Modular Structure and Function in Early 21st-Century Video Game Music

One of the most critical aspects of music in video games is that it is dynamic. This music---along with a game's visuals, events, and other audio---is flexible across gameplay, and its progression depends on various real-time factors, including the player's individual actions. For example, the player may move her character to a new area in the game's virtual world and the musical score might change in response; similarly, a particular in-game event may trigger a brief motive that sounds on top of the game's other ongoing music. As each player's experience with a particular game is unique, so each real-time musical soundtrack shapes itself---to varying degrees---to match each individualized play session. Music is an integral part of gameplay and the larger multimedia object of the game, but this media's dynamic quality challenges the study of video games and game music in ways that are unfamiliar in studies of more static media, such as most concert music and film. In particular, how can we study music whose final content and structure is unknown until the moments of gameplay? How can we equally treat each real-time soundtrack---and its contributions to gameplay---for an infinite number of individual players?;This dissertation addresses these fundamental questions through a focus on modularity. Game music consists of many distinct modules together with rules that govern the modules' possible behavior and combination. These modules are then triggered and modified in real time, resulting in an individualized gameplay soundtrack. To understand game music's unique practical and aesthetic considerations, one part of this dissertation situates game music within the broader context of modularity, including instances of modular music in the 20th-century avant-garde.;One critical component of modularity in video game music is the seams that arise when one module stops and another begins or when two modules overlap in real time. Such seams are a fundamental part of a soundtrack's structure, and they are, moreover, functional. Smoothness at modular seams is an aesthetic goal in game music and it contributes cohesion to the soundtrack and the game. Disjunction, by contrast, can support a change in the game's environment or enhance the game system's usability. Both smoothness and disjunction can moreover support the player's immersion in various contexts, and they may serve other functions as well.;To forward the study of dynamic music in video games, this dissertation therefore proposes a method for analyzing smoothness at modular seams. This method measures smoothness and disjunction in five main aspects of the music---meter, timbre, pitch, volume, and abruptness---although it accounts for additional aspects in certain contexts as well. By focusing on the real-time seams between modules, this method allows analysts to examine game music in detail and in relation to other gameplay events and processes. Critically, the method in this dissertation incorporates probability calculations to analyze every possible seam that may result during gameplay from a given modular system. In this way, every player's soundtrack while playing a game is given equal weight in analysis.;Since technology limits the degree to which game music can be dynamic---because of memory limitations, for example---this dissertation focuses on games of the 21st century, where widespread advances in technology allow modular structures to become increasingly complex and certain structures become especially common. Through analyses of diverse examples from several games---including The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo 2003) and Flower (thatgamecompany 2009)---this dissertation argues that modularity and modular seams vitally assist dynamic music's unique contributions to video games. This dissertation's approach to modularity thus offers critical insight into this complex and versatile multimedia.