Finding Untitled Goose Game’s Dynamic Music in the World of Silent Cinema

Abstract

There are three unusual things about Untitled Goose Game’s music. First, for an independent video game produced by a small studio, the music is dynamic and reactive to a high degree. The game uses pre-recorded, non-generative musical performances and yet will respond to onscreen events within a buffer of only a few seconds at maximum. Second, the music takes inspiration not from other dynamic music systems in video games but from the varying practices of musical accompaniment for silent cinema and early comedy, aiming to replicate affect rather than process. Finally, the music for Untitled Goose Game takes the unusual step of adapting pre-existing classical music from the public domain—in this case, six of Claude Debussy’s Préludes for solo piano—rather than creating an original score intended from its conception to be dynamic. Accordingly, this article outlines the dynamic music system at work in Untitled Goose Game and the influence drawn on for this system from non–video game approaches to musical accompaniment. The article discusses the varying practices for music for the silent era of cinema, the theoretical frameworks used to conceptualize these many divergent approaches, and how closely we might recognize their legacy at work in Untitled Goose Game’s soundtrack. Ultimately, this article argues that by looking to approaches beyond more familiar debates about dynamic music for video games, Untitled Goose Game helped shortcut familiar problems that confront developers and composers when working with dynamic and reactive music.