Musings: Reflections on the North American Conference on Video Game Music

I've been really stimulated as I've continued to think about my weekend at the video game music conference.  As I've chatted with some friends around the U, I mentioned the conference to one who often teases me about "degrading the education at UM by offering courses on video game music."  I told him how we had a lengthy discussion as to what to call the group-- should it join with other academic groups: AMS, SAM, etc?  Or should we branch out on our own?  Should we call ourselves Game music scholars or "Ludomusicologists?"  I thought this would might help my friend change his thinking.  Nope.  His reply: "Ludo-musicologists?!  Sounds like Pseudo-Musicologists!"  It's a good reminder for me that not everyone sees validity in studying game audio.

While I was at the conference, I kept wondering why so many of the speakers were interested in finding and explaining classical music (or secondarily, popular music) examples in games.  I can think of a few potential answers immediately: 1- as "scholarly" musicians, these are examples that we hear, recognize, and relate with; and 2- as scholars, we find these examples of "high art" in game music and hope that it gives some extra weight to our argument that it is worthwhile; and 3- these classical works give us a reference point to engage our other scholarly trained friends.  I'm sure there are more, but these pop up for me immediately.

For me, though, the greatest interest in game audio is that which is created specifically for the medium.  And what an interesting creation it is!  I was thinking this morning about how every aspect of the game is so carefully crafted and how it takes such skill are precision for ambient sounds, sound effects, dialogue, and music to all come together and create a real, immersive, believable world where players want to spend time.  When I began the blog, I considered following examples of classical music in games-- I even created a label "classical connections," but I never used it.  In fact, the use of Hadyn in Final Fantasy 7 was one of my initial interesting points that came up as I studied FF7 music early on in this blog.  However, as I thought more about game audio, I became more interested in game music (and audio) for its own sake.  There's something inherently exciting about these new sounds that are being created.

Anyhow, my conversation yesterday got me thinking about why academics interested in game audio might go for classical connections and how we might use it to our advantage at this point as we try to convince our peers that this area is worthy of study.  However, the new music being created for games should be drunk deeply, fully studied, and appreciated as well!