Bioshock Infinite’s barbershop quartet. Image: Irrational Games
Even for your average gamer, the music from classic games like Super Mario Bros. or Halo can trigger nostalgic reveries, conjuring memories of endless hours spent fighting to save Princess Toadstool or decimating alien hordes. But those songs elicit far more complicated reactions from a small but growing band of scholars who specialize in videogame music. When these so-called ludomusicologists hear selections from the sonic oeuvres of Nintendo or Bungie, they detect strains of creative genius on a par with Tchaikovsky’s allegros. And they’re on a mission to ensure that videogame music is accorded the same respect as Hollywood film scores, which are now much studied by academics.
The ludomusicological movement reaches an important milestone today, with the start of North America’s first academic conference devoted exclusively to the analysis of videogame music. The two-day affair at Youngstown State University features 19 presentations ranging from an examination of leitmotifs in Final Fantasy Tactics to the splendidly titled “A Study of the iMUSE Transition Matrix Music System in the Woodtick Location of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.”
Conference organizer Steven Reale traces his abiding fascination with videogame music to the 1984 release of Pitfall II. While playing the game on his family’s Atari 2600, he had an unexpected and powerful emotional reaction — one having nothing to do with Pitfall Harry getting thwacked by a pixelated scorpion or condor. “There’s this music in the game that goes duh-duh-di-di-do/duh-do-di-di, and I turned around to my sister and said, ‘This song, it’s so pretty it makes me want to cry,’” he recalls. “Of course, she teased me mercilessly.”
Years later, in the course of earning his PhD in music theory at the University of Michigan, Reale wrote a landmark paper on how the music in Katamari Damacy affects gameplay. (Sample line: “The opening section has a sostenuto feel with few rhythmic or metric cues to the meter; the guitar is suspended in mistlike alternation between B7sus4 and E?9 over a pedal e.”) Now an assistant professor of music at Youngstown State, his presentation this weekend will focus on how the music in Portal 2 mirrors the game’s puzzle-solving strategies.
The Youngstown conference’s most-discussed game music will be the score for the steampunk-infused Bioshock Infinite, one of the most musically innovative games in recent years. It eschews a traditional score in favor of haunting, anachronistic covers tinged with irony. A barbershop quartet version of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” for example, exudes an air of quiet menace that hints at the terror soon to come. There is also a warped, tinny take on a Chopin nocturne that pops up in a scene where malevolent tycoon Jeremiah Fink interacts with his abused employees.
“It’s supposed to be used as work music, but Chopin is totally wrong for that—it doesn’t have that steady beat,” says Sarah Podzerac-Chenevey, a graduate student in music theory at the University of Cincinnati who hopes to write her dissertation about videogame music. “Then I realized, the way the music was being stripped of its rubato, what it does is it reflects how Fink is stripping his workers of their humanity.” She will talk about that strategic butchery of Chopin at the conference, as well as the lyrical choices that make the game’s version of “Will the Circle be Unbroken” evoke concepts of both heavenly bliss and earthly disillusionment.
Aside from satisfying their own intellectual curiosity, ludomusicologists hope their scholarship brings more widespread renown to the field’s pioneering composers, none of whom enjoy the recognition of such movie-music titans as John Williams or Hans Zimmer. Several of the Youngstown attendees would love to see longtime Nintendo composer Kenji Kondo became a household name — not for his catchy Super Mario Bros. theme song, but rather for his endlessly inventive work on the Legend of Zelda series. Nick Exler, a graduate student in music theory at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, is one of many young ludomusicologists to be deeply influenced by Kondo’s work on 1998’s Ocarina of Time, which includes the topic of his Youngstown presentation, “Zelda’s Lullaby.”
“The way it’s set up is that it’s perpetually building tension, but it never reaches resolution—there’s no tonic chord,” he says, clearly full of admiration for Kondo’s willingness to flout a fundamental convention of composition. (Kondo later wove the tune into “Ballad of the Goddess,” a song from the prequel Skyward Sword; it can be heard by playing the song backward, a cheeky nod to the game’s use of time-shifting portals.)
Reale is elated that his conference has not only attracted interest from academics, but also from Youngstown locals‐he’s fielded plenty of calls from parents interested in bringing their game-obsessed kids. If any of those kids do show up, however, they may quickly discover that listening to professors hold forth on “hybridity,” “diagesis,” and “modular smoothness” is a great deal less enchanting than anything on Xbox One.