Fear and the musical avant-garde in games: Interviews with Jason Graves, Garry Schyman, Paul Gorman and Michael Kamper

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. If you have ever experienced the cold chill of fear when watching a film or playing a video or computer game, it is highly probable that your responses have been manipulated by composers exploiting the musical resources of modernism, experimental music and the avant-garde. Depictions of fear, horror, amorality, evil and so on, have come to be associated with these sound worlds, particularly within the realm of popular culture. A number of game titles and franchises have emerged in recent years, which exploit these musical associations, exploring their creative potential as vehicles of fear and horror within the context of interactive game-play. Two composers associated with this approach are Jason Graves (Dead Space franchise) and Garry Schyman (Bioshock franchise, Dante’s Inferno). This article explores perceived links between avant-garde music (as defined in ‘populist’ rather than musicological or historical terms, as a ‘catch-all’ phrase for twentieth-century music exploiting experimental techniques, modernism and atonality) and depictions of horror and fear through interviews with Graves and Schyman. Further questions are posed to Paul Gorman (audio director – Dante’s Inferno) and Michael Kamper (audio director – Bioshock 2) to contextualize the discussion by demonstrating the significant creative influence of audio directors in guiding the musical approach taken by game composers. The article would be of potential interest to anyone with an interest in game audio, commercial composition/composers, game development, creative collaboration, audio direction and the power of music to manipulate the emotions in association with visual media

BitBox!:A case study interface for teaching real-time adaptive music composition for video games

Real-time adaptive music is now well-established as a popular medium, largely through its use in video game soundtracks. Commercial packages, such as fmod, make freely available the underlying technical methods for use in educational contexts, making adaptive music technologies accessible to students. Writing adaptive music, however, presents a significant learning challenge, not least because it requires a different mode of thought, and tutor and learner may have few mutual points of connection in discovering and understanding the musical drivers, relationships and structures in these works. This article discusses the creation of ‘BitBox!’, a gestural music interface designed to deconstruct and explain the component elements of adaptive composition through interactive play. The interface was displayed at the Dare Protoplay games exposition in Dundee in August 2014. The initial proof-of- concept study proved successful, suggesting possible refinements in design and a broader range of applications

Is Vivaldi smooth and takete? Non-verbal sensory scales for describing music qualities

Studies on the perception of music qualities (such as induced or perceived emotions, performance styles, or timbre nuances) make a large use of verbal descriptors. Although many authors noted that particular music qualities can hardly be described by means of verbal labels, few studies have tried alternatives. This paper aims at exploring the use of non-verbal sensory scales, in order to represent different perceived qualities in Western classical music. Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to six musical excerpts in major key and to evaluate them from a sensorial and semantic point of view (Experiment 1). The same design (Experiment 2) was conducted using musically trained and untrained listeners who were required to listen to six musical excerpts in minor key. The overall findings indicate that subjects\u2019 ratings on non-verbal sensory scales are consistent throughout and the results support the hypothesis that sensory scales can convey some specific sensations that cannot be described verbally, offering interesting insights to deepen our knowledge on the relationship between music and other sensorial experiences. Such research can foster interesting applications in the field of music information retrieval and timbre spaces explorations together with experiments applied to different musical cultures and contexts

Projecting the voice : audience responses to ICT-mediated contemporary opera

This paper examines how audiences experience live opera performance and the behaviours they exhibit during live-streaming of the performance. It aims to contribute to our understanding of how audiences, who increasingly inhabit an environment saturated with digital media, respond to contemporary opera performance. Based on a comparative study of audience experiences and behaviours during a live opera performance and the streamed opera screening, we investigate whether digital mediation affects audience appreciation, and whether streaming live opera means the same thing to an audience as the unmediated performance. We firstly outline the conception, design and performance of a contemporary opera and its simultaneous streaming to nearby digital screens. Then, we report the evaluation of the project as measured by a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods during the rehearsals, the live performance and the screening. As one of the few social studies of contemporary classical music in Britain, our study of opera audience behaviours sheds light on the challenges and opportunities afforded by digital technologies for opera companies. Understanding how audiences appreciate digital operas offers practical advice on how theatres and opera companies could respond to new forms of digital activities

Sound for Fantasy and Freedom

Sound is an integral part of our everyday lives. Sound tells us about physical events in the environ- ment, and we use our voices to share ideas and emotions through sound. When navigating the world on a day-to-day basis, most of us use a balanced mix of stimuli from our eyes, ears and other senses to get along. We do this totally naturally and without effort. In the design of computer game experiences, traditionally, most attention has been given to vision rather than the balanced mix of stimuli from our eyes, ears and other senses most of us use to navigate the world on a day to day basis. The risk is that this emphasis neglects types of interaction with the game needed to create an immersive experience. This chapter summarizes the relationship between sound properties, GameFlow and immersive experience and discusses two projects in which Interactive Institute, Sonic Studio has balanced perceptual stimuli and game mechanics to inspire and create new game concepts that liberate users and their imagination