REBUTTAL TO: The Sounds of Silence
Sit in your room a moment; five moments, if you got the time. Do nothing. Listen. Odds are, you'll hear something. Some ambient sound that relates to your room and the environment. One you might even tune out ninety nine percent of the time. To me, sitting here now, there's the coughing going on a few rooms down. The slight sound of the forced air coming air conditioner in the main suite area and the sound of my computer fan spinning swiftly around. Even the typing of my keys. These things are part of the atmosphere of this room. To present this room in absolute silence would not be nearly as believable an experience. Life is always accompanied by sound.
And so, games, as entertainment, should generally be as well. They are part of developing an atmosphere, of conveying a feeling and sense. Visuals are all well and good, but they are not the entirety of a room. We play games for a long time. Most of the ones I own can easily claim at least forty hours of my time. I'd be quite...bored with a series that did not have any music in it for forty hours. It would seem odd, empty on an entire level. The scene work would lose a dimension of definition that is important. Its ability to engage me on an entire sensory level would be abandoned. This is not to say that all music that is chosen is good music, for that would be ridiculous. Many game composers are mediocre at building an atmosphere through music, but many does not equal all.
Ratchet and Clank was a good game. A great game I'd even say. And no small part of it was the talented blending of music into the worlds. It fit naturally into the environment of the game, feeling as much a part of it as the sky or the earth. It augmented, on an almost unconscious level, the experience of being in a factory at points, or wandering through a winter wonderland. Koichi Sugiyama's music is one of the pillars upon which the Dragon Warrior experience stands. To experience the battles in silence would do them the greatest disservice, as the playful ballet of his music during them is a large part of how they are intended to be experienced. Could battles be just the sounds of the swords, slashing back and forth, with no music? Possibly, but they'd lose an aspect of theme and elegance that was conveyed to them by the skilled compositions underlying them. What about no sound whatsoever? I think that'd grow quite boring. Xenosaga went on the borderline of this quite a few times, and I think most would agree that the game suffered for this lack of music, particularly in the dungeons.
Yes, some music that gets tossed into games is inappropriate. Some does not blend with a scene and creates dissonance with the environment in which it is placed. This is disruptive, ruinous... but is not an indictment against music in games or even music in that scene, but simply a poor choice by the composer and music crew there. This is not to say silence does not have its place. As I recall, several games have used silence as an instrument to create tension, the sudden lack of sound providing a visible contrast in experience. This contrast though would lack any power if it was not for the music played in other sections. Using the example of the scene in space from Final Fantasy 8, it would not seem particularly of any interest if the two hours before and after it were passed in silence. In such, the silence was, in fact, an instrument of music, utilized within the greater symphony of the game. A world truly without sound would be a truly cold world indeed.
|
RSS feed
iTunes
