Björn Redecker

Sound plays a crucial role in creating virtual worlds. It is a vital part of digital games, fillingthem with life and undoubtedly enhancing the experience for players. Ever since Al Alcorn“poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone” (Alcorn in Kent 2001, p. 42) for Pong (Atari 1972) and created the bip that broke the silence that had left digital games incomplete, virtual worlds have become livelier, more authentic and, above all, the audio- visual form of media as we know it today. The very same can be said about “music, as the ordered succession of sound” that serves as “a vehicle for the transportation of atmospheric values” (Herzfeld 2013, p. 147, see also Haffter 2015, p. 9). In fact, the very first examples of Game Music were comprised of “the sounds that were already in the machine” (Alcorn in Kent 2001, p. 42). Game Sound as well as Game Music are key design elements in the sense that they can greatly support visual efforts to create an atmosphere and are furthermore capable of evoking as well as adding to different atmospheres themselves. From a design perspective, they are neither an afterthought, nor a passing fad, as “music is not a redundant echo of other aspects of the game, but […] a central part of the audiovisual experience” (Summers 2018, p. 6). This is due to the immediate nature of sound and music, whose direct connection to our feelings and emotions has been a frequent talking point in historic musicology.1 However, how exactly this immediate connection works has never been clearly defined or fathomed and remains a major point of contention within the musicological community (see Mies 1912, p. 399). As mentioned in the Call for Papers, the term ‘atmosphere’ is hard to grasp. It is frequently used but rarely broken down to what it really means or implies. At the same time, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’2, which further complicates the issue. Albeit these difficult prefixes, this paper aims to describe and discuss the interrelationship between sound, music, and atmosphere. In doing so, it will address the connection between music and space and touch upon techniques like ‘Tonmalerei’ (tone painting), constituting musical elements such as texture as well as musical concepts like musique concrète. It will use examples from games like Inside (Playdead 2016), Kona (Parabole 2017), The Longest Journey-Series (Funcom and Red Thread Games 1999-2014), Virginia (Variable State 2016) and others.

20-30 min for each paper. Group A: Björn, Vadim, Felipe, Miruna, Su-Jin Group B: Katja, Jonathan, Anh-Thu, Magdalena, Felix, Jimena