Review: Review

Reviewed Work(s): Biophilia by

Review by: Ben J. Miller
Source: American Music, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter 2013), pp. 511-514
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.31.4.0511
Accessed: 02-11-2016 15:30 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
American Music

This content downloaded from 83.103.212.204 on Wed, 02 Nov 2016 15:30:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 MULTIMEDIA REVIEW

Music Learning through Video Games and Apps: Guitar Hero, Rock Band,
Amplitude, Frequency (Harmonix Music Systems); Rocksmith (UbiSoft);
Bandfuse (Realta Studios); Bit.Trip Complete (Gaijin Games); Audiosurf
(Dylan Fitterer); Beat Hazard (Cold Beam Games); Biophilia (One Little
Indian/Polydor).
In recent decades, interactive video games have opened up new paths for music
composition, performance, pedagogy, and appreciation, with a number of Ameri-
can studios, designers, programmers, and producers contributing to the creativ-
ity and entrepreneurship that push the subgenres of this field forward. These
releases come from the full gamut of the game industry, from larger studios like
the Cambridge, Massachusettsbased Harmonix Music Systems to smaller indie
developers like Gaijin Games in Santa Cruz. Given their interactive nature, these
games offer unparalleled means of immersing their audience and imparting
knowledge and skills that the user might not have even set out to learn. The
weekly Web series Extra Credits, written by game designer James Portnow and
narrated by Pixar animator Daniel Floyd, discusses this untapped pedagogi-
cal potential of contemporary video games. In Tangential Learning (http://
extra-credits.net/episodes), they make a case for the educational value of these
games, proposing that players will self-educate when a topic is introduced in a
context that they already enjoy. Though music is not directly mentioned in this
video, it is not difficult to extrapolate its more general points about pedagogi-
cal benefits to musical understanding. Indeed, there are already many video
games demonstrating such tendencies; they cover a wide range of genres with
the integration of music and gameplay taking various forms.
The category of video games that make use of pre-existing music is best repre-
sented by the work of Harmonix. Well known for the first two Guitar Hero games
(20056) and the later Rock Band (2007) franchise, this studios career extends fur-
ther back with games like Frequency (2001) and Amplitude (2003), which adopted
a similar setup: the player navigates an abstracted representation of the music,
usually a vertically scrolling path paced to the music along with descending
note-heads representing the melody line to be intercepted. Successfully hitting
each note translates into more of the song being played back. However, achieving
a perfect play session with an unblemished playback requires more than quick
reaction time; it demands a degree of timing and muscle memory that would
be a familiar challenge for any beginning musician. Many of these games come
with plastic controllers to mimic the feel of playing an instrumentat first just
the guitar, but later expanding to a full band set of bass, drums, and pianothus
inching players closer to the real deal while straining the now-simplistic defi-
nition of toy. In Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance
(2012), Kiri Miller examines games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band as creative
extensions to instrumental learning rather than as the instrument replacements
many detractors have framed these mimetic controllers to be. More recently,
games like Rocksmith (2011) or the upcoming BandFuse (2013) integrate a real

American MusicWinter 2013

2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

This content downloaded from 83.103.212.204 on Wed, 02 Nov 2016 15:30:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
512 American Music, Winter 2013

electric guitar, mapping the previous games formula onto the input hardware
of an actual instrument. With this integration of musical and gaming hardware,
theres a greater possibility of adapting the structure and instant feedback of the
games to the process of learning to play an instrument.
One subset of games that use pre-existing music repurposes the users own
music library to dynamically structure the gameplay. Indie offerings such as
Dylan Fitterers Audiosurf (2008) and Steve Hunts Beat Hazard (2009) tap into
the users digital libraries, applying an algorithmic analysis of the sound file to
structure the flow of action in-game. Audiosurf has a similar visual layout as Guitar
Hero, but adapts its stage design to the musics rising and falling tempo, density,
and dynamics. Beat Hazard sets out with similar goals in the format of top-down
shooters (as in the classic Asteroid from 1979); here the varying intensity of the
music accounts for concentrations of the enemy flittering and approaching to the
rhythm. The manner in which these two games have branched in their design
lends them to very different purposes. Games like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard offer
a potential for greater music appreciation, demonstrating fundamental musical
concepts such as tempo or texture in an engaging way. Games like Rock Band
and BandFuse hint at a more applied value with the potential to impart actual
musical information and technical skills.
Another category of games feature original soundtracks; these consequently
provide their creators much greater freedom in how the music can be integrated
into the gameplay. The Bit.Trip series (beginning in 2009) from Gaijin Games is
one example of this trend. Each entry in this franchise inhabits a different genre
with distinct gameplay, but in all cases the game elements add to or enrich the
soundtrack itself in some manner. Bit.Trip Runner, the fourth game in the series,
demonstrates this quality the most clearly. In this platformer, the player pro-
gresses through levels while navigating the terrain and dealing with enemies.
Each gameplay choicewhether to take the high road or the valley, to attack
or avoid an enemyelicits a particular musical effect as well; climbing a hill is
an arpeggio, enemies formations translate into triplets, and powerups can be
collected to enhance the musical texture. These games become an interactive
form of graphic notation; each decision the player makes to progress in the game
adapts the music and generates a soundscape that is unique to each play session.
Here the mission is not to impart some applicable level of musicality along the
lines of playing a specific instrument, but rather to provide a framework within
which players can explore the music itself on a more abstract level. There is a
shift from passively understanding the structure of the music to actively reshap-
ing it, something like an improvisatory compositional role. With the exception
of Rocksmith, however, all of the above games focus first on being games and
second on being vehicles for self-education.
A recent release from outside the game industry takes a deliberate step toward
adapting the game format for educational purposes. The Icelandic singer Bjrks
Biophilia project (2011) represents both a technological and a pedagogical achieve-
ment. In addition to the core album of songs, Biophilia comprises an app-album
and a series of workshops aimed at a new approach to teaching both music and
science through principles of tangential learning. Scott Snibbe, producer of the
Biophilia app, is an American artist whose decades of work in interactive media

This content downloaded from 83.103.212.204 on Wed, 02 Nov 2016 15:30:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Multimedia Review 513

have set the stage for the developments in gaming discussed above. We were
trying to find creative, open-ended ways to interact with music that werent turn-
ing it into a game, Snibbe explains in an interview in The Guardian (October 21,
2011). Guitar Hero pigeonholed music into the same idiom as a normal game,
trying to get a score. You dont get a score using Pro Tools, right? Hoping to
facilitate a similar interactivity as in games, yet free of many of the expectations
and constraints of the game format, Snibbe envisioned something that offers
more than just chasing a high score.
Biophilia consists of ten apps joined in a single interface, each app accompanying
or extending one of the tracks of the album. After listening to a brief narration about
the song and the concepts to be examined, the user is thrown into the app without
further explanation; one is free to explore and tinker with the app at ones own
pace, learning about its specific expectations and controls along the way. Each app
is different, changing thematically (both visually and sonically) and mechanically
in how it implements user interaction. Some hold close to the format of the song,
even maintaining a specific start and end time, while others are more open-ended
sonic sandboxes that use the song as material for development via game-like
manipulations. The nature of the interaction often reflects the idea of the song.
Crystalline suggests a rigid but branching structure echoing the fractal pattern
found in crystalline geometry; Solstice focuses on planetary orbits and rotations,
reflected as a cyclical music sequencer in the form of a spinning mobile with the
player placing notes as planets, chiming away the music of the spheres.
The app-album offers a chance to reclaim musical agency for those who feel
excluded by certain expectations of talent, training, or experience. It trims away
the layers that separate the user from the immediate act of both understand-
ing and potentially making music, allowing one to manipulate the apps range
of options in creative ways. In Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with
Sound and Music in Video Games (2013), Karen Collins focuses on the potential
of interactivity to change how we listen to and understand soundnot just by
playing released games, but by manipulating and repurposing the hardware and
software building-blocks that compose them. Biophilia also plays with interac-
tivity in creative ways: the apps make sound physically tangible, with spatial
qualities and direct feedback that lend a greater comprehensibility compared to
more traditional and abstracted ways of teaching music.
Extending the Biophilia app-album were a number of educational workshops
that tapped into this flexible approach to the subject matter. In New York City,
these workshops were run by the New York Public Library and the Childrens
Museum of Manhattan; the two followed similar approaches but targeted differ-
ent groups, high school students and preschoolers respectively. Each participant
received an iPad and headphones. In one session educators explained how to
access a song in the app and provided background information on the app and
the topic of the day, but then they allowed the students to focus on the app. The
preschoolers poked and prodded their iPads in a raptured silence; the high school
students were also enthralled, occasionally sharing with each other discoveries
they had accomplished in the app. The degree to which the app engaged dis-
tracted high schoolers and enamored the younger children validates the intent
behind the workshops and the kind of tangential learning they encouraged.

This content downloaded from 83.103.212.204 on Wed, 02 Nov 2016 15:30:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
514 American Music, Winter 2013

Video games capitalize on a mutual middle ground between systemization

and creative artistry, balancing their in-game rules and programmatic logic
with the various ways users can play with and against these preconditions. The
games discussed above represent a range of possibilities for both engaging and
educating players, yet the ability of gamers to tap into this immersive potential
is tempered by the degree to which the games allow themselves to be poked,
plucked, played with, and ultimately understood. It will be the work of both
sides of the equation that will push this new form of pedagogy forward; both
the composers and musicians who understand and can deconstruct the music
for the games, and the designers and programmers who can tap into these new
media to stitch it all back together.
Ben J. Miller
Center for Social Innovation, Boston

This content downloaded from 83.103.212.204 on Wed, 02 Nov 2016 15:30:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms