I had a blast at GameSoundCon 2019. Once again I was honored to serve on the advisory board and to co-chair the ludomusicology/sound studies track, this year with Dana Plank. Dana did a great job live tweeting the academic conference, if you want to catch up on what we were doing. GameSoundCon really is my favorite conference of the year for a number of reasons, and I wanted to share some of my highlights from this year as well as encourage anyone reading who has any interest in the conference to consider attending in the future.
While I was of course excited to hear the talks Dana and I selected for the academic track, hearing Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey speak about the music of Metal Gear Solid, watching Martin Leung transcribe from Super Mario Galaxy live, Ryan Thompson discussing about the sounds of the SNES, and many others. But honestly, my favorite day is the other day of the conference, where I can dart from room to room and hear any variety of presentations on very different topics.
Below I list some of my favorite quotes from GSC 2019 with some of favorite people I met.
With Elizabeth Zharoff
Elizabeth Zharoff speaking about upcoming AI developments in voice commands and video games: "What if you yell at someone when you should speak to them normally? Imagine yelling a spell incantation when you should simply speak it normally and thus the enemy is able to block it."
Marc Strait speaking about audio accessibility in gaming: "Why can you adjust the brightness on your TV to optimize your gameplay and suit your eyes the best, but not alter the audio profile to suit your ears?"
Hearing Tom Salta speak about his use of leitmotifs in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
Gender and Safety panel: "How do we ourselves act once in positions of power if we never had good role models as we came up?"
Will Roget's inspiring keynote with a cameo by U-M alum Nico Millado as Scorpion
Will Roget: "Long term commitment in people and projects is more important than short term networking and gain. Invest in people and connections and you'll reap dividends over the long term."
And I loved what Marty O' Donnell said to me: "I'm a big fan of yours! It's great to have you working in and around this field." Excited to have some of his music recorded and coming out later this year.
All in all, GameSoundCon is such a great time. I hope that I might see some of you at one in the future. If you have any questions about it, be sure to ask away.
I've just finished up an exciting week at U-M that involved Dr. Martin Leung's visit to U-M. He completed many different activities while here: teaching lessons to my studio, speaking to the piano majors, being a guest in my Video Game Music class, making a Vodcast that will come out later in the year, speaking to students at large about incorporating the internet and video game music into their portfolios, and playing a concert as well.
Dr. Leung's visit was a major event in my year of research about this kind of music. I was really glad to see how much enthusiasm some of the piano majors had regarding this material. Even the faculty seemed pretty supportive of it as well. Most of all, I was just glad to make an School that in many ways is slow to update repertoire outside of the traditional canons and acknowledge career paths beyond the traditional "super star performer" face up to someone who has had success in another way. Although it definitely made a difference in the present culture, I think and hope it has the ability to make a difference down the road— that students and scholars who come after will be able to look back and say: "hey, this guy X years ago had a piano studio that played all video game music, so why can't I do Y?"
I'm sure some of my colleagues think I don't belong in this space, doing this research or teaching, and/or that the repertoire is not worthy of attention and focus. But I'm really learning this year just how much of a community this music creates. One of my favorite take away's from the week was when one of my students greeted Martin at the start of his lesson by explaining that finding Martin's YouTube channel over a decade ago also led him to a community of music lovers who were passionate about video games and video game music. One of the things I've learned in all my years of work in game audio is that gamers have a "coming out" process— many people play games, but they don't talk about it often. However, because of my work, people DO talk to me about their interest in gaming and what they're playing. I'm always glad when anyone can express him/here self more, and it was an emotional experience to see one of my students explain that he'd found inspiration from Martin and his playing video game music for years. Wow!
Lastly, I'll leave with a comment about the recital Martin played. (If you're interested in any of his arrangements, you can find them for free for a limited time on the sheet music portion of his website.) As you can see from the above picture, the recital was well attended by all sorts of students and even guests who had driven a long way to get to Ann Arbor to hear him. I really enjoyed the event and was delighted to play some duets with Martin at the end of the program. Turns out these are the first video game music duets that he's ever performed! I put these duets up on my videogamemusicnerd YouTube channel, but I'll share my favorite of these duets here. I absolutely loved playing Super Mario Galaxy, and also the reference to Super Mario Bros 3, in the middle of this duet. Despite the fact that we probably had only about 45 minutes to rehearse, these duets really came together. In fact, one of my students wrote a reaction to the recital, commenting: "The duets were incredible— really in sync— you seem to play off each other well." I think that playing piano duets is one of the hardest things to really have exactly together because of the percussive nature of the instrument, but we did it!
I think that Martin will eventually post the whole recital and I'll link to it here once he does. For now, you can see the other two on my channel if you like. Including some antics jumping around during Mario Kart Double Dash: Baby Park. About this duet, one of my students wrote: “BLUE SHELL! DUCK AND COVER!— that sort of thing is something you simply can’t get at a normal concert/recital. Part of why I love video games so much; in the end, it’s about fun.”
Overall, a tremendously busy week, but also an important one in my research that I'm still digesting. Have you heard Martin play video game music? Did he inspire you and help you find a sense of community? I'd love to hear about it, if so.
I thought it'd be fun to give a little view of some research that I'm currently working on.
Just about a year ago, when I hosted the North American Conference on Video Game Music (NACVGM) at the University of Michigan, I made a presentation about video game piano transcriptions. I titled the talk "There's no question you'll be popular after performing these in front of your friends: the pedagogy and performance of piano transcriptions of video game music." The title is a line from the beginning of a Zelda collection and I thought that was perfect. In this presentation, I discuss the variety of piano material and how the game audio is adapted to work well in a linear format for live performances. In doing this presentation, I also became the first person to perform on a traditional instrument live at NACVGM, though others before me had made music on game systems.
As I say at the end of the talk, I was planning to have a studio of pianists to have lessons and study video game piano music with me in the coming year. That's this academic year, and I'm in the midst of that research. Although it's a lot of extra work to have five piano students and a studio class on top of my normal teaching schedule, I've learned a lot and am hoping in upcoming years to publish about my experience, my students' experience, and about the repertoire. My hope is that if more teachers of piano knew about this material, they would incorporate it into their teaching. One outcome that's already clear to me is that this sort of material will attract students who would not otherwise be interested in studying piano.
The year is going so well. I have a variety of students to help explore the repertoire from a beginner who had never had piano lessons before (though he could read music as a violinist) to a student who could easily have been a piano major if he'd desired it to a doctoral student who helps me with researching the pedagogy of these collections and other aspects like how to program a piano recital of all video game music. My studio had our first concert at the University of Michigan Museum of Art a few weeks ago as a midway project and Peter Smith took some great pictures from the event, including this one of the studio just after we finished.
As far as I know, this is the first collegiate studio of pianists working on video game music. Pretty cool! Although only one of them, the DMA student, is planning to go into the profession, I'm delighted to have inspired the others to revisit their piano playing and hope they'll stay with it through life.
There are some other upcoming events that are exciting too. Video Game Pianist, Dr. Martin Leung, will be coming in about 10 days to give lessons to my students, and speak to the piano majors at U-M as well as other students about his career and how the internet has changed the modern musician's career. He's also playing a concert and I'll be joining him for a few duets he's arranged-- they're hard!
This concert is free and open to the public if you're in the Michigan area.
We have an end of semester recital planned as well, April 13th. So it's a busy few months. Meanwhile, my students are keeping journals about their practice and work and have formal interviews that I'll be able to study through as I'm working on publications I hope will come out of this year.
Since I started this project, I learned of another pianist who is doing research in this area, from Tarleton State University, Dr. Leslie Spotz. She gave a recital after a sabbatical researching video game piano transcriptions the day after my studio recital at the UMMA. So cool to realize you're not alone in interests and what you're researching!
That said, I bet there are more folks out there in a similar case. Do you use video game music in your studio teaching? I'd love to hear about it if so, and especially if you're a pianist. What works well? What doesn't? How long have you done it? I welcome any comments or chance to connect about this.
Yesterday was a long travel day for me as Vince and I headed down to my parents house to visit them before we start our usual summer work in the Berkshires. The drive gave me a chance to listen to another of The Game Audio Podcast's, which I'm really loving so far-- I'm up to episode 4 now.
I've also been thinking about the Video Games Live!/ Distant Worlds, etc phenomenon a lot recently. Whenever I mention to a classical musician that I'm studying this music, they ask if I know of these concerts. Somehow, these concerts have permeated the game culture bubble to non-gamers. Probably in part because classical musicians understand how film music concerts work and these aren't far from that.
This music tries to distance itself from classical symphonic music, and I can certainly see why. A regular classical symphony orchestra might not enjoy an event like this, so the distinction is important in selling the concert to the right audience. Tommy Tallarico is right in describing the event as a part symphony, part rock concert. The lights, effects, multimedia, incorporation of audience members, interviews with composers, and historic speakers... there are lots of things this performance has going right. In many cases, with widely consumed classical music, the creators are long dead and can't be interviewed and brought up on stage. That will happen to video game music, of course, but right now they have a huge advantage in an aging generation that we can see and talk to. There are before and after events with the concerts too, much the same as classical music's pre-show lectures and afterward meet-and-greets.
I hadn't considered that there are celebrities in this style of music, for instance, the pianist who plays Super Mario music blindfolded, Martin Leung. There's a whole culture to the live performance of this music that's somewhat different from those who play it in games. I suppose that's one of the ways these concerts win: mom and dad (or at this point, grandma and grandpa!) may still feel like they're taking the kids to the symphony, while the younger generation is thrilled to hear music they've grown up loving.
The marketing of these concerts is a fine line to walk, though... there's no need to disparage classical music or concerts. I've been to plenty of classical concerts that made use of multimedia, special effects, etc, to great effect. I've also been to plenty of classical concerts that were in that traditional "stuffy" atmosphere and were absolutely brilliant-- and, in fairness, some I've hated for having that atmosphere. That's all in the eye of the beholder anyway. In some ways, with VGL!'s various acts and discussions, it's even more true to what I know of historic classical performances. I'm thinking here of Baroque opera houses, where pieces were broken up, excerpted, and there was a whole event to the performance; in the corners of the houses, there were people eating, having sex, selling things, etc.
I do hope for a day when we can hear this music a bit more expressively live. I understand the need for the click track with the visuals, but think that combined with the hiring of orchestra members who sometimes look (and sound) as if the music is beneath them can hurt the performance. We need to invent a way to lock the visuals with the music instead of vice-versa. And make sure that the performing orchestra members actually love the music they're playing.
In any case, I need to see one of these concerts live some day soon to drink it all in in-person.
