Halo and Music

2008

Unlike traditional artistic endeavours such as literature, painting or sculpture, videogames and their creation, according to Janet Murray, are still in an incunabular period. Various efforts have been made to view videogames in light of other media such as film and narrative while few have yet to address, specifically, ways in which videogames present unique opportunities for expression. This thesis draws upon a number of authors to identify areas unique to videogames, and examines the implications for the employment of music within them. After examining the case for videogame uniqueness, the thesis looks to the current musical paradigm within videogames and, finding it somewhat lacking, offers a critique of the paradigm. A number of games that do, however, break from tradition and utilise music in exceptional ways are then discussed and their potential for adoption in future games is assessed. The final component of the thesis is an investigation into the use of music within the Xbox videogame Halo 2 (2004) through discussion with the composer, Martin O’Donnell, and an analysis of the music and sound of the game. In the process I discover that the game uses music in a way similar to the dominant paradigm, while also exhibiting a musicality within the in-game sound effects and level ambience. The result is a ‘soundscape’ style approach well suited to attaining both the emotive power of linear compositions as well as a closer relationship between music and visuals, seemingly a ‘best of both worlds’ videogame musical approach.

This research branches from the study of silence in sound studies and musicology. It contributes by theorising ‘sonic subtlety’, a new category of sound positioned between silence and sound, where the sound is more restrained, but also not completely silent. Sonic subtlety appears in four aspects of sound: amplitude, spectrum, space and time. This study observes how sonic subtlety performs in 20th-century classical music and contemporary film music and answers the following: • What does sonic subtlety do and in which ways can it perform effects to a listener? • How does sonic subtlety function in 20th-century classical music and contemporary film music? • How does sonic subtlety change the act of listening? In Chapter 1, I explain ‘sonic performativity’, the ability of a sound to perform an effect to an audience. This thesis considers sonic subtlety in terms of its sonic performativity. Most 20th-century classical music has no external, extra-musical functions such as illustrating a narrative or accompanying a visual. Sonic subtlety performs effects for the listener’s enjoyment only. In Chapter 2, sonic subtlety has four modalities of performativity: sonic clarity, sonic environment, sonic preparation and thematic subtlety. Film music has a more functional nature than 20th-century classical music with the addition of three cinematic factors: intermediality, narrative and emotion. In Chapter 3, the modalities of sonic subtlety function in film music to enhance these factors. Sonic subtlety in film music also often encourages ubiquitous, inattentive listening. Sonic subtlety performs effects to the listener on a partially-conscious level; I call this ‘subtly conscious performativity’. Sonic subtlety in film music can create a ubiquitous listening experience which can involve a new mode of listening between attentive and inattentive; I term this ‘subtly attentive musicking’. Sonic subtlety encompasses both the construction of sonic parameters and the ways of understanding musicking and performativity. This thesis breaks previously opposed categories: silence and sound, conscious and unconscious, attentive and inattentive. It contributes new perceptive and analytical categories for composers, sound designers and musicologists that can now be explored further.

The Nigerian film industry (Nollywood) embraces both motion picture and television approaches; yet it cannot be called one or the other in its entirety. This ‘both and neither’ nature has forced scholars such as Kenneth Harrow to ask: ‘how are we to read their films?’ and, by virtue of this article, their film music. I argue that the capacity to do so subsists in a thorough understanding of the industry’s organisation and long-held divergent creative process. My ethnographic study reveals that Nollywood’s structure of film music production differs significantly from some other known cinema traditions of the world. One such striking observation is that Nollywood film music projects and production (recording, editing, spotting, etc.) are entirely carried out without the involvement of film directors. And this unique process and structure strongly influences its film music approaches and aesthetics. This paper, thus, presents and examines those differences with a view to offering insights on how Nollywood film music might be understood.

The post-apocalypse is a narrative context that focuses on the destruction and rebirth of civilization, society, and culture. Familiar signs are mixed with the unfamiliar to create something new, a unique post-apocalyptic Other as the decontextualization, recontextualization, and resignification of sound breed new possibilities for identity. Videogames allow players to explore this new identity as an expressly interactive and immersive medium, while eclectic digital music embodies and communicates this identity within the medium in ways that it cannot in others. In this work, I analyze the musical approaches in three post-apocalyptic videogames, Borderlands, Bastion, and Fallout 3. In these games, the eclectic musical approach aims to evoke an ambiguity and originality achieved through digital production using synthetic and instrumental sounds found in sound library software. Also, pre-existing music from a specific time period is recontextualized in the futuristic post-apocalypse, establishing a temporal Other through temporal displacement. Both are possible due to the global digital database, a growing, easily accessed digital archive epitomized in sound library software and digital composition. It is in this database and through the use of technology that sound becomes a simulacrum of its former self, and the barrier created by terms like “Western” and “non-Western” decays. The virtual Othering in these three games draws attention to the value of sound in music-making and, consequently, to the redirection of meaning in musical sound and the virtual world.

2015

This study seeks to present the motivators behind the consumption of videogame soundtracks outside of the gameplay environment. This dissertation proposes a three-part consumption model that describes these different motivators and the interactions between these imperatives. At the heart of this study is the intention to demonstrate that videogame music has become a very important part of a videogame’s concept, design, and marketing; it not only plays a significant role within the game, it has also transcended the medium and is enjoyed by audiences beyond the game. This media migration generates questions regarding its effects and the motivations why people listen to videogame music outside of the game, and the ramifications of this consumption at the personal, social, and game industry levels. Why are people listening to videogame music, one that is designed for an interactive medium, in a linear medium (such as a CD, an audio file, or a re-interpretation)? In what ways does the game experience and the music create associations that affect the audience at a personal level? How did game music become this consumable object and what is its value for consuming audiences? How does the consumption of OSTs affect future game music composition and what is the role of the audience in this? And what does this mean for the shelf-life and marketability of videogames?

The following study is concerned with how immersive experiences are constructed in first-person shooter (FPS) video games through the implementation of “realistic” audio. Bringing together the three fields of video game studies, sound studies, and science and technology studies in its theoretical framework, this study approaches FPS games as commodities, marketed for their capabilities towards providing the player with an immersive and realistic experience, and constructed in particular ways, for particular ends. The first part of this study explores the context of FPS game audio development, from the earliest days of video games in the mid-twentieth century, to the current day. It is argued that the history of FPS games is tightly coupled with the innovation of particular audio reproduction technologies, with the greater history of representation across forms of media, and on a trajectory towards increased immersive realism. The aesthetics of realism as presented in war cinema are taken as a fundamental influence for how immersive and realistic auditory experiences are constructed for contemporary FPS players. The second part of this study takes four FPS games and formally describes them in terms of how the player is positioned as a subject via the game and platform’s audio affordances and disaffordances. Finally, both sections are brought to bear on one another in a diachronic account of how subjects have been (re)positioned via game audio throughout the history of the FPS. Merging these threads, ultimately this study argues that the player-subject of FPS games has been aurally (re)positioned on a trajectory shared with the refinement of audio reproduction technologies towards greater immersive realism. Technological development and the aesthetics of realism, as well as the evolution of FPS games into competitive multiplayer formats, have been mutually influential in this, one necessitating the other in a constant cycle of refinement and occasional decline.

For several years audiovisual analysis has been a growth area in musicology and cultural studies. And yet, very little has been published that recognises its relevance to a wide range of practices, including music videos, film and television music, video art, and gaming music. A thread that runs through the chapters is the recognition of audiovisual performance as a central theoretical category. The focus of the essays is exclusively contemporary. In this way, the book addresses a cluster of concerns that pertain to audiovisual production, performance and consumption in a variety of present day contexts. Chapters are organised thematically around the headings Avant-garde aesthetics, Re-sounding soundtracks, Televisual intertexts, Interrogating the mainstream, and Personal politics and embodied performance. What we attempt to put forward in this book is not a solution to the analysis of sound and vision, but rather, a list of possibilities and approaches through which interpretation can be undertaken. Thus, the essays collected provide critical readings through which the authors provide answers to questions, such as what is the relationship between sound and vision? And what is music's potential for communicating meaning into understanding?

2007

Musicology Research, 2017

With the recent publication of the edited collection Brian Eno: Oblique Music (Albiez & Pattie, 2016) and the distribution of Brian Eno’s 26th solo studio album Reflection in 2017 on vinyl, CD and as an innovative software application, the time is ripe for a reconsideration of the way in which software has been used by the musician, composer, record producer and visual artist Brian Eno. This paper explores how Eno has used simple but innovative ideas and processes to inform his music over the course of his career, and considers how his work with collaborators – specifically the musician and software designer Peter Chilvers – has converged with the emergence of touchscreen technologies and modes of distribution. We will demonstrate how Apple’s App Store global distribution platform has further disseminated Eno’s ideas of ‘generative music’ to a wider audience through he and Chilvers’ Bloom (2008), Trope (2009/2015), Scape (2012) and Reflection (2017a) software applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and the impact on the distribution and reception of Eno’s own music. Echoing Eno’s own processes of appropriation, remix and collaboration the authors wrote the paper through exchanges dictated by the turn of a card selected from the third edition of the Oblique Strategies deck, issued by Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1979.

Synesthetic interfaces—interfaces that enact a sensory substitution by translating information normally accessed through one sense modality into the phenomenal forms associated with another—constitute a fascinating and little-theorized corner of videogame UI design. Frustrating the distinctions laid out in dichotomies of "diegetic" versus "non-diegetic" UI elements, or "ecological" versus "emphatic" elements, synesthetic interfaces have been poorly served by the terminological frameworks that have typically dominated discussions of the functional and fictional status of game UI. This paper examines two employments of synesthetic interfaces—to communicate human perceptual expertise, and to depict the experience of nonhuman organisms—as a way of illuminating aspects of synesthetic interfaces that evade more terminologically rigid approaches.