Musings: Listening to music outside of games

I've been listening through to some game music I don't know per games Collins mentions in her book, as well as reviewing the music of some games I haven't thought of in a long time.  So that's been: Crystalis, Journey to Silius, Ultima III, and Manic Mansion (the last is the only game I know well).  I've been working on my computer transposing some music for shows I'm working with this summer, and meanwhile, I've been listening through to videos of the gameplay.  I can fit a tiny corner of the video on my screen while I'm working in Sibelius, but I can't see more than about half of the screen.  Mainly, I'm just getting the audio experience.  I do check in occasionally to see what onscreen action is causing the music to play.  Especially, that tends to happen at the end of the video when the end game sequences bring in new themes.

This made me think about how to listen to game music outside of games.  Of course, game music is made to be heard during gameplay, but there are plenty of other ways to hear it: in a concert, on soundtracks, while someone is playing the game and you're in an adjacent room.  I've been wondering: How are these different?  Is one the best?

As a performer, I've got an interesting way of thinking about listening to game music.  Listening to music without playing the game I think of as being very passive, like an audience member might do at a concert.  Or perhaps if I'm listening for more detail, I'm listening like a musicologist or music critic, still though, it's a passive act.  In contrast, if I'm listening while I'm playing the game, I think of this as listening to the music as a performer.  That makes perfect sense to me: as a performer of music, my physical actions make the music happen in real time and the same is true as a game player with game audio.  My starting the game, actions, for instance going in and out of different rooms, etc, cause the game music to happen/continue/change.  In a sense, by playing the game, we gamers make the game music happen.  We're a kind of performer.  And similarly to performers, the game music can't happen without us.  Music isn't pasting pages of manuscript on the wall (like an art gallery) and looking at it.  Neither is game music merely the code in the game.  The game must be played for the music to be experienced.  There's that cool real time aspect to it, interactive-- as we play, we're in charge of the audio experience, whether we think about it or not.

I think this is why I prefer to listen to (and watch, if I can) gameplay videos rather than soundtracks.  A soundtrack plays every theme equally, whereas a listening to a gameplay (I often choose longplays) allows me hear the themes as they occur in the game.   Perhaps even more importantly, this ensures that I hear the proper ratio of music.  Let me explain: in an RPG, probably the most played music is the battle music.  If you were to listen to a soundtrack, you might hear that looped once or twice, but that's all.  If you watch a gameplay of the game, you'll hear quite a bit of the battle music, probably 2/3rds of the gameplay or so.  This is a much more realistic listening experience of the game.  Some modern soundtracks, like the one for Red Dead Redemption, are just possibilities that one might hear when playing, since the game audio is so dependent on your playing session.

All of the various ways to hear game audio are certainly valid, and I use them all depending on what I'm doing.  A soundtrack is a quick way for me to reference different tracks for analysis.  However, to experience game audio for the first time, I like to hear the music as it was intended-- in gameplay.