On the Organological Potential of Video Games

Abstract

The various—and often unpredictable—musical applications given to new digital technologies have fundamentally altered our ways of creating, performing, representing, and understanding musical instruments, giving way to new sounding artifacts that pose unprecedented challenges to musical iconography and organology. The multifaceted nature of digital musical instruments has exposed the limitations of traditional organology, prompting a redefinition of the concept of instrumentality and an upsurge of new methodologies. This renovation, however, has yet to recognize the organological potential of video games, which often make use of visual depictions and reconfigurations of musical instruments in the creation and characterization of virtual universes and characters. Musical instruments play an essential role in regulating the tensions between fiction and reality that underlie videoludic experiences by constituting an active agent in the player’s interaction and emerging relationships with the gameworld and its music. Research on these artifacts has been scarce yet promising thus far, providing this article with a wide-ranging collection of references that have served to inform the proposal of a new cataloguing card model for the identification, examination, and classification of musical instruments represented in, and constituted by, video games and consoles. This model merges traditional organological knowledge inherited from hierarchical systems of classification—such as the Hornbostel-Sachs—with new paradigms and taxonomical categories. In so doing, this model aims to accommodate the dual nature of ludomusical instruments as both iconographical resources of undeniable sociocultural transcendence, and organological artifacts with a set of assigned roles within their virtual worlds. The ultimate goal is to provide a framework that fully recognizes the impact of ludomusical instruments in musical experiences and organological knowledge and expectations both inside and outside the medium.