Non-playable main character
An involuntary soundscape has played in my head during idle moments all my life since my teens. It’s not an earworm (known more technically as involuntary musical imagery). It’s not hallucination or delusion. It’s just this curated, gentle but persistent barrage of sounds, always interesting and compelling, always out of material reach. Let me coin a janky neologism for this: psychosoundscape. I have a few adjectives to describe my psychosoundscape—lithe, pointillist, punctuated, dry, weathered, episodic. If you’ve heard my track “Siliceous,” that was the first time I’ve tried to engage compositionally with my psychosoundscape and the closest I’ve come to representing it. I still think it’s the best music I’ve made. That was in 2017.
The activity of recreating this involuntary sonic fiction with greater fidelity became an obsession that never relented. I’ve tried for eight years, with great frustration, to edge closer to it through different media and techniques. I’ve released no electronic music under my birth name since. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s almost all been R&D in service of this phantasm. I know better than to let the idea dictate the materials—I teach the opposite to my composition students—but despite this sensible advice, it still lingers with a ludicrous, sincere, galvanic, solipsistic, vital urgency. All music I’ve done publicly since 2017 has been a welcome distraction from the difficulty of this project, but its persistence remains.
About a year ago I had two realisations on this front. Firstly, my psychosoundscape is just ordinary but eccentric daydreaming, my brain idly processing and aggregating sonic experience by aesthetic value. It isn’t invention or inspiration in any valorised sense; it’s just processing sounds because sounds need to be processed, like doing laundry, and through this cycle sounds transform or settle into patterns. That processing includes mental improvisation, pushing sounds into new forms and abstractions to see how it feels. When it works, it feels good. The ordinariness of this activity felt key. It’s a cognitive schema that, while involuntary and spurred on by gnarly artistic work ethic issues, accepts aesthetic experience as an ordinary and everyday practice of doing structural integrity tests on everything I hear. It’s a perpetual subconscious musicking that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I needn’t rush to recreate it. This didn’t change my goal, though it relaxed my timeline.
The second realisation was about provenance. This psychosoundscape seemed unlike any music I’d known except in snippets here and there. It definitely identifies as music in my head. Because of this, I assumed that the sounds I was processing in this way were strictly musical in origin. But that wasn’t the case; it was all sound. And there was one big category of sound I’d omitted from my understanding of my psychosoundscape, perhaps out of embarrassment: videogame audio.
I gamed a lot growing up. My fifteenth birthday was an eight-player Age of Empires II LAN party/sleepover. (This was, let me assure folks who weren’t that age at that time, detestably uncool.) It more or less stopped with adulthood, save for week-long decompressions after each semester with whatever game my Macbook could tolerate. One relatively recent aspect of my job is teaching videogame sound design at a very introductory level. Through this I started noticing that much of my psychosoundscape had the shapes, envelopes, cadences, and associated affects of videogame sound design. They’d often appear verbatim, sounds I hadn’t heard in twenty years remembered vividly down to their low bit rate patina, but their origin I had either forgotten or suppressed. I soon realised that nineties videogames were the most prominent source: Space Cadet pinball, Total Annihilation, Doom, Diablo, Starcraft, Half-Life, Pokémon Gold and Silver, etc.. It became clear that any project of realising my psychosoundscape had to entail learning how these sounds were made. Thus, my new project.
On April 3, as part of the Audible Edge festival in Boorloo/Perth, I will be presenting a new acousmatic work exploring the aesthetics of videogame sound design. Its palette consists entirely of game audio libraries and design processes, and structures derived from sci-fi and fantasy videogame acoustic ecologies. This is not music. It is a meditation on the audio asset as the definitive symbol of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century digital soundscape, and the weight these sounds have in the imagination; in my case, the psychosoundscape. If I’m contending something here, it’s that audio assets in all their contexts are as culturally and imaginatively significant as music.
There might be a recording to share later, but in the mean time, if you would like to support my work, there is a crowdfunding campaign to raise wages for a few other commissioned artists and myself. Boorloo folks, please donate if you can. I made a fundraising video with a snippet of the piece for Instagram here. This project isn’t quite the material manifestation of my psychosoundscape that I’m still dead set on. But the project has helped shore up techniques that should come in handy for that. I think it’s a compelling construction so far. Thank you to Tone List for this opportunity.
It’s been a difficult piece to make. As I worked, an unexpected figure kept creeping into the soundscape: the silent protagonist. The lurking quiet of Chell from Portal, Tim from Braid, the children of Limbo and Inside, ‘Comrade General’ of Red Alert 2, Red from Pokémon. They were standing in for a younger me, and their abiding weighed more heavily as the going got tough. It transitioned from being a work about the ‘grain’ of videogame sound design and started to become a slightly more autobiographical work, of the projected fantasies of past selves mediated by fictional worlds. Silent protagonists are today considered too limiting for modern narrative, a convenient crutch. They quietly coast between barked instructions and accrue an improbably mythic reputation. Theirs isn’t a fantasy of agency or self-determination but a fantasy of mastery. A younger me aspired to a personal fulfillment along the lines of this faulty causality. Therein, a difficult figure emerges, at the nexus of videogame aesthetics and the fixed-media acousmatic form: a non-playable main character. What on earth do you do with that?
In other news more becoming of a newsletter, I did a CHIME seminar talk on YouTube a few months back introducing the book I co-edited, Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production. It’s roughly a re-run of my book launch talk from April 2024. The talk was back to back with Catherine Provenzano, contributor to the book and world-leading expert on the cultural politics of Auto-Tune. Her talk is here.