The Electronic Score

You're working your way through a maze, eating pellets. You turn a corner and come face to face with a ghost. You turn around to escape, but another ghost blocks your way. You have nowhere to go. The ghosts move in for the kill and you collapse, cursing, "Damn, they killed me again!" Now you're running through a jungle, trying to avoid obstacles and dangerous animals. You grab hold of a hanging vine, trying to swing over a swamp, but your timing is off and you fall into the snapping jaws of an alligator. "I just got eaten," you moan.

I've never put too much thought into exactly how I came to enjoy electronic music. I've always assumed my interest simply grew out of exposure to a few records I enjoyed in my teens, including Eurythmics, New Order, and Depeche Mode. Once I heard "Blue Monday" and "People Are People" I just started following the trail, and somehow I ended up here today listening to Autechre and Taylor Deupree.

Earlier this week I watched 8 BIT, a documentary about visual artists and musicians who utilize Gameboys, NES machines, and Commodore 64s as their primary tools. The film could use some serious editing and focus, but overall it contained lots of interesting tidbits. One of the taking heads talked about how interesting it was that even though these old video game characters were very low-res, abstract collections of blocky pixels, gamers were able to engage with them emotionally. Pac-Man and Pitfall Harry are hardly photorealistic humans, yet players are able to immerse themselves in the game. In the case of Atari's Adventure, the main character is literally a single block, and still player's preface descriptions of their actions with "I." Interestingly, this ties in with something Scott McCloud describes in Understanding Comics, his classic book on the workings and visual grammar of sequential art. Essentially, McCloud explains that the more basic and abstracted a character design, the more readers will be able to identify with that character.

In a sense, the character in a comic book stands in for the reader. That character is your avatar, pulling you through the narrative. In Pitfall!, you are not simply controlling some disconnected second party. Pitfall Harry is your avatar. He is you. I've always had the feeling that music taste is at least partly vicarious; people are drawn towards types of music they can imagine themselves creating. The performer becomes your artistic avatar, and if you're a computer geek or a video gamer, it's much easier to envision yourself as Kraftwerk than as, say, some rock guitarist.

So, back to 8 BIT. One of the musicians in the film theorizes that this group of artists grew up with video games and video game music, so naturally they have an emotional connection with these electronic sounds. There's more than simple nostalgia at work here. For my generation, the first to grow up with video games, these games provided our first opportunity to control and guide a system towards achievement and reward. These feelings of empowerment and success were always set to electronic melodies. The connection was made.