Video Game Music Class: An Update.

I've been struggling to find time to write on here recently, for which I want to apologize.  I love this blog and the connections that it gives me, but right now so much of my energy is going into my game music class.  I don't know that it'll get much better any time soon, but I will try to make updates about once a week as I'm able.

I always knew this class would be a lot of work, but I've been surprised about how much time and energy it's taking, even compared against other classes I've taught.  The hardest thing about it is that because there's a lot of video game footage to show, I have to do a lot of video manipulation which simply takes time.  Some footage I've pulled off of youtube-- from a longplay, for instance-- and then simply taken out the 90 seconds that I want to show.  Other footage I've had to record on my own for some very specific audio examples that aren't online.  For instance, I'm going to be talking about Ocarina of Time in a few classes, and I want to show how the crossfades between the current theme and the battle theme work.  So, I recorded myself inching toward and away from an enemy to show how the crossfading works.  Something like that isn't a normal part of gameplay and doesn't exist in a playthrough, so I'm having to create some materials like that at a very basic level.  All in all, a huge undertaking.

Making each lecture is taking between 6-9 hours.  I can usually create a lecture in about half that time, but a lot of the time is spent with video manipulation.  Luckily, I'll have this material for the future, if UM decides to re-run the course.  I think it's also hard to do this because, unlike the other courses I teach, a music appreciation course through the lens of video game music has never been taught before, so simply figuring out how to do it and make the materials is an enormous process, building from the ground up.

Kirsten wrote recently on the blog and asked how the class was going and what we were doing.  As far as I can tell, things are going pretty well.  The last day to drop/add is tomorrow, and I'm thinking the class attendance will set around 67, with 80 possible seats in the room.  I also have a few folks who aren't formally enrolled for whatever reason, but are attending, so the class looks very full generally.  As I understand it, this enrollment is the most successful non-music major outreach sort of course UM-SMTD has ever offered.  That's encouraging.  The first of two quizzes is on Thursday, and once I look at that, I'll have a better idea of what the students are taking away from the class.  I can say already that reading what they've written in the online forums shows that their eyes are opening quickly to the complexity of game audio.  Many of them appreciated it, but they're starting to see how much planning is involved and the behind the scenes aspects of game music.

So far, most of the class activities have been my playing gameplay and then either talking to the students about the audio and its connection to the visual aspects, or else I play them some gameplay and then they talk in small groups about what they notice about the music.  How does the visual connect with the audio?  Space Invaders is a good example of this, with the music mimicking a heartbeat and speeding up as the gameplay progresses.  How does the music in Super Mario Bros represent the situation?-- for instance, the overworld theme versus going down a pipe and having the underworld theme.  We started at the beginning with the first computer games and have progressed through Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, and are going to look at GameBoy and some other computer games on Thursday.  Tues is our first guest Skype with Brian Schmidt.

I've emphasized numerous examples of game music that use folk tunes, classical, and popular music to open them to the amount of covering that goes on in game music.  For me, this is an important idea: when you play a game, you're not just hearing that game's music-- you're being exposed to a lot of culture.  The same as the Looney Tunes cartoons passed down all sorts of musical heritage, so do video games.  I've also asked them recently to start to notice how the music changes from one track to another.  Of course in the oldest games, there was no background music, just sound effects or short musical fanfares.  With the NES, often one track plays until a certain action makes the audio switch to a second track.  As we were recently exploring in some SNES and Genesis games, tracks might fade into one another.  I don't always know what'll come up and what we're going to do next, but I do like that discussing some of the basics of mixing/recording are going to be a part of the class.  Those considerations probably wouldn't be a part of most classically based music appreciation courses.

Kirsten, as for a final project, we're using GarageBand (or other software) to create game music.  What I like about GB is that it's easy to drop in a video and score it.  Students could re-score gameplay footage they pull off YouTube, for instance.  That's actually a practical project if any of them are interested in being game composers.  For students who don't want to actually set their music to video, they can use artwork or simply verbal descriptions of the scene where their music should fit.  I've even got some class members who are working on creating video games now and are eager to learn more about how to create their own music for these games.  I don't know if you'd have that in middle school, but I definitely think that using GB to create music is a very simple project that your students could do.  I haven't taught middle school, but I know from readings in the Tech for Mus Ed class that I teach that MS teachers do find GB to be an easy program for that age group to work with.

The last thing I wanted to add is that I set the course up in a gamification way.  Instead of typical grades (which students still do get at the end of the semester), the course is worth 100,000 points and various activities are worth certain amount of points.  We have trophies that are rewarded for going above and beyond the normal workload.  Class members level up as the semester progresses.  All of this results in a little more work for me behind the scenes, but I'm excited to try it out this semester.  It's been well received by the students, although so far, they haven't seen many results from it.  Part of that was just getting everything going, but I'm excited that it should be in full swing by the end of the month.

I'll continue to update as the class goes on.  Thanks for writing and asking!  Let me know how your class goes!