VGM Research Help

[Alismadia]

I hope you don't mind, but I have a favor to ask of this community...

So I am currently doing an ethnomusicological study that looks into the roles of different kinds of music in video games, and I need some opinions on the topic. My goal is to explore how different types of music impact the culture surrounding gaming, and I need some help collecting feedback. To help with this, I have made a survey that I would like to share with this community that can be found here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XV7FLKR

Taking the survey would be a great help to my research, and I would appreciate anyone who takes the time to check it out (I promise that your answers do not go unnoticed, I love getting responses).

However, I do also want to mention that any topic related to the questions in the survey is also open to further discussion in this thread, and I would like to know your opinions on items including:

What games have the best music and why?

If I say environmental music... What does that make you think of ?

Do games portray culture with the music they contain?

Thank you for any help you can give

[BardicKnowledge]

I have decided to post here instead of responding to your survey. This is largely because listing all of the games I have played (especially on Nintendo platforms!) would take me longer than it took to write my own ludomusicology MA thesis.

I highly recommend considering asking about genres or categories of games instead of titles.

Similarly, I'm not sure that approaching your research question from the relatively limited perspective of the culture surrounding gaming will prove very fruitful, as it feels too broad to be of great use. You are likely to find that a group of gamers who plays primarily action platformers will have an entirely different culture from people who play first-person shooters, who have different experiences and relationships to game audio than do players of Plants vs. Zombies or Peggle.

[Alismadia]

Hello,

First, just to clarify, you don't need to list every game that you have played, it is a list that can be as long as you like, just give me highlights if you do not want to write.

By asking for game names I get more information that is relevant to my interests than if just asking for genre... I want to have an idea of what kind of music people taking the survey have been exposed to, and see how those games impact the answers that follow.

Also, the topic I am writing about is more specific than I explained, and any information people discuss in the audio of a game is interesting to read about, even if for the lack of musical descriptors as seen in certain genres.

I have decided to post here instead of responding to your survey. This is largely because listing all of the games I have played (especially on Nintendo platforms!) would take me longer than it took to write my own ludomusicology MA thesis.

I highly recommend considering asking about genres or categories of games instead of titles.

Similarly, I'm not sure that approaching your research question from the relatively limited perspective of the culture surrounding gaming will prove very fruitful, as it feels too broad to be of great use. You are likely to find that a group of gamers who plays primarily action platformers will have an entirely different culture from people who play first-person shooters, who have different experiences and relationships to game audio than do players of Plants vs. Zombies or Peggle.

[Patrick Burns]

I remember asking for some help for my own ethnomusicological study a little over a year ago. I think I opted to just write a paper instead, though. I'll take the survey when I have a minute.

[DarkSim]

Filled one out for you, hope you find it useful.

[Patrick Burns]

One concept to sort out that you might encounter -- environmental music may be interpreted in different cases as both underscore and diegetic music. For example, the music while wandering Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft obviously has no "real" sound source in the forest. Whereas the music within the taverns of Elwynn, although there is no band present, has both stylistic and acoustic (reverb) elements to suggest it might be coming from within the bar itself. (Music which has a potential on-screen sound source or is within the world of the characters is often referred to as diegetic.)

Diegetic music often as a stronger attachment to the culture within the game world, where as off-screen underscore outside of the character's world has more to do with the art direction of the game or other storytelling conventions. For example, WoW's tavern music is obviously meant to be a sort of celtic drinking tune.

Now, the wandering environmental music is certainly very pastoral with lots of woodwinds and horns, but it's arguable how much that has to do with the game's culture. Does it have more to do with the in-game culture or our actual real-world culture of storytelling conventions?

So, diegetic music within the actual game-world definitely has strong cultural aspects, and off-screen environmental music for the benefit of the player will have less definite splashes of culture, in my opinion.

[Alismadia]

Thank you for this feedback, this is a really poignant issue to the theories I have been working with. To help elaborate on what I have been looking into, I will explain that my focus at this point in the research is on non-diegetic implication of music in games. I would love nothing more to cover the diegetic end as well, but my professors won't let me take the paper to that broad of a topical view.

...in any event,

The current view for me then is that of non-diegetic environmental composition, where the composer has needed to make artistic choices in determining what sounds truly bring an environment to life for the player as well as what sounds make an environment seem aesthetically appropriate. I have been looking into elements such as instrumentation and timbre as tied into symbolism and location during gameplay. What this has led to is the analysis of environments across different games... in examples such as 'forest' which, as I have found so far, has a place in at least 60 different games, and as I expect will be found in hundreds more.

Thusss the goal at this moment is to see how these types of compositions impact the players, for in the end, it is the success of these styles of music in these types of games that has helped to preserve their place in the gaming multiverse.

Though it should be said that I am interested in more than just this element, which is why the other questions exist as they do in the survey.

One concept to sort out that you might encounter -- environmental music may be interpreted in different cases as both underscore and diegetic music. For example, the music while wandering Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft obviously has no "real" sound source in the forest. Whereas the music within the taverns of Elwynn, although there is no band present, has both stylistic and acoustic (reverb) elements to suggest it might be coming from within the bar itself. (Music which has a potential on-screen sound source or is within the world of the characters is often referred to as diegetic.)

Diegetic music often as a stronger attachment to the culture within the game world, where as off-screen underscore outside of the character's world has more to do with the art direction of the game or other storytelling conventions. For example, WoW's tavern music is obviously meant to be a sort of celtic drinking tune.

Now, the wandering environmental music is certainly very pastoral with lots of woodwinds and horns, but it's arguable how much that has to do with the game's culture. Does it have more to do with the in-game culture or our actual real-world culture of storytelling conventions?

So, diegetic music within the actual game-world definitely has strong cultural aspects, and off-screen environmental music for the benefit of the player will have less definite splashes of culture, in my opinion.

[Patrick Burns]

Thusss the goal at this moment is to see how these types of compositions impact the players, for in the end, it is the success of these styles of music in these types of games that has helped to preserve their place in the gaming multiverse.

I really like the topic. Because your study is focusing more on the use of timbre and instrumentation, I guess chip tunes are going to be less useful to you than modern soundtracks. (Although maybe you can make the case that some chip tune instruments are emulating certain kinds of instrumentation. Or maybe you're going even more broad with the softness or edginess of sound, in which case chip tunes might still be useful.)

If you're using the survey -- in part -- as a tool of discovery for yourself, to find games to investigate with regard to instrumentation/timbre and sense of place, some open-ended RPGs and MMOs would be a good place to look. You can extract the game data and get dozens of cues conveniently labelled things like "forest" and "mountains" etc. I know WoW is that way. PM me if you'd like me to upload some of that for you at some point.

[Alismadia]

Thank you, I am glad that you like the topic. The range of games that I am mostly focussing on is from the super nintendo era and forward really, since this is when instrumentation options really began to flourish in games. Though there are a number of interesting examples that I always come back to in the NES period as well, despite the fact that most of the games come down to a 15 to 20 second clip of music on repeat.

Also, a quick shout out to everyone helping with the survey thus far, thank you for taking some time to fill it out

I really like the topic. Because your study is focusing more on the use of timbre and instrumentation, I guess chip tunes are going to be less useful to you than modern soundtracks. (Although maybe you can make the case that some chip tune instruments are emulating certain kinds of instrumentation. Or maybe you're going even more broad with the softness or edginess of sound, in which case chip tunes might still be useful.)