Music Transcription and Video Game Fandom: A Reception Study Main Menu

Video Games and Music Transcription

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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, rather than the physical instruments that fans may want to play in the game. This creates some interesting issues about "authenticity" that have been explored by video game music scholars.

Video game soundtracks are an increasingly popular subject for pop orchestral concerts, and fans often see the most "authentic" performance as that which deviates from the 8-bit timbres of early games: instead, working with the real instruments are suggested by the soundtrack rather than something like the actual ones. (Fans have also begun doing the reverse, converting other, non-game music into 8-bit timbres, or writing original music designed to replicate the sounds of early video game music.)

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 particularly focus on popular Nintendo series, specifically the Pokémon and Animal Crossing game series.

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