Interactive Digital Music: Enhancing Listener Engagement with Commercial Music

Listeners have long been inspired to interact with music and create new representations of popular releases. Vinyl offered many opportunities to reappropriate chart music, from scratching and tempo manipulation to mixing multiple songs together. More recently, artists could engage their audience to interact with their music by offering mix-stems online for experimentation and sharing. With the extended processing power of mobile devices, the opportunities for interactive music are dramatically increasing. This paper presents research that demonstrates a novel approach to interactive digital music. The research looks at the emergent format of the album app and extends existing paradigms of interactive music playback. The novel album app designed in this research presents a new opportunity for listeners to engage with recorded content by allowing them to explore alternative takes, renditions of a given song in multiple genres, and by allowing direct interaction with embedded mix-stems. The resultant audio remains true to the artist and producer’s studio vision; it is user-influenced, but machine-controlled. The research is conducted in collaboration with artist Daisy and The Dark and was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council

Dynaamisen musiikin merkit avoimessa pelimaailmassa: Semioottinen tarkastelu The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt -pelin musiikista

Tutkielmassa tarkasteltiin The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt -tietokonepelin dynaamisen musiikin muutoksia viestintäprosessina, merkkinä ja merkityksen rakentajana Ferdinand de Saussuren semioottisen viitekehyksen mukaisesti. Analyysiyksikköinä käytettiin pelimusiikin erilaisia siirtymä- ja vaihtelevuusluokkia sekä elokuvateorian mukaista musiikin ei-diegeettisyyttä. Analyysi tehtiin ensisijaisesti peliä pelaamalla ja sen musiikkia kuuntelemalla. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että kyseisessä pelissä musiikki ja soitinryhmät toimivat merkkinä asioille kuten sijainnit ja asutus, perinteisyys, sivistyneisyys ja modernisuus, yö, epätodellisuus ja käsittämättömyys, taistelut ja vaarallisuus sekä pelattava Geralt-noituri. Erityisesti sijaintien kohdalla musiikin soitinryhmät toimivat joissakin tapauksissa viestijänä epäsäännöllisesti. Musiikin merkityksellistäminen liittyi asioihin kuten sosiaaliset luokat ja tilat, sosiaalinen yhteisöllisyys, maanläheisyys, luonto ja vanhanaikaisuus, seikkailullisuus, dramaattisuus ja korkeakulttuuri, pimeys, unenomaisuus, synkkyys, kylmyys ja pelottavuus, sotaisuus, viha, kiroaminen ja noituminen, elinvoiman antaminen ja Geralt-noiturin tunnetilat. Todettiin, että musiikin merkityksellistymisen kannalta erityisen tärkeää on pelin musiikin ja visuaalisuuden suhde. Koska pelissä soivat musiikit ovat sitä varten tehtyjä sävellyksiä, ne on eittämättä pyritty säveltämään pelin muuhun kokonaisuuteen sopiviksi niin, että pelin kohderyhmä tulkitsee musiikin luomat merkitykset intuitiivisesti ”oikein” jollakin tasolla. Voidaan siis todeta, että pelin musiikeissa on näin ollen täydytty käyttää konventionaalisia muotokieliä ja viittauksia esimerkiksi kansanmusiikkiin ja sinfoniamusiikkiin.In this thesis the changes in dynamic music of the digital game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt were analyzed as a communication process, as semiotic signs and builders of signification according to Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiotics. Different classes of transition and variability in game music and non-diegetic music according to film theory were used as the units of analysis. Analysis was done primarily by playing the game and listening to its music. It was observed that the game's music and its layers of instruments work as a sign for different locations and settlements, traditionality, sophistication and modernity, nights, unreality and uncanniness, combat and danger, and playable character Geralt. Especially in different locations the instrumental layers of music work irregularly as a communicator in some cases. Significations of the music were related to things like social classes and spaces, social community, earthiness, nature and traditionality, adventure, drama and high culture, darkness, dreaminess, gloominess, coldness and scariness, belligerence, anger, accursing and witchcraft, administration of vigor and the emotional states of playable character Geralt. It was observed that in terms of signification the relation between the game's music and visuality is especially important. Because the music of the game has been composed and produced specifically for the game, the music is admittedly made so that it fits well to the rest of the game, and so that the game's target group intuitively gets the significations of the music "right" on some level. This is why it can be stated that conventional musical forms and references to things like traditional and orchestral symphony music must have been used in the game's music

Atmosphere & Challenge: An Exploration of Dissonant Player Experiences

Dissonance means an unusual combination of any two things. Two dissonant experiences in video games which could lead to undesirable player states are thematic dissonance and difficulty dissonance. Thematic dissonance potentially annoys players by breaking the atmosphere, and difficulty dissonance by preventing players with low skill from progressing past unbalanced challenges, resulting in rage-quits. This thesis seeks to deepen the understanding of dissonant experiences in video games through two experiments measuring the player experience as affected by different audio and practice conditions respectively. Results indicate that the experience colloquially referred to as a rage-quit is directly affected by avatar death events and game-specific skill and is related to lower levels of heart rate variability (HRV) and higher levels of electrodermal activity (EDA), which implicates feelings of stress. This project successfully advances the definition of video game atmosphere as the level of subjective thematic fit or association between the audio and visual components of a game’s setting, and indicates that musical thematic dissonance may lead to higher intensity negative valence facial events

The Repetition of Video Game Music, its Impact on Video Game Enjoyment, and How Best to Manage it.

Video game music (VGM) has a functional role in video games which can cause it to be looped and repeated as it accompanies the player around the game world. This has an impact on players’ video game enjoyment and engagement when players become overfamiliar with repeating VGM. There have been numerous approaches and techniques implemented in video games to attempt to conceal, reduce, and remove repetition of VGM. However, familiarity through repeated exposure to VGM has a positive functional role for players with regards to player feedback. This constructivist study focuses on the phenomenon of VGM repetition and its impact on the complex concept of video game enjoyment, and gauges how best to manage the phenomenon using various approaches, and techniques, used to conceal, reduce, and remove repetition of VGM. The current study conducted qualitative interviews with actual players who believed that VGM was important to their enjoyment of video games. A codebook was developed from these interviews and used to interpret the data using heuristic inquiry. Findings show that players understand the reasons for VGM repetition and believe that their video game enjoyment is contextually dependent on whether repetition improves their engagement. Players are generally tolerant of VGM repetition but can become overfamiliar with VGM when it repeats, which has an impact on their video game enjoyment. However, players are more appreciative of the functional role that repeating VGM has with regards to feedback as they become more familiar with the repeating VGM. Ultimately a pragmatic worldview is held by the author who believes that this study could be beneficial to other VGM research and the video game industry because it focuses on the perspectives of the players themselves