An analysis of repetition in video game music

Hunt, Samuel J

Abstract

Video game music, unlike other forms and genres of music , is comparatively young in its development, and undoubtedly heavily influenced by the hardware it was originally played on. This study observes whether the amount of repetition in video game music has been affected by limitations in hardware and physical storage size. Musical structure often derives from repetition and is one of many crucial musical elements for defining structure. We hypothesise that early videos games will contain above average repetition due to hardware limitations. Early video game soundtracks were minimally encoded, utilising hardware based chip-tune synthesis, whereas modern games can support Hol-lywood style soundtracks. This research analyses 21,391 pieces of video game music across a range of various video game consoles. In conclusion our original hypothesis was mostly disproven, and in fact the repetition structure discovered across different platforms and generations remained more-or-less consistent. There were however improvements in song length and the number of instrument tracks within a song. Overall this paper presents an initial informal analysis of repetition in video game music.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: The 2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity
• Start Date: Oct 18, 2020
• End Date: Oct 23, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Oct 23, 2020
• Publication Date: Oct 23, 2020
• Deposit Date: Oct 27, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9789151955605
• Keywords: Video game music; music analysis; music structure
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/6818560
• Publisher URL: https://boblsturm.github.io/aimusic2020/programme.html