12 - Analytical Traditions and Game Music: Super Mario Galaxy as a Case Study

Summary

Ludomusicologists generally agree that cinema and television represent the nearest siblings to video games, and so therefore adopt many methodologies familiar to film music scholarship in their work. For example, the influential concepts of diegetic and non-diegetic, which respectively describe sounds that exist either within or outside a narrative frame,¹ feature prominently in many accounts of game audio, and represent one axis of Karen Collins’s model for the uses of game audio, the other being dynamic and non-dynamic, where dynamic audio can be further subcategorized as adaptive or interactive.² Ludomusicologists generally also agree that the interactive nature of video games marks its primary distinction from other forms of multimedia, and so a fundamental point of entry into studying game audio is to examine how composers and sound designers create scores and soundtracks that can adapt to indeterminate player actions.