Happy new year!
We’re pleased to announce that the registration site for #ludo2020 is now live! See details here with further accommodation, travel and registration details on the University of Malta site. We’ll be adding more detailed programme information in the coming weeks.
We also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone to get your submissions to us at ludomusicology@gmail.com as soon as possible!
We are now accepting proposals for Ludo2020 , the Ninth European Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, taking place at the University of Malta, April 24th-25th next year.
Please share our Call for Papers poster online and around your institutions.
We welcome proposals on all aspects of sound and music in games.
This year, we are particularly interested in papers that support the conference theme of ‘Participation, Performance, and the Body’. Papers on this topic may include:
Presentations should last twenty minutes and will be followed by questions. Please submit your paper proposal (c.250 words) with a short provisional bibliography by email to ludomusicology@gmail.com by January 6th 2020. We aim to communicate the programme decisions by January 20th 2020. If you require more information, please email the organizers.
We encourage practitioners and composers to submit proposals for showcasing practice as research.
The conference will feature as a keynote speaker:
Prof. Hillegonda Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture at London South Bank University, musician and electronic music specialist, co-editor of the special issue ‘Hear the Music, Play the Game’ for GAME.
And more to be announced…
Hosted by Costantino Oliva, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta.
Organized by Melanie Fritsch, Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers & Mark Sweeney.
Continuing our series of posts about game music research around the world, Ariel Grez gives us an insight into the activities of our friends in South America.
At first glance, the ludomusicological research in Chile is as recent as the foundation of the Chilean’s Research Group of Video game music (LUDUM), at least when it comes to the use of the term ludomusicología (the self-proclaimed translation of the term ludomusicology). LUDUM is formed by musicians and researchers who met at University of Chile. Daniel Miranda is a pianist, composer, producer and researcher, Joaquin Gutiérrez is an electric guitarist and composition student, Guillermo Jarpa is a bassist, researcher and cultural manager, with formal training on audiovisual communication, Ariel Grez is a clarinetist, singer and songwriter, researcher and adjunct professor at the Music Department of University of Chile and Sean Moscoso is a percussionist and artist, and professor at the Sound Studies Department of the same university. We started this group in February 2018, and although we were the first to centralize research and documentation, the work from agents outside LUDUM before and after its beginnings must not be ignored.
That’s why our first assignment was to identify the state of academic video game music and sound research, including the social and cultural reach of its music, and the advances of Chile’s video game music industry.
It is worth noting that research from Chile was part of the first wave of academic scholarship on video game music. 2004 saw the completion of a Master’s thesis in musicology by Mónica Moreira Cury named Video games music: modes of use and their relationship with the social imaginary. A study on the soundtrack of the game Final Fantasy VI. Her work is relevant in a context where this topic of research was underrepresented globally and non-existent in Latin-america.
In 2014 Gerardo Marcoleta, an academic member of the Autonomous Center of Musical Research (CIMA) of University of Valparaiso, presented “Music for Video Games” and other papers about the matter in different instances, including academic ones like the “1st Meeting of Contemporary Music” in Rengo or the “1st International Instance of Music and Audio” in ARCOS’s institute.
The Chilean videogame industry is in an adolescent, but evolving, condition. The Chilean Association of Video Game Development Companies (VG Chile) is a guild of 38 companies (representing more than the 85% of games companies operating in Chile). In regards to the video game music that these companies make, we have observed that the composers of the games with the higher reach, are Chileans who graduated from music-related programs from colleges or academic institutes. Among them we have Francisco “Foco”, Patricio Meneses, Ronny Antares, and others. Since 2015 the 101 Training School of Creative Technologies has offered the diploma of music production for video games, the only program in our country that specializes in music for this media, with “Foco” as their main teacher.
In Chile, Video Game Music is also experienced as a collective cultural experience taken from its original designed setting (video games) to – literally – the streets and festivals. There are many video game music bands and groups of different levels of professionalization that play music of (or inspired by) video games. Ludópatas and Jazztick make regular concerts in the capital Santiago de Chile, with the latter having performed weekly in different streets and venues. The Plasmas have been sporadically playing game music for more than 10 years in Valparaíso. Pokérus and Thennecan have smaller, but growing audiences. The Popular Music Orchestra in Concepción and the Student’s Orchestra of Federico Santa María’s Technical University in Valparaíso have included video game music in their repertoire.
As in other parts of the world, the chiptune scene has developed in our country since the mid-2000s with different waves of artists. First with Una Niña Malvada and Noobelesia, later from 2008 to 2012 with H#xz, Analog and Foco, then from 2012 to 2016 we have Kbt, Utsuho, Clsource and YZYX, and in recent years Jota Capsula and Bluu whose point of reunion in Santiago was the Once Super Portable/Mutante, a regular music festival (‘circlo’) in which chiptune musicians gathered and played among peers and fans. These events are on hold since March 2019, because their point of reunion Casa Ruido recently closed.
These musicians have been building networks of social interchange to promote their music and create financial opportunities of collaboration between each other, as seen with the chiptune scene, the collective of game music “Pixel Quemado” and the Ñoño Party (the word ñoño is used colloquially to describe someone who pertains to geek culture). This last event aspires to congregate players, who want to have fun while listening to the video game bands of the capital. After a successful first Ñoño Party, that took place in April 2017 in Santiago de Chile, there was a second version of this event in October 2018, and the Ñoño Party 3 will be held in November 2019. But, that was not the first time that this kind of event was held in our country, as in May of 2014 the Festival of Video Game Music was held in our capital.
Three international video game music ensembles have come to our country: Symphony of the Goddesses (2015), Distant Worlds (2014) and Video Games Live (2012), all of them with excellent reception.
Chile is a highly centralized country, both in politics and economy. Our work as game music scholars is dedicated mostly to uncover the state of video game music in our close environment: the capital, Santiago de Chile. This is because our members are students, graduates and/or workers of the University of Chile and are all living in Santiago. But, there is still a lot to unravel in other areas of our country.
Our research group started with seminar activities that consisted of getting an overview on the state of the art of the discipline by assigning readings and making summaries on each reading. Here, we read some of the seminal works on video game music, and came to realize the first and most important challenge to disseminating our interest in video game music research: the lack of research in Spanish on the topic.
So, in an attempt to activate the academic community, we organized our first public event. We held the 1st National Meeting of Ludomusicology in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile in November of 2018, with the sponsorship of its Music Department, and the Latin American Aesthetics Research Centre, with the support of the “Espacio Elefante” Cultural Center. Even though LUDUM is an independent research group, we are working to strengthen our bonds with different institutions, such as the University of Santiago de Chile or the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso.
The meeting’s program consisted of three days with academic, artistic, formative and musical activities open to the public: A daily session consisted of seminars, where papers were presented, and different activities with artists and video game music producers. A forum of productive experiences was held the first day, with the Creative Director of Niebla Games Nicolás Valdivia and Composer René Romo. A Workshop on interactive music was held the second day with the composer Francisco “Foco”. Musical performances were realized every day, with arrangements of video game music made by students of musical composition David Bustamante and Joaquín Gutiérrez, the latter being a member of our group and also director of the ensemble composed by students of the University of Chile. Foco also performed his chiptune project and Ludópatas closed the last day with a concert, where a full Sala Elefante danced and jumped to some classic video game tunes. A review of this concert? was published in the Chilean Musical Journal.
Also, LUDUM members have presented papers at academic conferences. Ariel Grez has presented papers both at the Ludo2018 and Ludo2019 conferences, using different analytic approaches to video game music, aesthetic, semiotic, ludic and ethics fields, bringing the input of Latin American thinkers like Katya Mandoki and Enrique Dussel to the ludomusicological field, to deepen our understanding of the reception of video game music, aiming to finally being able to characterize the specificity of Latin-American gamers experience in the complexity of the geopolitical problem of distribution of video games. On the other hand. Daniel Miranda presented a paper in the Third Chilean Congress of Popular Music in Alberto Hurtado University. In this paper entitled A Contained Princess: a Vocal Analysis of Super Mario 3D World’s Characters he proposes a methodology to analyze these voices comparing the pitches and sentences used by each character, doing a gender performance reading inspired by Butler (1990) and also studying the reception of Princess Peach’s voice, categorizing popular comments of an online viral video. He concludes that the Princess’ voice responds to a voice direction that overcaricaturizes her among other characters through a process of infantilization that is increased over time in the games she appears in and by using a template of an already caricatured version of a sexualized woman (Betty Boop, Marilyn Monroe). A continuation of this research was presented at Ludo 2019, in which the reception of Peach’s voice was studied through Philip Tagg’s methodology of semiotic analysis, categorizing different profiles of gamers that responded in different ways to her voice, suggesting that experienced male gamers were more likely to refrain from playing with her character because of her voice.
Our objective is to consolidate a space of debate and knowledge building on video game music, articulating the Spanish-speaking community, while also connecting with the academic and professional field and the public in general. To that effect, we are preparing several investigation projects, ranging from characterizing the local video game bands scene, to analysing the Chilean production of video game music, and continuing to test different analytical methods to investigate the experience of listening while gaming. Last but not least, we are currently preparing our second academic event, the Second National Ludomusicology Gathering, here in Santiago de Chile.
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