How to Do Things with Videogames

4. Music

4 Music We tend to think of music as a purely aural medium. But one need notsearch hard tofind that listening isonlyonewayweexperience music. Intheancientworld, forexample, musicand literaturewere indistinguishable. Epic poetry like that of Homer wasn’t read in bound volumes but sung by minstrels who performed for groups. Shorter ancient verse, called lyric poetry, was so named because it was written to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre. From the early first millennium through the Middle Ages, music served a liturgical purpose. The plainchant (most know it better as the Gregorian chant, thanks to a compilation made by Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century) wasn’t intended to be particularly musical, but to prime the listener for spiritual reflection. By the twelfth century jongleurs revisited the ancient oral tradition, performing songs and tricks in the streets and courtsof medieval Europe. Acombinationof secularand religious hymns emerged in the early Renaissance, and by the sixteenth century composers were penning music for church and concert alike. Music became more theatrical, with stagings of orchestras and, of course, opera’s emergence in the seventeenth century. The melodic age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw musicrise tothe level of art, thanks largelytogreatcomposers like Mozart and Beethoven. Throughout this era, music still largely served a narrative or painterly purpose, whereby the music was a medium for carrying another message entirely, whether from the church, the people, or the imagination. Thetwentiethcenturywitnessed newstyles, among them jazz, which secularized the sacred traditions of music and movement musIc in Africa and blended them with the instrumental and performative role of music in the West. Dance has existed throughout human history, but the last century reintroduced music as a habitat for movement and action. The Victorian waltz, the modern stadium rock concert, the 1930s swing club, the rave warehouse, all of thesevenuesexemplify music’scarnivalesqueroleasan invitation to overcome inhibitions and to perform physically in ways otherwise prohibited by polite society. Music’s strong social history notwithstanding, today we often use it in isolation. We insert our earbuds in the gym or on the subway as much to drown out sound as to take it in. The concert and the dance club still exist, but we’ve also adopted new musical functions. The emergence of soft jazz and piped music slows down and calms listeners in elevators or shopping malls, reducing anxiety during idle waiting and encouraging browsing while shopping. The music video may have been popularized by MTV in the 1980s, but it had existed in prototypical form in the silent film of the 1910s, the musical film of the early 1960s, and the promotional films of the later part of that decade. It was this latter application that most influenced the MTVgeneration: short films set to songs acted as advertising forsingles, albums, concerts, and the musical artist more broadly. While it still serves as promotion today, the music video has exceeded this purpose, and it now acts like storytelling or vignette as much as the medieval chanson de geste or the early modern opera had done. Videogames enter the domain of music here, in the era of television. While much of the history of music takes place in the publicspaceof ritual ordiversion, videogamesenterthepictureat a time when more and more cultural activity began to take place at home. Even as memories of Woodstock were still fresh, the idea of capturing the experience of psychedelic musical theatrics at home was already in developers’ minds in the early 1970s. The year before the introduction of its seminal Video Computer System, Atari created the Atari Video Music, a hi-fi system component that could connect to a television through an RF adapter. musIc The device accepted RCA inputs from a stereo audio source, and then used the changing signals to modify the parameters of an abstract pattern rendered on the television—an early version of the visualizers that come with today’s computer music programs like iTunes or WinAmp. Push buttons and potentiometers allowed the operator to modify the output by changing the pattern, colors, and shapes. Like the music video or the opera, Atari Video Music made an auditory medium visual. But unlike those earlier forms, the device focused on manipulating the audio signal itself, the music directly instrumenting the visuals. The device could hardly be called interactive, but the viewer can manipulate its settings, effectively “playing along” with familiar music in an unfamiliarway. While primitive, Atari...