michael Austin (who also presented a fascinating paper on the participatory musical culture of “Automatic Mario Music Videos” on Day 2) certainly comes to mind, for Austin’s examination of how different kinds of social video gaming can serve as gamified “transmutation[s] of the mixtape” and displays of curatorial control. [8] As the professional players of massive online battle-arena (MOBA) games like Dota 2 continue to attract large streaming audiences, and video games become increasingly formidable icons in popular culture more generally, the realm of game-like musical interactions in virtual spaces seems ripe for further scholarly investigation. How, for example, are streamer-audience musical interactions shaped by the (in)formal rules that moderators enforce on platforms such as Twitch, perhaps contributing in turn to a broader fostering of online community?

On the broader theme of music and rule-bounded play it is hard not to mention the work of Roger Moseley. [9] On Day 3 Moseley presented a superb keynote that resonated with the approach and several themes within his recently-published and open-access monograph Keys to Play (University of California Press, 2016). [10] The keynote was titled “Recursive Representations of Musical Recreation”, placing “recursion”—signalling basic repetition and looping, the successive executions that occur in computation, and more specifically a kind of historical ludomusical praxis—in the critical spotlight. One particular argument was for “recreation” as a potentially more critically rewarding notion than “reproduction” when dealing with the recursive nature of ludomusicality, since “reproduction” has been historically more closely associated with a decidedly “serious” “phonograph ideology” rather than intrinsically creative and performative action (an association no doubt spurred by, or at least reflected in, Adorno’s and Walter Benjamin’s famous twentieth-century critiques of commercial culture). The first known use of the term “ludomusicology” can be traced to digital-game researcher and music theorist Guillaume Laroche in 2007; nevertheless, Moseley’s contributions to our understanding of the implications of the term “ludomusicology”—broadly construed as the study of music and play—have been seminal. [11] This is eminent not only in Keys to Play, but also in the 2013 chapter “Playing Games with Music” which elaborates play theory by Huizinga and Roger Caillois in the context of Guitar Hero after a much-needed historicization of work and play. [12] Indeed, central to Moseley’s work has been the goal of putting “play on display” in historical terms within a “media archaeology” framework, illuminating the possibility that “notions and terminology associated with digital games are capable of enlightening historical ludomusical praxis, just as the latter informs the former.” [13]

 

  1. Video game music as performance and/or culture

Several papers dealt with video game music and broader notions of culture, performance, or both. Presenting on the first day, Donal Fullam discussed how video game music can be understood as an expression of “algorithmic culture”. [14] For Fullam this cultural expression is a relatively recent incarnation of a more long-standing impulse, one that “treats music as an algorithmically determined system” and can be traced to the twentieth century avant garde and even further, to the foundations of functional harmony (which in turn represents a more basic tendency to systematise musical sound as a “cultural articulation”). A similar theoretical view of music as performing cultural and aesthetic functions was explored on Day 2 by Edward Spencer. His study investigated the bass-music signification and broader sociopolitical implications of Major League Gaming Montage Parodies, or MLGMPs. These represent a specific music video genre that employs audiovisual memes and “canonic” dubstep tracks by the likes of Skrillex to parody montages of skillful first-person shooter gameplay. [15] As Spencer convincingly showed through a critique of recent postmodern theory around notions of meaningless in contemporary culture, MLGMPs should not be automatically dismissed simply because they may, at first glance, seem to represent “ultimate” instances of “media convergence and ludic semiotic excess”.

Melanie Fritsch presented and applied also on Day 2 a theoretical platform for the analysis of music in video games.  principally argue that music in video games may be, but so far largely has not been, studies through the lens of interdisciplinary performance studies—which generally favours an ontology of music that is necessarily behavioural and social. [16] Fritsch did note, however, that scholars such as Tim Summers, Kiri Miller, and Karen Collins (and, I would add, William Cheng) have started to investigate music in video games beyond the basic paradigm of musicological close reading; both Miller and Cheng have favoured ethnographic paradigms while Summers is broadly interdisciplinary and Collins has tended towards embodied cognition and performance analysis. [17] Fritsch also introduced the German terms aufführung and leistung for understanding performance in a novel and more multi-dimensional way, with the former referring to presentation, aesthetics, and artistry and the latter encapsulating notions of skillful display, effort, and efficiency. Fritsch’s transnational perspective resonates with Moseley’s valuable historicisation of work and play in that both serve as a reminder that fundamental terms in music scholarship like “performance” and “play” are historically and socially contingent. Indeed, what one group of gamers or scholars regards as “play”, whether ludically or musically or both, may take on dramatically differently meaning across different times, spaces, or sociocultural settings. Or, put differently, the somewhat taken-for-granted idea that both games and music are inherently playful may be more thoroughly examined in a more empirically grounded, historically and socially (and perhaps even politically) specific way.

This last question may apply equally to video game music—that which is produced, performed, and listened to beyond conventional gameplay, such as in the concert hall. Video game music in this sense was explored in a concentrated and lively manner across four back-to-back presentations in Session 7, titled “In Concert”. In the first half of the session, Joana Freitas and Elizabeth Hunt drew attention to how notable organisations like Video Games Live have sought to “gamify” the concert hall in order to achieve “collaborative immersion and experience”. [18] James S. Tate and Ben Hopgood then dealt more specifically with music associated with Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs) and Final Fantasy respectively; Tate presented convincing evidence for, and hypotheses to explain, the widespread popularity of JRPG soundtracks in concert performance, while Hopgood’s study was more analytical in discussing the easy-to-forget but nevertheless prominent “classical music identifiers” that video game music often carries as part of its dense semiotic baggage. [19] Though it was only mentioned in passing, an exciting and potentially highly rewarding direction for future research in this area is the ongoing global concert tour of thatgamecompany’s broadly well-received PS3/4 title Journey; the tour features Chicago’s Fifth House ensemble performing the game’s soundtrack in real time in response to the actions of four-to-six players on stage. [20]

 

  1. Learning music through games and vice versa: video game pedagogy

Talks on the role of video games—and principles of play more generally—in education only made up a small portion of Ludo17, however, the quality of research presented and potential for growth on this theme certainly warrants its own sub-heading. On day three Meghan Naxer brought to light the value of video game game principles and practices to be fruitfully manifested in the classroom. [21] A personal anecdote in this regard was especially revealing: after responding student email queries with indirect suggestions to literature and other resources, Naxer’s students interpreted the interaction as a game-like “side quest” and subsequently became all the more excited to engage in independent study. Jan Torge Claussen next presented his ongoing research with 18 students learning to play guitar through Rocksmith, the decidedly more education-oriented competitor of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. [22] Claussen’s students have been video recorded and completed journals detailing their experiences with the game; early findings tentatively suggest that Rocksmith may be a useful means to learn how to play guitar through Rocksmith rather than to gain guitar proficiency in general.

 

Concluding remarks

In closing, I would like to draw attention to three talks that were especially intellectually stimulating, but do not fall neatly under any of the thematic categories I use above. Firstly, Stephen Tatlow and George Marshall expertly examined complex questions of music and diegesis, through voice communication in the fantasy role-playing game EVE Online and popular music in the racing title Forza respectively. [23] Implicit in Tatlow’s discussion was the possibility for in-game diegetic voices to function musically, or rather for music to function as a player’s in-game diegetic voice—as music arguably already does in Journey, where the only means of direct communication involves performing short musical pulses in the absence of conventional text- and voice-based chat. Secondly, James Tate discussed the problematic potential of developing a video game music studies canon, an especially important issue that we need not inherit from popular music studies and the Western ‘art’ music realm. [24] As Tate’s research showed, though, nostalgia is already something of a potent structuring force in steering which titles are most prominent in the game studies discourse. How, going forward, will we negotiate our personal tastes with academic integrity and maintain a field driven by egalitarian values that emphasise the embracing of diversity? Thirdly, Michiel Kamp’s “Ludo-musical Kuleshov?” drew much-needed attention to the importance of understanding the psychology of video game music perception and affect, including how strongly our interpretations of music can be guided by on-screen and vice versa. [25] Kamp also presented the exciting potential of his ludo-musical (practice-led) research paradigm whereby a relatively simple game design allowed flexible and iterative reformulation of research questions as uncertainties were clarified or new questions arose. In turn this brought to light how empirically-grounded musicological study tends to exist at the broader intersection of the ‘hard’ sciences and the humanities, drawing on the principles and techniques of both.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the concert curated by Professor James Saunders (with thanks to Alex Glyde-Bates) held at the end of day two. Performed works included the playful and aesthetically engaging, as was the case with Troise’s chiptune piece “FAMIFOOD” and Clement’s live play-through of s.laag. More overtly unconventional and thought-provoking compositions by Louis d’Heudieres and Ben Jameson explored, by ludic means, the ontological boundaries of “authentic” live performance—through a rule-based approach and Guitar Hero respectively. [26] Jameson’s piece in particular stood out, as a novel, compositional and performative elaboration of the seminal Guitar Hero research carried out by Kiri Miller. I believe our broad and fast-growing field of video game music studies should continue to feature and therefore encourage more work in this vein of artistic practice as research, which includes the studies by Clement and Kamp mentioned above; it is an emerging paradigm that has long been accepted in the visual and dramatic arts as a valid means of producing knowledge but remains relatively under-theorised and under-developed in music. [27]

In summary, Ludo17 was diverse, fun, and intellectually stimulating; it featured student and early-career researchers alongside established scholars; and it did what arguably most ‘good’ scholarship should do: open up, rather than close off, new and exciting lines of inquiry. To the curious reader I highly recommend visiting the #Ludo2017 twitter feed as well as the booklet of abstracts, for a more comprehensive look into the diversity of research that was presented beyond what I have been able to discuss here. I very much look forward to next year’s conference and wish to thank the organisers for organising a fantastic event.

 

Notes

  1. Ivan Mouraviev, BMus/BSc in musicology and biological sciences; currently undertaking a BMus (hons) in musicology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
  2. For the organisers’ biographies please see http://www.ludomusicology.org/about/.
  3. Blake Troise, University of Southampton.
  4. laag was composed especially for Dutch bass clarinettist Marij Van Gorkom, as part of the http://dutch-UK.network project started in 2015. For more information see www.game-audio.org.
  5. Richard Stevens, Leeds Beckett University; Nikos Stavropoulos, Leeds Beckett University. Stevens has co-authored with David Raybould the monograph Game Audio Implementation: A Practical Guide Using the Unreal Engine (Waltham, MA: Focal Press, 2015).
  6. Kenneth McAlpine, University of Abertay, Dundee.
  7. James Saunders, Professor of Music, Bath Spa University.
  8. Austin, “From mixtapes to multiplayers: sharing musical taste through video games,” The Soundtrack 8/1–2 (2015), 77–88.
  9. Roger Moseley, Assistant Professor in Musicology, Cornell University.
  10. Keys to Play is freely accessible at http://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.16/.
  11. See Tasneem Karbani, “Summer research project was music to student’s ears,” folio, University of Alberta, published 7 September 2007, accessed 23 May 2017, https://sites.ualberta.ca/~publicas/folio/45/01/04.html.
  12. In Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill (eds), Taking it to the Bridge: Music as Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 279–318.
  13. Keys to Play, 7.
  14. Donal Fullam, PhD Candidate, University College Dublin.
  15. Edward Spencer, DPhil Music student, University of Oxford.
  16. Melanie Fritsch M.A., PhD Candidate, University of Bayreuth.
  17. See, for example: Miller, Playing Along (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; chapter four of Cheng, Sound Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014); and Tim Summers, “Communication for Play,” in Understanding Video Game Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 116–142.
  18. Joana Freitas, MMus, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; Elizabeth Hunt, University of Liverpool.
  19. James S. Tate, PhD Candidate in Musicology at Durham University; Ben Hopgood, Musicology at University of Goldsmiths.
  20. A recent review with Fifth House performers by CBC news is particularly illustrative of the unique challenges and interactive components of Journey: Live. See http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/calgary/journey-game-soundtrack-live-1.4100542.
  21. Meghan Naxer, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Kent State University.
  22. Jan Torge Claussen, PhD Candidate, University of Hildesheim.
  23. Stephen Tatlow, MMus Royal Holloway; George Marshall musicology University of Hull.
  24. James Tate, BMus University of Surrey.
  25. Michiel Kamp, Junior Assistant Professor in Musicology, University of Utrecht.
  26. Louis d’Heudieres, Bath Spa University; Ben Jameson, composition PhD Candidate, University of Southampton.
  27. For an up-to-date account of artistic practice as research in music in both theoretical and practical terms, see: Mine Dogantan-Dack (ed.), “Introduction,” in Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015).

 

%d bloggers like this: