Exploring the Use of Musical Sound Effects in Games

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Noah Kellman
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Case Basis ◽  
Event Triggered

Musical sound effects are brief, event-triggered sounds, apart from the dialogue or music, which nonetheless contain a distinctly musical element as part of their sonic essence. Combining semiotic codes and thematic materials, musical sound effects can serve various important functions in video games: accentuating emotions, building worlds, providing signals and clues, and other purposes. This chapter explores various examples of their use, discussing how and why they are used on a case by case basis. It then provides readers with different techniques that can be applied to their own video game music projects.

Ludomusicology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Video Game Music

In the past two decades, the study of video game music has come into its own and gained acceptance in the academic community. This subdiscipline, now commonly referred as ludomusicology, is still attempting basic questions concerning how it can be researched. This article aims to present the current situation and to reflect about some of the main lines of research related to the music of video games and their culture, a field of ongoing research that has received little attention in Hispanophone academia up to the present time. This article was originally published in Anuario Musical 75 (2020): 181–99 and has been translated for the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. https://doi.org/10.3989/anuariomusical.2020.75.09

The Atari VCS

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McAlpine
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Hardware Design ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Home Video ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
Sound Chip ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the Atari VCS, the machine that took video games out of the arcades and into the living room and established Atari as the dominant player in the home video games industry, at least for a time. It examines the context that surrounded the birth of the Atari VCS and how that influenced its hardware design, in turn shaping both the sound and people’s expectations of video game music. The Atari’s sound chip, the Television Interface Adaptor, gave the Atari VCS what might charitably be described as a ‘characterful’ voice. By reviewing the hardware, this chapter explores how and why the Atari VCS sounded just the way it did, and by exploring some of the games that were released for the platform the chapter shows how, while sound games did indeed sound dreadful, with a little musical ingenuity they could work wonderfully as game soundtracks.

scholarly journals Soaring Through the Sky

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
Analytical Potential

In this article, I explore the analytical potential of musical topics and tropes in the study of video game music. Following Neumeyer (2015), Almén (2008), and Hatten (1994), I establish a methodology with which to approach musical topics in video game music. By way of a case study, I begin by defining the soaring topic through a historical and cultural examination of flying in cinema and video games. Flying, and more specifically soaring, has been a staple in film from the earliest days of cinema, and the music that accompanies it is also found in video games that prominently feature flying. I then engage the music of flying sequences in two specific video games, Final Fantasy IV (1991) and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011). The resulting analyses demonstrate that this approach helps to unpack the complex narratives found in video games.

scholarly journals Use of Progressive Rock in Donkey Kong Country (1994)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Background Music ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
Oxford University Press

Whereas most of Nintendo’s music from the 1990s used basic looping structure and simple chiptune-reminiscent sounds, Donkey Kong Country (1994), composed by British composer David Wise rather than by Nintendo’s in-house composition team, featured texturally more complex music, including features characteristic of the 1970s/80s progressive rock style such as short repeated melodies and chord progressions with layering (Collins 44).  For example, in “Fear Factory” (Figure 1), we hear a repeated chord progression of (VI, iv, i) underneath a faster eighth-note melody. Very little harmonic movement occurs and the focus is more on the melodic layers that occur in this top voice. In addition, “Fear Factory” includes unconventional punk, “mechanic/industrial”, and “glitch” noises that emphasize melodic content (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v18pEFQb3EM&t=45s). As William Cheng discusses in Sound Play, the use of such unconventional sounds often contribute to a feeling of dissociation and alienation in the player, and create a divide between diegetic (that is, music the characters are aware of) and non-diegetic (that is, “background” music) soundscapes (Cheng 98-9). While this is not a direct element of prog-rock, both industrial and prog-rock music styles feature a strong focus on texture. Collins speculates that this may have been an attempt by Nintendo to capitalize on the ‘edgier’ market of other game producers such as Sega (Collins 46). In this paper, an analysis of form, melodic structure, and instrumentation from Donkey Kong Country’s “Treetop Rock” and “Fear Factory” will demonstrate features atypical of Nintendo style, which normally features catchy tunes, simple instrumentation, and pop-inspired harmonies. Figure 1: e-:  VI               iv                      I                                       VI                    ivBibliography Cheng, William. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. The Oxford Music/media Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Collins, Karen. Game Sound an Introduction to the History, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

Videogames and Sensory Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-183
Author(s):  
Kaila Goode ◽  
Sheri Vasinda
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Instructional Tool ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
Classroom Use

The act of playing video games is a multimodal experience, immersing the gamer in a sensorial experience in the digital world. Video games incorporate sensory literacies such as haptics, graphics, sound effects, music, auditory dialogue, visual text, and character movement. The sensory literacies allow gamers to connect the digital world to the physical world, becoming engrossed in the world and story of the video game. Thus, due to the multimodal and sensorial nature of video games, they have the potential to be a beneficial tool for increasing student engagement within the classroom and assisting students in further increasing literacy skills and content knowledge. In addition, a review of literature of classroom use of video games as an instructional tool found increased engagement, use of video games as texts, cross-literacies that supported traditional literacy processes and skills.

Classifying Game Music

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Video Game Music

This final chapter considers the ways in which video game music has rapidly entered the concert repertoire, and what that change might mean for how listeners, critics, and musicians understand classical music. In the wake of successful long-running concert tours such as Video Games Live (which pairs local orchestras with a traveling multimedia show) and Final Symphony, many financially strapped orchestras have embraced game music as a way of reaching out to millennial audiences, much to the chagrin of some traditionally minded audience members. Moreover, some groups have begun to advocate for reclassifying game music as classical, thus breaking down persistent barriers between high and low arts.

Canon Anxiety?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Karen M. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Music History ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Original Game ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
The People

Canons—of music, video games, or people—can provide a shared pool of resources for scholars, practitioners, and fans; but the formation of canons can also lead to an obscuring or devaluing of materials and people outside of a canon. The four authors in this colloquy interrogate issues of canons relating to video game music and sound from a variety of perspectives. Each author considers an aspect of canonization and argues for a wider purview. In “Rewritable Memory: Concerts, Canons, and Game Music History,” William Gibbons examines the ways in which concerts of video game music may create canons and reinforce particular historical narratives. In “On Canons as Music and Muse,” Julianne Grasso views the music originally presented in a video game as itself a type of canon and argues that official and fan arrangements of original game music may provide windows into lived experiences of play. In “The Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Imperative Conversations Needed in Game Music and Sound Studies,” Hyeonjin Park highlights issues of diversity and representation in the field of video game music and sound studies, with respect to the people and music that make up the subjects of the field, the people who produce scholarship in the field, and the people who engage with game music and sound. In “Canon Anxiety?” Karen Cook pulls together various issues of academic canons to question the scope, focus, and diversity of the growing field in which the Journal of Sound and Music in Games exists.

The Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Imperative Conversations Needed in Game Music and Sound Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
Hyeonjin Park
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Music History ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Original Game ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
The People

Canons—of music, video games, or people—can provide a shared pool of resources for scholars, practitioners, and fans; but the formation of canons can also lead to an obscuring or devaluing of materials and people outside of a canon. The four authors in this colloquy interrogate issues of canons relating to video game music and sound from a variety of perspectives. Each author considers an aspect of canonization and argues for a wider purview. In “Rewritable Memory: Concerts, Canons, and Game Music History,” William Gibbons examines the ways in which concerts of video game music may create canons and reinforce particular historical narratives. In “On Canons as Music and Muse,” Julianne Grasso views the music originally presented in a video game as itself a type of canon and argues that official and fan arrangements of original game music may provide windows into lived experiences of play. In “The Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Imperative Conversations Needed in Game Music and Sound Studies,” Hyeonjin Park highlights issues of diversity and representation in the field of video game music and sound studies, with respect to the people and music that make up the subjects of the field, the people who produce scholarship in the field, and the people who engage with game music and sound. In “Canon Anxiety?” Karen Cook pulls together various issues of academic canons to question the scope, focus, and diversity of the growing field in which the Journal of Sound and Music in Games exists.

On Canons as Music and Muse

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-86
Author(s):  
Julianne Grasso
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Music History ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Original Game ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
The People

Canons—of music, video games, or people—can provide a shared pool of resources for scholars, practitioners, and fans; but the formation of canons can also lead to an obscuring or devaluing of materials and people outside of a canon. The four authors in this colloquy interrogate issues of canons relating to video game music and sound from a variety of perspectives. Each author considers an aspect of canonization and argues for a wider purview. In “Rewritable Memory: Concerts, Canons, and Game Music History,” William Gibbons examines the ways in which concerts of video game music may create canons and reinforce particular historical narratives. In “On Canons as Music and Muse,” Julianne Grasso views the music originally presented in a video game as itself a type of canon and argues that official and fan arrangements of original game music may provide windows into lived experiences of play. In “The Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Imperative Conversations Needed in Game Music and Sound Studies,” Hyeonjin Park highlights issues of diversity and representation in the field of video game music and sound studies, with respect to the people and music that make up the subjects of the field, the people who produce scholarship in the field, and the people who engage with game music and sound. In “Canon Anxiety?” Karen Cook pulls together various issues of academic canons to question the scope, focus, and diversity of the growing field in which the Journal of Sound and Music in Games exists.

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