Cleveland Game Expo panel on Game Audio, Fighting Games

[BardicKnowledge]

This past weekend, Dana Plank-Blasko organized an awesome panel of people, including Will Gibbons, Steven Reale, and myself to speak on music and games.  Really quick summaries of the presentations follow:

 

Steven Reale spoke about music as notation, covering games ranging from Bit Trip Runner (he had some _killer_ transcriptions of the game level lined up with the sheet music that results from a perfect playthrough of one of the stages) to LA Noire (which plays specific themes if you are right or wrong during interrogation).

 

Will Gibbons spoke on the hyperreality of game soundtracks, with a special eye towards Street Fighter II.  Consider E. Honda's stage, which takes place in a Japanese bath house with a giant sunburst painted on the wall and a random Kabuki-esque figure on the right side.  The music there is also almost exclusively made up of Japanese instruments and scales (pay particular attention to the opening, which is similar to how a sumo match begins).  The point is that it becomes "more Japanese" than actual Japanese locations or music, a concept known as "hyperrealism."  There's nothing wrong about this until a group (read: Americans who only experience foreign culture through games and films) become so used to the hyper-real presentations of a place that authentic representations of a culture just fail to resonate because we expect the hyper-real instead of what actually exists.

 

I spoke on the relationship between combo notation systems and musical notation.  Both represent only what happens when the moves/notes are executed corectly, not the required inputs to make that happen. For instance, Ryu's crouching MK into Super in SF2 is _always_ listed as cr. MK xx 2x QCF HP but is actually performed as 2X QCF MK HP (that is, you must roll the joystick before hitting MP even though it's a part of the fireball input) and similarly, sheet music doesn't usually tell you which fingers to use to play a given set of notes).  Performing these inputs (and I'm using "perform" intentionally) feels good, not unlike playing Guitar Hero, which I draw numerous comparisons.  The inputs are so important that they form the core of the character.  It's for this reason that Smash includes the options to use SF2 inputs when playing as Ryu -- if you can't do QCF P to throw a fireball, it just wouldn't be Ryu.

 

Dana Plank-Blasko spoke on physical reactions to sounds, different types of arousal (e.g. fight or flight response, heightened senses, etc), and how we experience compound sounds as individual sounds until we are made aware of the parts -- for instance, Hisako (of the new Killer Instinct) makes "undead, bone" sounds when she moves around.  Once you're told that those sounds are actually made by posting groups of taco shells against a wall and cracking them, all you hear is tacos.

 

I am told that the videos of all four presentations will be made available sometime soon, and will post links as soon as I have them.

 

Unrelated but awesome:  I played Super Turbo against Seasons Beatings organizer Chris Hatala and didn't make a fool of myself.  Hooray!