An Overview of Emotion as a Parameter in Music, Definitions, and Historical Approaches

Abstract

This chapter presents a theoretical overview of emotion in the context of music, particularly emotional analysis, different types of model, and the distinction between perceived and induced emotions. All are necessary to understand in order to examine emotion in the video game soundtracking context. You may be a videogame designer, sound designer, composer, or player; professional or enthusiastic amateur. Regardless, you will be familiar with the powerful role which soundtracking can play in shaping your experience. Music is a well-documented way to communicate feelings and emotional states, regardless of whether one has written, performed, or simply listened to it. When combined with other modalities, i.e., listening and seeing, or in the case of many games, listening, seeing, and responding with gameplay actions, the experience can become even more intense. High quality soundtracking has the potential to enhance player experience in video games (Grimshaw et al. 2008). Combining emotionally congruent sound-tracking with game narrative has the potential to create significantly stronger affective responses than either stimulus alone—the power of multimodal stimuli on affective response has been shown both anecdotally and scientifically (Camurri et al. 2005). Video game soundtracking has an inexorable link with the available technology at the time of development. This meant that there were—at least—some limitations in terms of what might be achievable in the soundtracking efforts for earlier generations of game, whether that be restrictions based on the type of synthesizer available to the composer, or the storage medium in terms of digital sound effects and speech. Game audio requires at least two additional challenges over other sound-for-picture work; firstly, the need to be dynamic (responding to gameplay states) and secondly to be emotionally congruent whilst adapting to non-linear narrative changes (Collins 2008). Early solutions such as looping can be come repetitive, and ultimately break player immersion, but branching strategies (where different cues are multiplexed at narrative breakpoints) can drastically increase the compositional complexity required in the music implementation when creating a soundtrack (Lipscomb and Zehnder 2004).