Music for a Boss Fight: Creating for the Context of Video Game Worlds

Creating music increases student engagement, and drawing on students’ background knowledge is a respectful way to value students’ lived experiences. By challenging students to create music for the context of a video game world, teachers can build on students’ previous knowledge and bridge that knowledge to the elements of music and creating music for specific contexts and purposes. This column outlines a project for fourth graders to create video game music for specific contexts within the game.

Music in the Digital World

Digital technologies have impacted and reshaped almost every aspect of 21st-century life, from communication and commerce, to work and leisure, to education and politics. This bibliography represents a collection of scholarship that seeks to detail how varied and ubiquitous digital technologies have reshaped music, and how music has in turn shaped the digital world. Since the first years of the 21st century, widespread access to digital technologies, including social media, smartphones, and Web 2.0 have fundamentally transformed musical aesthetics, creation, performance, consumption, and reception on a global scale. As of October 2020, there are around 4.66 billion active internet users around the globe, nearly all of whom interact with music in one way or another. This bibliography addresses how this “digital world” is implicated in 21st-century digital regimes, and in the global flows and local assemblages of music’s production, circulation, and consumption. Like the technologies themselves, scholarship on music in the digital world is a rapidly shifting field. Readers are encouraged to understand this bibliography as a fluid network of related topics, with substantial thematic overlap between sections. Except when a subject touches on topics unique to this bibliography, the authors have omitted topics covered extensively in other Oxford Bibliographies, including “Film Music,” “Video Game Music,” “Electronic and Computer Music Instruments,” and “Music Technology.”

Ludomusicology

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

NACVGM 2020 Retrospective

The North American Conference on Video Game Music (NACVGM) has been held yearly as an in-person conference. NACVGM 2020 was originally scheduled to occur in April 2020 in Ithaca, New York. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many academic events in 2020 were shifted online, including game music conferences like Ludo2020 and NACVGM. The organizing committee for NACVGM decided to hold the full conference digitally as a live event. After hosting NACVGM 2020 live on his personal Twitch.tv page, Ryan Thompson explains the technical means that made it possible and offers a series of recommendations for other individuals considering shifting in-person meetings to online events. This reflection provides one perspective on hosting an academic conference during lockdown.

The Game Music Handbook

Writing music for games is an art that requires conceptual forethought, specialized technical skill, and a deep understanding of how players interact with games and game audio. The Game Music Handbook embarks on a journey through numerous soundscapes throughout video game history, exploring a series of concepts and techniques that are key to being a successful game music composer. This book organizes key game music scoring concepts into an applicable methodology, describing them with memorable distinctions that leave readers with a clear picture of how to apply them to creating music and sound. Any music composer or musician who wishes to begin a career in game composition can pick up this text and quickly gain a solid understanding of the core techniques for composing video game music, as well as the conceptual differences that separate it from any other compositional field. Some of these topics include designing emotional arcs for nonlinear timelines, the relationship between music and sound design, discussion of the player’s interaction with audio, and more. There is also much to be gained by advanced readers or game audio professionals, who will find detailed discussion of game state and its effect on player interaction, a composer-centric lesson on programming, how to work with version control, information on visual programming languages, emergent audio, music for virtual reality (VR), procedural audio, and other indispensable knowledge about advanced reactive music concepts. The text often explores the effect that music has on a player’s interaction with a game. It discusses the practical application of this interaction through the examination of various techniques employed in games throughout video game history to enhance immersion, emphasize emotion, and create compelling interactive experiences.

What Is “Game Music”?

Game music is an eclectic term, encompassing the many different musical genres that are used in video game scores. This chapter introduces readers to important game music history while seeking to define what musical characteristics are unique to game music. As composers found creative ways to work within the scope of this limited technology, unique challenges led to the conception of a new body of musical work that would later be referred to by the gaming world as “video game music,” or just “game music” for short. This chapter explores the history and development of game music as a genre. It focuses on analyzing how the limitations of previous gaming systems influenced composers to make specific musical choices, while also seeking to define what aesthetic characteristics are unique to video game music and how interactivity has led to new musical forms.