The digital audio is holding the videogame back
/!\This article is a translation of my article on Game Dolls Advance episode 8.
Hello, it's Rose, welcome in my talk called "The digital audio is holding the videogame back".
I thought i didn't complained that much in my last article. I complained how music in porn is mostly boring, that music in Fallout is mostly boring and unimaginative, that search engines for music are bad. So I need to repare my too much enthousiasm of my last article. So tody, i'm going to complain about video game music in general. So I will say bad things about your favourite videogame music composers, and maybe some bad things on you, music composer, who's reading me right now.
I think I don't know a videogame that is not like that. I mean by that composed only by digital elements. Those digital elements are digital graphical assets, digital audio assets, digital video assets, digital text assets, and other digital big brain assets I don't know. The rest, it's hardware, the videogame console, but also the controller, and maybe the screen if it's not embed in the console itself.
Digital datas have made the videogame, so much it's diffucult to not conceptualise it without, to imagine what can be outside, in the analog world.
Most of the time, when videogame goes outside of the console, it's an app coordonated with a board game. We can think about of a game like The Werewolves of Millers Hollow where the referee making the rythm and rules of the game is suggested by a voice coming from the app. Sometimes it's the analogic that come into the videogame, when you need to mimik a sound in the mic of you computer to make the sound signal mimik an other sound signal.
« Yes, that's great, Rose, you would say, but what is why of what the what the video game doesn't go in the analogic, what's your freaking philosophic deal in the and ? What's your fuzzy theory, again ?» Well I'll let you know about that with videogame music.
Videogame music, it's fun, isn't it ? Everybody loves it, right ?
(Sarcasme ON) Well no, it's shit.
Music composers are horrible people who only impose sounds to players with the idea of innovating on the medium. Like, wahou, it's interactive so it's the summum of sonic practices. They say "blablabla i do dynamic music, look how i'm intelligent, i do crossfades in my sonic layers to create a dynamic experience for the player, blablabla, i cut my music in nice blocks to conviniently mix everything in a total sonic immersion, blablabla, i did a nice musical harmony so it's true music, i'm a genious and i reinforce depreciation stereotypes for people without any access to music composition, blablabla". IT'S SHIT. If I can't play with your audio triggers easily, i find you lame, if that aspect of the musical is not allowed, it's shit. And I tell this to the me from the past too, send help, you're not funny Rose, so lame, your music stinks.
Yes, I talk shit on videogame music composer but don't you try me on game and level designer 'cause I know how to fight è_é (Sarcasme OFF)
Ok that's sweet to want to fight everyone but now what can we do ? So my reflexion comes from a brainworm I had after misreading a piano sheet made by Yoko Ono.
I can see you come with your "Nyanyanya, Rose, are you kidding us, you spit at the face of videogame music composer, that they are oppressive but you just bring out of your ass some artsy fartsy bourgeois contemporary art references that everybody forgot about and that nobody care anymore" yes well i can't do nothing about that if Fluxus creatives from the 60's had more advanced anticapitalist and antibourgeois reflexions in their practice of creativity than the whole industry of videogame and videogame music in general.
So, the Yoko Ono piece, it's the one called "Secret Piece", written in 1964 in her incredible book called Grapefruit that I recommand to everyone.
It's written : "Secret Piece, Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment : The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer" . Next a music partition with the note "With the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn".
Grapefruit, it's a book of creative instructions more or less abstract and poetic, all written by Yoko Ono. It was a thing in the Fluxus members to create creative recipes allowing the emergence of what they called Happenings, situations, that everyone could make happen. We can find in Grapefruit some magnificient pieces like Bell Piece, Water Piece, Tuna Fish Sandwich.
It is written "Bell Piece. Listen to a bell for an hour. Diminish the sound to piano by ringing it over in your head. Diminish the sound to pianissimo by ringing it over in your dream. Diminish the sound poco a poco troppo pianissimo by forgetting. Try other sounds, mother's voice, baby cry, husband's hysterics. 1963 autumn"
It is written "Water Piece, steal a moon on the water with a bucket. Keep stealing until no moon is seen on the water. 1964 spring"
It is written "Tunafish sandwich piece, Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time. Let them shine for one hour. Then, let them gradually melt into the sky. Make on tunafish sandwich and eat. 1964 spring."
Secret Piece is presented like that, a text accompanied by a music sheet photo and a hand written instruction. The same note is played two times with the mention of « With the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn ».
So, me, for a while, i didn't understand that piece. I understood, when I discovered it in "Fluxus et la musique" by Olivier Lussac, that you needed to "imagine the sound of the bird at dawn". When I understood that for the first time, it shocked me, like "oh yeah, I can add the sounds that I hear in my head, that I imagine, desire, hallucinate, I can add those sounds to acoustic sounds that I perceive, it's freaking crazy". I have the exploding head syndrome and chaotic tinnitus, it helped me sometimes, to get over those hard noises and play a bit with it. It made me able to sit and force mysef to imagine sounds that don't exist in the acoustic world. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But everytime I took a lot of my time just to do that, and it was always amazing.
So what's the deal. The deal is, what prevent us to use all of this process ? In my misinterpretation, I imagined an active work of superposing a brain imaginary audio on a real audio. And Yoko Ono propose to play an audio accompaniment already existing, the real birds. In any case, there are things to get from it.
Audio in videogame, it's dumb to say ut it's necessary to say it, it can be also things that don't come out of the speakers of the videogame console or TV. It can be what surround us, it's all the parameters that change the audio flux, everything of what we can control or not in our sonic external space and internal space. Everything that can be audio practice.
In a Fluidspace session in Marseille, a nice hackerspace, we did a videogame session and i hijacked the audio flux of one of the TV to make it go through my effect pedals, to hack it live and send the changed flux in a speaker. Everybody could participate in changing the sonic result of the game. It was quickly made up but, that could be a way to think about videogame music. With a base principal that the audio should be played together, a person that play the controller to play on screen and other that change the audio of the game through a network of elements that can change its shape on live. It demands a specific set-up, maybe some gear just for that game in particular. But if that gear can be used easily on other games (exploit the audio outpout of a TV screen or a headphone output can be done for 99% of videogame that possess audio) so it's not really lost and can be reproduce undefinitely.
There is a whle spectrum that can be open to us, situated music, and other unique practices of the audio in videogames.
What prevent us to propose as a sonic composition for games a situation like Yoko Ono's Secret Piece. Like, ask for gamers to take their phone or laptop to play the music but also get the sound of birds at dawn, in a forest, in a park, in the garden of someone loved. What prevent us to play a videogame but broadcast the audio of an other game instead of the original one, with the other game played by someone else near you. Making audio and video flux mashup. To ask that the game should be played by a friend of yours near you. We could imagine some impossible conditions to be physically executed just because it's funny and so people need to think of a really personnal way to resolve that "problem".
It could be possible to compose digital audio elements taking those considerations, there is so many ways to create things with digital audio that are unexplored, but to imagine that digital audio is an unreachable horizon, it's to fool ourself completely and just reinforce an idea of music composer genius that is the unique owner of the means of imagine the audio. And then we forget about the metagame, to play with our ways of playing game, adding, hijacking, withdrawing, inspiring ourself of, game rules.
Those thoughts, considerations, rules, need to be thought in an accessibility process, in a non fetichisation of the sound and in a anticapitalist and antigenius way really active. Everybody don't have the moeans to go to the other side of the world for a fucking "immersive" experience, fetichising sound, destroying ecosystems, nor having portable playable gear.
We could have hear a nice use of the Locustream from Locus Sonus Vitae, the sonic lab from Beaux Arts d’Aix en Provence to integrate qa livestream audio source, to propose an alternative, digital but accessible. On all those aspects, I really recommand the work of Juliette Volcler (in french sadly) who talk about sound fetichisation, urban sound design, how it is oppressive but also how we can emancipate from it.
Sincerely, videogamers, please terrorize your favourite ideogame music composers, torture their audioflux by putting a distorsion pedal in your audio output, play the music under water, ask for your friend to listen to the music with headphone and to mimik the audioflux with their mouth... and i ask us videogame composers, to not limit us to digital audio to imagine our sonic desirs, to shut the hell up of our harmonic and authorial desirs, to put our "capitalist and looking for fame and glory" alienated ego somewhere where it can give us a break, and put in the game some dailyness, love for the present in our sonic practices. And to not forget that we are not the only one to make those musical possibilities happening.
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