Those music loops become engraved in our brains and our hearts after listening to them over and over and over again. The music of games is also the soundtrack of our lives, in ways that perhaps – and regretfully – film scores may not always get the chance to do. (These loops never resolve, because that’s what suspense is all about.) The music is also part of the interface, provides feedback about the world.īut there’s another narrative that game music also creates, which relates to what I referred to at the beginning. The soundtracks for the Metal Gear series have always done a great job to create both mood and tell the player what is going on, from loops closer to ambient music for the stealth sections to accelerated and strong beats when Snake is in danger. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy game, I’m sure you can recognize the different combat music loops. The loops change their tempo, key, or instrumentation depending on the situation not only to cue different emotional states, but also to give us game information. Games also use them a lot in the form of loops that repeat so they can adapt to the length of gameplay. The use of leitmotifs is extensive in film-you can recognize the music that identifies James Bond, or the Force in Star Wars. It can be torture, really.) And I do pay attention because the music also tells the story-characters, situations, spaces can have their own melodies. (And in the muzak in the supermarket and the elevators. This is a pet peeve of mine because I’m the kind of weirdo who pays attention to music in films and videogames. These music cues can also be intrusive, trying to amplify a mood that is already created visually, verbally, or through camerawork, by playing predictable music in ways that can ruin the scene. ![]() More often than not, these musical devices are trite because the emotions they evoke have very little subtlety, and they tend to be a stock library that repeats from episode to episode. They want the audience to feel a certain way, as if they couldn’t have their own emotional reactions to the events they’re watching. I find this notion rather limiting, even irritating-think of documentaries or reality TV playing loud soundtracks to indicate that there’s a moment of suspense, or that the scene is sad because people are crying. People often refer to film or videogame soundtracks and their capacity to evoke emotions, understanding that the music dictates how the audience has to feel about what is happening on the screen. ![]() A few notes can send us spinning to a summer in our childhood, a fun party, or the aftermath of a breakup. ![]() Our lives have a music soundtrack-people often associate songs with specific moments of their existence and create emotional connections with melodies.
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