Music Transcription and Video Game Fandom: A Reception Study

Music Transcription and Video Game Fandom: A Reception Study

How do fans engage with anime and video game soundtracks? One form is transcription, where fans attempt to recreate the music for other fans to perform. This can be particularly interesting with video games, which often have no original "score" and where what score is available is for artificial instruments. This creates some interesting issues about "authenticity" that have been explored by video game music scholars. When fans recreate this kind of music, they often prefer to do it on physical, often acoustic instruments.

Video game soundtracks are an increasingly popular subject for pop orchestral concerts. This reflects how fans often see the most "authentic" performance as that using the acoustic instruments suggested by the soundtrack rather than the original 8-bit (or whichever number of bits) scoring. Interestingly, video game fans also convert other, non-game music into 8-bit timbres, or write original music designed to replicate the sounds of early video game music. Many, but not all, of these are the same fans who want to hear the original 8-bit soundtracks "how they are meant to be" on "real" instruments.

I was interested in this because of my own history of arranging music as a teenager; I would create versions of classic rock songs I loved for my high school orchestra, jazz band, or small chamber ensembles. It was how I learned music composition, which I would later pursue as my undergraduate major. I would have loved to have the kind of online communities that have developed since for fan transcribers to share their music. I was also interested because of how this music falls at the center of two different types of online fandom: "curative" and "creative" fandom. "Curative" fandom focuses on collecting information about the fans' object of obsession (such as wikis devoted to a TV show), while "creative" fandom encompasses activities like fanfiction and fan art that attempt to put their own spin on the original work, often creating new works in the process. "Fan transcription" is both, "writing down" preexisting music in a way that other fans can more easily access, play and study it, but also twisting it creatively by rearranging it for other instruments, or making other changes.

This project examines some of the different ways that fans transcribe video game music into musical notation: why they do it, what or who each of these musical transcriptions are "for," and the issues of authenticity that arise from this. It is a fusion of manuscript and reception studies to examine this particular practice as a part of modern game fandom. It will focus on popular Nintendo series, specifically the first few game "generations" of the Pokémon and Animal Crossing series.

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