The Ithaca Music Forum is pleased to announce its first event of the year. On Friday at 5pm in Ithaca College’s Whalen Center for Music (room 4308), Dr. Elizabeth Medina-Gray will present “Musical-Technological Representations of Speaking Voices in Video Games.” The event is free to the public, and a reception will follow.
The spirited talk will compel anyone interested in video game and their use of sound and music. Let's generate some good conversation at this exciting demonstration!
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Description: Video games, overall, use an extremely wide variety of sounds and techniques to represent the voices of characters in their game worlds. This broad repertoire of sounds includes relatively realistic recordings of voice-acted speech, highly abstract synthesized tones, and myriad other sounds, each creatively tailored to a game’s technological affordances and limitations as well as a game’s aesthetics. Some of these sounds representing voices, moreover, are curiously musical, even though they ostensibly represent speech (rather than song). Video games thus provide a rich field in which issues of voice and technology, human and machine, and blurred boundaries between sound, music, and speech all come into play in intriguing ways.
In this talk, I engage with these broad issues by closely examining a subset of sounds that represent characters’ voices in video games: I focus here on sounds that are both strongly technological and in some way musical (primarily in their use of discrete pitches), and I draw examples from a few prominent and aesthetically divergent games. In the first portion of the talk, I examine some technologically generated sounds in games on the Nintendo Entertainment System, for exampleSuper Mario Bros. 3(1988) andDragon Quest(1986). In the second portion, I explore two later examples that feature technologically modified recordings of voice-acted speech: sounds representing the voices of GLaDOS inPortal(2007) and Fi inThe Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword(2011). Throughout, I ask what meanings might arise from these sounds’ particular musical qualities, in the context of their framings simultaneously as technological sounds and as representations of characters’ voices.