Why Music is Critical
Frequently, the most undervalued facet of game development is music. Nobody would disagree that gameplay is paramount. A boring game, no matter how fancy the presentation, is still a boring game. Then, most developers would suggest graphics as a secondary importance. But I’m going to challenge that.
When I was in college, I headed a psychological study regarding emotional malleability in the presence of music. Myself and a small team of colleagues presented to a number of volunteers various photographs accompanied with a rotating playlist of music of various emotional overtones.
What we discovered was shocking.
Regardless of the content of the photograph, be it a wedding or a disfigured beast, it was the music that expressed the majority of the emotional value. Display a photograph of a child’s birthday party and the elated emotions were felt universally. But accompany that photograph with a menacing soundtrack and that joyous day became something sinister. An adrenaline infused dune buggy ride became a flight of fancy with some soothing background music. And an average grandfather turned into an insightful wiseman with the sound of tribal drums beating around us.
Music - with its powerful ability to shape our emotions and experiences - is a profound thing. So why is it so often overlooked?
Graphics are tangible, easy to digest bits of information. It’s not hard to immediately place value on a well drawn image. Music, on the other hand, is a very cerebral experience. It manifests only upon performance, pushing the limits of our minds to the (literal) fourth dimension. Unlike graphics, music never really exists at any discrete moment of time. Only through our own reconstruction of what has been played, and the expectation of what will be played, can we ever really experience music. It’s easy to overlook such a subtle, yet powerful, medium.
So, next time you’re designing the production of a game, ask yourself if you’re overlooking the soundtrack because it really has no value, or because you don’t understand its value.
November 20th, 2006 at 6:31 am
I can’t really say that I’m surprised (although it’s very impressive that the experiment had such clear results!) But I’m not sure that music in games is all that overlooked; it’s rated less important than graphics, but its effects are probably not ignored. People seem to work hard to find songs that fit into a game’s theme well, and I think that part of this search is to find the desired emotional response along with the musical style. (Maybe subconsciously.) It’d be great if more effort was put into integrating sound in subtle ways though.
And that goes for other subtle details as well: in a school project I made a silly breakout game where the background would scroll in various ways, to see what impact this had on the user’s perceived sense of speed. I love when people experiment with little details like this!