Interactive Corruption: Atonal Freedom and Narrative in Video Games

Abstract

Engagement in rigorous pitch analysis of dissonant media music is remarkably infrequent; I attribute this reluctance to the (perfectly valid) reason of horrific music often being difficult to transcribe and/or using non-discrete pitches. As a result, such music is often viewed through an affective or topical lens. I acknowledge that both of these factors are important to the listening experience; as such, I view atonality (and the analysis thereof) as a sort of topic in and of itself. When a dissonant piece does utilize discrete pitches, however, analyzing its pitch content with greater specificity than has been historically applied offers rich information about a game's story, its world, and its characters. My choice to use video game music is purposeful: ludomusicology is a field that is, perhaps more than any other discipline, chiefly concerned with media immersion. My study, then, adds a pitch-narrative dimension to ludomusicological analyses of horror and horror-adjacent music. In this dissertation, I apply relatively basic post-tonal analytical techniques to video game music tracks that may be considered “atonal” or otherwise dissonant. Following Gassi (2019), I contend that composers set significant atonal relationships using other musical parameters to increase their audibility to the audience, even if subconsciously. In doing so, I elucidate otherwise latent narrative information that arises from the relationships discovered in those analyses. In total, I do not only conclude that post-tonal analysis can reveal dormant conflict narratives in video game music. I also argue that video game music tells us a great deal about post-tonal analysis at large, that when it is applied to a medium that necessitates audience input, it inherently flirts with an interpretive dimension beyond merely pitch and narrative: other musical parameters such as rhythm, timbre, and dynamics become analogous to active agents in both the subconscious and perceivable realization of narrative.