 The only thing as iconic as Super Mario Brothers' jazzy theme was the jaunty boing that accompanied every jump. In technical terms, it is an ascending chromatic glissando, but colloquially, it puts a spring in his step. This technique is called mickey mousing, a trick from early Disney films that syncs the accompanying music with the actions on screen. As Zack Whalen argues in his essay, Play Along, the mickey mousing effect is intended to emphasize the physicality of Mario and his kinesthetic involvement with his environment, rendering a musical landscape that mediates Mario's movement, but also our motivation to maneuver him. When the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time came out, though, the inspirations with the music were not cartoons, but cinema. The game employs diegetic noises to simulate existing in 3D space, light motifs to designate characters and locations, uses blending techniques to signify attacking enemies, and the Ocarina itself shows the rudiments of the rhythm genre, where simplified inputs by players could yield more elaborate musical pieces. With Silent Hill, though, Adventure gave way to horror as more pronounced and startling diegetic cues as well as music that was unsettling because it never sawed resolution, created a new suite of emotions inspired by horror films. When the game shifts from our world to the paranormal, jarring metallic clangs start to appear, and when enemies approach, we are conditioned into fear by the static screeches and dissonant noises of plenty. This famous sequence that has you run down an alley shows musical escalation, as clangs, organs, sirens, and whales all get added to the sonic landscape. These three examples show how music has been borrowed from other art forms, but also how it is used uniquely in the medium of games. Zack Whalen's essay was an attempt to reconcile these things, a preliminary foray into understanding the continuity of game music and other mediums. Game music is much like its sister art forms, but it is also different in how it incorporates player action, it is interactive music. From the constraints imposed by 8-bit music to the dynamic interludes of the present, video game music has evolved quite a bit over the years, and has become as iconic as games themselves. Techniques and methods of composition have also improved, expressed in different forms in many games. Ace Invaders had an increasing tempo to its music, Xevious and Xenon showed how musicality could be built into action, Vib Ribbon drew levels based on musical cues, and Parappa the Rapper popularized the call-and-response method of the rhythm-action genre. With iconic franchises like Halo, Final Fantasy, and Zelda, we have themes composed to highlight the grandeur of alternate worlds, without uttering a single word. Game music, though, is far more than just a continuation of prior forms, it is a new genesis of interactive music. In her book Playing with Sound, Karen Collins attempts to formulate a new theory for what sound and music is in games. She states, We cannot rely on language brought from film and animation. We must develop a new path to understand how we play with sound. Her claim? Game music is schizophrenic, synesthetic, syncretic, dynamic, kinesonic, and emergent. Let's break it down. Synesthetic refers to how sounds have been decoupled from their source, allowing us to invent new sounds and remix them in new digital contexts. Synesthetic refers to how sounds are blended with other sensory perceptions, like how music can motivate actions. Syncretic is how these isolated sounds can be attached to new visual outputs, creating new meaning. Here's an example. Shadow of the Colossus is a game about subverting the monster-killing trope endemic in games, and so the music reinforces this. An instrument called the bazooki was used, decoupled from its source, to signify the forbidden. When traversing the desolate lands, only die-jet-accuses are present, reinforcing our sense of isolation. To motivate action, an orchestral score intervenes when we ascend and climb Colossus. It prompts us to act, to kill, to triumph. Sound is blended with our sensory dimensions. However, when you slay the beast, melancholy not triumph is communicated by the music, using syncretes to attach sad music to what otherwise might be euphoria to communicate tragedy. Synesthesia was a core motivation for the design of Rez, an Unreal's musical shooter, and in this game, we see how sensory dimensions blend. Enemies prompt your actions, but their deaths release music that fuses with the underlying beat. It's a call-and-response mechanism. Music also causes the wireframe environment to pulse with energy, and the music surges through your body with a transcendent electronic verb. Dynamic music can be either interactive or adaptive, interactive being our ability to input commands, and adaptive referring to how the game world responds. In Rez, there is a dynamic interplay between creator and player, as we prompt music which in turn prompts us. We can tap the buttons to release a clap, or we can lock on to multiple enemies to release a flurry of musical ammunition. Finally, the musical landscape is emergent in that it encodes a story of humanity's creative evolution, as we travel through cyberspace, cleansing the network of viruses to pave the way for a new future. There are also a handful of different layering techniques outlined in the book, The Composer's Guide to Music, by Winifred Phillips. Horizontal sequencing is shifting to different music. Vertical music is adding layers on top of existing music, and generative music is when objects and actions have intrinsic musicality to them. In the Tetris Effect, additional layers of the track that play during levels, including vocal complements, are added when you reach certain line requirements. This is vertical layering, where music is added on top of the existing loop to create escalation. When you use the zone mechanic, a powered up state that lets you build on top of this, the music shifts to a faded version of the current track, giving us a sense of suspended motion by sequencing in different music. There is also generative music in the game, which can be analogized to a wind chime. The pieces you move in the game each have sound associated with them that harmonize with the underlying track, and the game uses quantization to ensure this is not disharmonious. In essence, there is an intrinsic musicality to the objects in the world, both interactive and adaptive. Play not only triggers music, but actively creates it, breaking the divide between author and player. So game music is not just an evolution of prior forms that allows us to enhance gameplay and tell stories, but also a dynamically interactive interface that includes us in the creation of new meaning. However, the idea of music being interactive is not new. It is built into the neurophysiology of sound. In his book, The World in Six Songs, Daniel Levitan argues that sound is wired to the motor regions of our brain for evolutionary reasons. If we hear the rustling of leaves with the thumping gait of a predator's approach, well, it behooves us to run without thinking. When music starts to play, children can't help but dance. Sound motivates motion as well as emotion. In another of his books, This Is Your Brain on Music, Dan argues that music is beholden to many of our cognitive processes, like novelty, expectation, and memory. Another theorist, Stephen Brown, even suggests that music and language evolve from a common ancestor, music language. Music is also instrumental in crafting a sense of immersion, a topic pursued by the researchers Paul Cairns and Emily Brown. At a low level, engendering a sense of flow by meeting a player's abilities with a corresponding challenge can suspend their sense of time. But coupling this with visual and auditory cues can further their immersion even more. Symbolic interactive environments are said to be amenable to immersion as well, but in a more synesthetic sense. Perhaps explaining the common aesthetics of res, the tetris effect, thumper, and beat saber. Sound creates its own virtual landscape. There are also different meanings encoded by different sounds, rooted in how we experience music. Wardrums drive us into an aggressive frenzy, and so in the game thumper, tribal thumps are used to whip us into a cantankerous state. We are playing at the abstraction of music itself. Conversely, music can also cause harmony and synchrony seen in any form of dance. And this can be witnessed in a beautiful level in the tetris effect, where you conduct the synchronized gyrations of a Balinese ketchup dance by playing tetris. Music takes precedence in the mediation of emotion for clear evolutionary reasons, articulated in this GDC talk, The Emotional Puppeteer, but it is also the vehicle to motivate action. The Rayman Legends music sequences have musicality built into the levels. Rhythm and beat aid us in finishing these devilishly difficult sequences. We are being cued by music, much like any rhythm game. But thumper is different. We are actually creating the rhythm by slamming our cosmic spacebeetle into the track. We start with conventional beats. The time signature is 4-4. But we branch further and further away from the stable center as the music gets harder. Beat, rhythm, tempo, circle of fifths, let's throw them aside to re-examine the language of music itself. This was the explicit intent of the music director of the game, Brian Gibson, a musician himself, who was trying to reintegrate the physicality of music with the anxiety of performance. Beat Saber makes the connection between music and action even more explicit. Music generates the level, and you wave your hands physically to strike the rhythm yourself. In his GDC talk, Dynamics, Clint Hawking claims we play games in two ways. We play them like we play a CD, and we play them as we do an instrument. There is a guidance by rules, but also improvisational rebellion. Interestingly, the prime analogy for play is music itself, and this isomorphism was explored more fully in Roger Mosley's book, Keys to Play. He states, those who play with music can transgress and subvert, as well as obey the protocols that constitute the rules of engagement. This is much like the dichotomy between play and games, between Lutus and Paidea. The book traces the history of improvisational music and creative forms, like the warful spell, Comedia dell'art, and John Cage's experiments into the music of reality, but also highlights how music can be played to fit an ideal or be played improvisationally. Mozart pieces could be played to the script, or they could be modified. There was room for the player. This is the analogy Roger concludes with, that games are functionally instruments that we play, and the keys of play are the degrees of freedom a given game gives us to interact with. This is Ludo musicality, play and music combined, and the authorship of the instrument of a game is a call-and-response collaboration between both designer and player. Journey is clear to its purpose. It's about the hero's journey, a universal story motif, and music accentuates this vision. Digetic sound accompanies your early isolation. Rousing orchestral pieces drives kinetic action as you surf through sand or fly through mountains, and music is vertically layered in every time you meet another person, communicating the joy of companionship. The sonic landscape is scripted, but it incorporates player action. There is intentionality, but also emergence. Journey is much more like playing a beautiful piece of music than it is creating it, though. So much so that its soundtrack won awards experienced in that way. Thumper, res, and the Tetris effect are a little different, though. The experience of music is made by interaction, whether by slamming into the side of a track or engaging in the simple motions of Tetris. Music is created not by action, not reaction, but interaction. Listen to this vertical escalation in res. Each zone adds a new layer, vertically, but there is also horizontal sequencing. Enemies are musical, but so are you. Electronic music is schizophrenically severed from its source, is synesthetically blended into multiple perception, and is dynamically integrated into an emotional, playful, improvisational landscape. The music here is about transcendence. Tetsuya Mizuguchi went to EDM festivals, and the experience was practically religious. Music binds us into an organism. This is the metaphor of choice to symbolize humanity's new evolution. This evolution requires we play, and this is reflected in the gameplay and fiction of res. Narrative escalation and tragic subversion are what Ori and the Blind Forest and Shadow of the Colossus did. The Ginzo tree level in Ori was kept on a loop, carefully choreographed to escalate as you progress through the tree. And Shadow of the Colossus used synchrisis and dissonance to communicate tragedy. These are brilliant examples of harnessing musical form to enhance games, but they are borrowed from other mediums. Thumper, on the other hand, is tragedy and narrative escalation in a ludomusical sense. We are destroying music as much as we are creating it. In Thumper, we are incentivized to smash into the track, destroying the contrived musical conventions of the past as we delve further into a Lovecraftian abyss. Where are we going, though? What is the nature of our descent into chaos? The designers, Brian Gibson and Mark Flurry, used to make mundane music games, and then they rebelled. Seven years of indie development it took, but Thumper was born. The rejection of the commodification of music, the narcissism of fake performance, and the vacuous passiveness of the rhythm genre, which was already dying. Thumper is rhythm violence. We are experiencing music in its purest form, not as some fantasy. Playing music is extremely hard. It is stressful, but infinitely rewarding. Thumper is the experience of authentic musical creation, but also reveling in the destruction of the past. It is creative destruction. It is catharsis. It is the tragedy of modern music, redeemed by ludomusicality. With tragedy comes redemption, and the tetris effect is interactive transcendence. We travel across the world. We experience all cultures and creeds. We dive into oceans and soar into space. Humans evolved from caravans on the Sahara to lunar exploration. Our creative will is unmatched. However, have we lost our sense of creativity? We assume that we are no longer the hand that plays. All we do is listen to others, right? Wrong. We may be playing tetris while we are doing so much more. We exhibit creativity, improvisational skill, and pattern memorization to push to the end of our journey, where we are reborn. Finally, the music of playing tetris has given explicit voice, like when Marcel Duchamp played chess and compared it to musical creation. In the tetris effect, play and sound finally converge, and so too does the spirit of humanity. This is just the beginning of our journey. Ludo musicality, interactive music, may enhance games, but it is so much more. It is a way to inspire all of us to play with sound once again. In res, we are playing before our own birth. We are in the symbolic womb. The womb was also synesthetic. Sound was touch was sight. And then when our perceptions differentiated, we entered the chaos of reality. By handing creative control back to players, we are allowing them to return home. We are making music together, playing the instrument we know as a game.