Published!

Finally!

My article "Meaningful Play: Performativity, Interactivity and Semiotics in Video Game Music" has been published in Musicology Australia, the journal of the Musicological Society of Australia. It follows directly from a paper I gave at the Performative Voices conference at the University of South Australia in 2012, and which I also gave (slightly revised) at the Ludo 2013 and MaMI 2013 conferences.

From the abstract:

Through an understanding of interactivity as a performative act, we can treat the musical experience of gameplay as the text to be studied—a text the player has a non-trivial role in creating. The player’s unique series of actions during gameplay evolves into an interpretation of the designers’ complete, preconceived game experience. Similarly, although music is received in a series of unique contexts during gameplay, the player’s actions shape the music into an interpretation of the musical experience envisioned by the composer... Video game music exhibits a twofold semiosis, the analysis of which must contextualise both the music's initial composition and the player's interactivity in relation to the complete musical experience.

The article can be found online here. If you have institutional access, go have a read!

Satisfaction in abstraction

I'm increasingly aware of a preference I have for the study of abstractions. In its current form, this is manifesting as an enjoyment of musical semiotics, which I've been studying for thesis and prospective article purposes. This isn't a new thing for me, I think. When I started to find undergraduate physics too hard because I'd forgotten how to do integral calculus in the year between school and uni, I majored in pure mathematics instead. I've always found the application of mathematical models to real-life situations a bit challenging; on the other hand, algebra for algebra's sake is satisfying, pure geometry or topology fascinates me, and set theory permeates my thinking about anything quantifiable.

Musical semiotics is a little controversial. On the surface of it, music doesn't seem able to convey meaning; you can't say, for instance, that middle C signifies a tree, or love, or the number 231. On the other hand, you could say that music can convey meaning within the external framework of a shared musical pedagogy. In that instance, a perfect cadence could convey a sense of satisfaction if there's a socially-acknowledged precedent of perfect cadences representing satisfaction. But if this is the case in the Western tradition, there's nothing to say it must hold in other musical traditions. Furthermore, some have argued that it's possible to distinguish between a 'meaning' and a 'significance'; that is, what a thing means in and of itself, and what significance external factors can give it in people's minds. It's fairly broadly accepted that music can connote — it can be made to signify something within its immediate context — but can it denote, or refer to something outside itself? Some say "yes" and some say "no" (and it sometimes seems that each answer is also followed by "of course, that should be obvious").

This is barely scratching the surface of the question of musical meaning, let alone how (and if) music in games is meaningful. I know it is meaningful, at very least through its context within the audiovisual text, and I'm pretty sure there are even multiple ways in which it can bear meaning. But proving this in my thesis is shaping up to be a significant (and hopefully quite satisfying) challenge. I'm part way there with my current work, but every new text I read seems to open up further avenues for investigation. I guess I'm just glad that I can include some abstract theorising in my studies. Being able to look beyond the texts I study to the bigger issues, the things that inform, shape and permeate all such texts, and even beyond those things to the small glimpses one gets of how humans work through what they create; this is what, for me, makes this study worthwhile.