THE ORCHESTRA IN THE ARCADE

THE ORCHESTRA IN THE ARCADE

FEATURES

P. GREGORY SPRINGER

Step into the arcade, try to find a piece of private space, and wait. Block out the visual. Close your eyes. Let an onrush of sound attack you.

What do you hear? A blur of cacophony? The anarchy of a thousand microchips competing with each other? Or, an interwoven, technological aleatory music, a Found Philharmonic playing the 20th Century's Favorite Song?

The music of video games takes back seat to the visual effects produced on the screen, but most of the surviving popular games would hove faded long ago without their hypnotically clever music. Heard separately, individual games like Pac-Man and Q'Bert owe much of their magic to the sounds they sinq to every player at their controls.

Collectively, the orchestra in the arcade blasts out the kind of overlapping rhythms being created by American musical composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. One could easily trace that history of dissonance and chaos to the grand old American fiagwaver Charles Ives, who—in his Fourth of July Symphony—makes mincemeat and fireworks out of our national anthems. Sounds, sounds, and more sounds. Videogame sounds ore the melting pot of electronic media machine music.

Don't most gomes make mere artillery rhythms, variations on the basic beepbang? Shooting is only one of many activities in a video game: there are electronically generated sounds of jumping, running, driving, flying, falling, punching, eating, swimming, hopping, pushing, kicking, digging, dancing and climbing, to name a few. Every game makes music of its own, every player conducts his own symphony at the drop of a quarter.

Many contemporary composers create what is called "aleatory music," or "found sound." By forcing the listener to recognize that music continues all around us (silence is an illusion), these composers make listening the active part of music. One music critic for the Village Voice some years ago analyzed wnat he called "zoo music" by tape recording the various cries of animals on random days at the zoo. The time has come to recognize and analyze the more common sounds around us in video games.

Maybe you think Frogger, Centipede, Pengo ana the rest of the cute scafy animal games have been designed and programmed by tight-fisted money-mad videogame manufacturers rather than any lofty musical minds. Maybe you figure they created those little noises only with the intent of swallowing up the coin flow of the video-addicted

universe. Maybe you're right, But nothing con prevent the sounds of silicon from adding to o listener's catalog of beautiful noise. The beep stands alone.

PLAYING IN THE BAND

WORK I Pac-Man, the most venerable old man of music, has become a sound heard round the world. The opening prelude to every game echoes a coll to the starting gate. In four bars of music with two instruments, a bass part and a lead line, the player hears a cheery incitement to start moving, a summons perhaps more well known than the "DIT DIT DIT DUH" beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Every game makes music of its own, every player conducts his own symphony at the drop of a quarter.

Immediately following those familiar notes, the game player is handed the conducting baton.

With the joystick, each player determines how much dedicated munching noise and how many siren whoops will be heard. The siren of Pac-Man blasts out whenever the PacMan runs along paths he's previously gone, where the dots are already munched. The theme of the Pac-Man music is really the Work Ethic in a capsule: keep on the move, eat the rewards of your labor ahead of the competition, and expect the warning sirens to ring in your ears when you aren't making gainful progress. No

matter how well you do, in the end, everybody collapses with a sound like the plug's just been pulled on your electric organ.

SEX AND I Arcade games have VIOLENCE steered clear of the sexy images that pinball traditionally uses. Apart from the relatively innocuous Mae West pose of Ms. Pac* man, most battles of the sexes in video games involve romance sweeter than molasses. Donkey Kong, Popeye,

Jungle Hunt, ana the rest are innocence itself. Similarly, the sounds of these games sometimes seem to be coming from another planet rather than a bedroom.

The seemingly innocent Centipede has a phallic sexual component, including the gun shooting upwards in buzzing ejaculatory spurts. A victory "charge" sound results at the climax, whenever a new gun is awarded. But, when the frigid button-headed mushrooms convert back to their fleshy, vulnerable state at the collapse of the player's gun, the sound is nothing less than a machine gun rat-a-tat-tat.

Donkey Kong, supposedly a story about the conquest of true love, begins with a mystery music warning, right out of a TV tnriller from the '50s.

Throughout play, bombing is the sound accompanying Mario's treacherous climb. The steep ascent itself makes a burbling noise quite removed from romance or Italian hiking shoes.

Frogger has some of tne siurpiest sounds in the business, with o mating dance that rivals Nijinsky's "Rite Of Spring" ballet for suggestiveness.

When the frog leaps on the pink female frog's back, a shimmering crescendo of wobbling groans soars above the easy-listening background music. The happy frog, mate attached, now hops towards his home slot, which he enters with a slooshy, solid splat. Quite organic.

On the other hand, a paramilitaristic training game like Frontline features a single drummer boy through victory and defeat. That's appropriate enough, other than the fact that the soldier operated by the player walks upwards on the screen with an odd tinkle bell sound, sort of like a "beat the clock" countdown. All around this tick-tock reaper beating rhythm, grenades scream and explode at whatever rate the player chooses to fire them.

WHITE I For pure, unadulterated NOISE sound, Defender remains the best purveyor of white noise. White noise boxes which simulate the ocean roar or windy nights can be purchased for the soothing atmospheres they can create. Defender offers nothing of the kind, but does have the kind of tuneless emotional purrs which hove won it along life in the arcade.

In the opening moments, immediately after punching the start game button, a low twang signals go, mimicking the guitar string reverb opening when the Beatles played "I Feel Fine,'' From there on, the firing mechanism allows every player to make as much white whoosh as fast as his twitching trigger finger can flap. The little humans whose planet is threatened cry out for Defender's help, and whenever one is saved—when he leaps off the ship and back to mother earth—a wah wah pedal tremolo thanks you. At the conclusion of certain rounds, the swhoosh explosion is prolonged for several seconds, giving the player an extra rush of sound. Defender comes closest, on sounds alone, to a modern rock sound.

Krull is the newcomer in the white noise field, offering a variation in crunching sound. Sheer echoes of calculated grating accompany every rescue mission in the game, like the world's favorite halitosis— Darth Voder's nasty aspiration—Krull turns deep breathing into a beat.

VOICES I Lyrics play a very minimal part in modern arcade music.

Mousetrap toyed around with animal noises, in particular cats, dogs, and a screaming hawk, and □ few of the earlier games were programmed to taunt and (supposedly) entice players into relinquishing their quarters.

One of the better speaking machines is Berserk, although it too can disrupt with its speech. The taunt, "Chicken! Fight like a robot!" for example, irks players who strategically abandon a particular maze in order to advance the game logically. However, you can't talk back to the machine, and you can't explain. With sounds, though, whatever curses or groans you make blend right into the unearthly chorus.

That bizarre language is part of Q’bert's greatest innovation. The dream-state characters—a bouncing nose, a beatnik blob, a slinky snakeall speak with syllables from beyond. Their voices are unlike any but the most perverted human speech, and as the creatures bounce noisily across the pyramid of colors, o rich whirlpool of unintelligible voices chant in rhythms never imagined in reggae.

Other games have introductory remarks. Star Trek allows a few of the famous characters of the television program to narrate some moments, in particular the "Welcome aboard, Captain" greeting and the "damage repaired, sir" signals during play. This electronically simulated speech ties in with the Star Trek attempt to give the player the actual sensation of piloting the Starship Enterprise. Despite the well-known theme music which begins the game, Star Trek remains one of the least musical of all videogames.

There may be a future in lyrical games, but for the present it is sound itself which dominates and pleases. When the controls of Berzerk threaten us, "Stop the Humanoid, Intruder Alert, Intruder Alert!" it sounds almost like the beginning of another phase of futuristic rock. Maybe it's up to Neil Young and his vocoder to come up with the definitive Folk-Rock-Revisited Game. Maybe Bob Dylan should revive something. Highway 61 Roadrace, with poetry?

REAL I Theme songs and classical MUSIC m music infiltrate the beautiful madness of the video arcade. Popeye wouldn't be kosher spinach without his "Popeye The Sailor Man" song. Satan's Hollow enlists Wagners "Ride Of The Valkyries," as did the movie Apocalypse Now, Pengo lets its penguins slide over the ice to the tune of Bach. Certain games force constant elevator ditties over the background of the action: Moon Patrol's samba sound, Frogger's carnival Muzak, and others. Of all the borrowed sounds in games, Tron is clearly the most musically attuned.

Maybe they created those noises with the intent of swallowing up the coins of the video-addicted universe.

Wendy Carlos' compositions transfer well from the 70mm movie screen to the arcade video screen. Tron's songs emerge as the game is played, annoncing each victory and failure. During the Spider fighting sequence, the music continues right along until you die or until you're lifted up into the beam. Because Tron was one of the first games to have four different games included within one screen (Krull is the newest with this feature), there is opportunity for variation in the musical portion of the game, too. Playing Tron is a little like conducting a concert in four parts.

DEATH I like all music, there are themes and motifs which evoke emotions without words. Winning sounds in games are energized ups, while the sounds of death ore almost universally downer, losing laments. PacMan dwindles down in death to the tune of a waning moan, a little weepy collapse with a kicker disintegration at the very end. As the family dies in Robotron, they cry the most sorrowful whine in the arcade. Defender's explosion is a detonation that's as finalsounding as a judge's gavel. Centipede's last gasp is a quick crash, while the sequel Millipede, curiously, dies with the buzzing of an electric alarm clock. Q*Bert s suicidal leap gives off the appropriate ^Oooooooooohhh," a fatal plunge and a cosmic joke.

Whatever your poison, there's no mistaking the final movement in □ video game symphony,

UNREALI The special thing about videogame sounds is that they are recognizable. Buckner and Garcia milked this with a single ("Pac-Man Fever") and an album that actually recorded arcade musics in the background of their own insipid songs. Whether or not more records will be released utilizing videogame sounds remains to be seen, although retailers know that selling home game cartridges in record stores nas become a near essentia! in the business. Racks of rock V roll stand next to take-home videogames as though they were a marriage made in money market heaven.

Pauline Oliveros, the most recorded of women composers and a pioneer of electronic music, used to lecture on rock V roll as electronic music. Once, she gave an entire performance by asking the audience to hum any note that came into their heads. Then, she sat and waited. The New York Times critic, John Rockwell, referred to that performance as one of the most important concerts of the season.

"Maybe one of the most interesting things about rock V roll is that people begin to have a sense of participation," Oliveros said in a 1978 interview. "It is hard to just listen to this music; you have to move,"

Videogames take the idea of musical particpation one step further. In a videogame, like the humming music of Oliveros, the player determines an important portion of the sound. Every player is also a musician, every gome an instrument. The audience no longer sits and stares. Or just listens.

What is your favorite sound?

Oliveros asks. The answers she frequently gets are wind chimes, babies nursing, Swiss cowbells in the Alps, voices, birds, hmmm, the bathroom door, basketball swish. Grating, cracking and grinding. The memory of undifferentiated masses of sound before auditory perception is highly developed.

What is the most silent period you have ever experienced? Anesthesia. Sodium Pentothal from an operation.

An anechoic chamber in the department of Speech Pathology, Daydreaming,

The music of videogames may continue to drone on unacknowledged, but underneath it burbles the sound of the future, our musical heritage in a new arena.