Musical wallpaper or musical worlds? Soundtracks in video games and everyday life
Video games pose a number of new challenges, both to those making and those studying music. As an audio-visual medium, video games have much in common with film and television, but the dimension of interactivity—bound by the rules and goals that games set players—means that music has to be composed and heard in unique ways. Compositional problems include writing a soundtrack that has to dynamically adapt to player actions and cues that last for indeterminate amounts of time. Hearing those soundtracks is as much conditioned by the musical soundtrack discourses of film and television as it is like musical encounters in everyday life: piped music or ‘Muzak’ in restaurants in shops, or travelling with headphones on, for instance. All three listening situations—video games, film and television, and music in everyday life—have in common that as background music, they are often dismissed as inferior to attentive listening to music and mostly valuable for their psychological effects.
I will subject video game music to a variety of ideas and concepts from both film music studies and music in everyday life, most prominently Ben Winters’ unique views on musical diegesis in film, Anahid Kassabian’s ‘ubiquitous music’, Michael Bull’s critique of ‘musical flânerie,’ and Paul Allen Anderson’s ‘Neo-Muzak.’ These will help to consider game soundtracks—especially those least interactive, ludic, dynamic, or ear-catching—as world building instead of ‘musical wallpaper.’
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