Surveying Literature: A few short articles

While insomniac last night (perfect evening before a road trip), I read through several short articles I've had saved on my iPad. Nothing groundbreaking in them, but I did want to catalogue that I read them.

"Game on!"  Dominic Milano.  Keyboard magazine makes two appearances on this list.  Maybe keyboardists are just naturals for game music; Tommy Tallarico would agree! This is definitely the most interesting of these short articles to me. It reinforced for me my desire to meet Tommy Tallarico. This short Q and A with him clearly has a target audience of professional musicians. He also lists important websites I want to check out: idea.org, audio gang.org, and gamasutra.com. While a short article with ideas I've encountered before by this point in my research, it's always good to hear one more person reinforce audio software, interactive audio principles, and ways to get in the game audio scene.

"Video Games Killed the Cinema Star. Karen Collins." A brief defense of the academic study of game audio. It's a pity this is necessary. Most interesting is where she points directions toward future research. Some are being fulfilled already since the publication of this article (2007). I should probably browse this journal, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, to see what else I might find. I like the list of popular music pieces related to games. I want to check out these and others.  Don't think I've listened to Weird Al's Pac-Man before:

"Les Claypool on Making Music for the Mushroom Men Video Games."  Q and A with Les Claypool.  've been wondering what sort of instruments game composers play and/or were trained on. Here's a bass player who composes game music. He discusses some of his techniques. I want to check out these games and give the albums with the music a listen. Definitely a good example of pop music/ game music synergy. And, as a big South Park fan, Les Claypool created the theme song for the show-- it's cool to see musicians who work in many mediums.

"Bloop Bloop, Hey, Bleep Bleep: Emulating Video Game Sounds."  Mitchell Sigman. Here's a super short article about emulating game audio sounds. Interestingly enough, this is in a journal aimed at keyboardists!  One of the most important things I took away from it was that the audio quality can't be too good or the music sounds to modern. There's a reduction in quality necessary from what's possible today to get the true 8-bit effect.

"Game Play to Music Play-- Video Games in the Music Room." Andrew Mercer. Very short-- target audience of music educators.  Gives some basic info about games that feature music prominently in the gameplay. While I've played Wii Music and Rock Band, I don't know Sing It at all and haven't played Dance Dance Revolution. I'll have to give Andrew's Audacity tutorials a watch to learn a bit more about him and the program; I've got only a very basic understanding of it.