Abstract
Rarely do the worlds of classical music and video games collide explicitly; when they do, as in the 2007 JRPG Eternal Sonata, the result is of marked semiotic interest. The game’s complex metafictional plotline – involving multiple levels of narrative seeking to blend fantasy and reality – invites speculation and interpretation, particularly concerning its multivalent ending. This article uses recently developed analytical methods from the burgeoning field of musical semiotics to glean poignant interpretative meaning from the video game’s musical surface. By invoking music-theoretic work in intertextuality (Klein 2004), musical narrative (Almén 2008), and virtual agency (Hatten forthcoming), I argue that the video game’s musical score is a hermeneutic key for decoding artistic meaning in Eternal Sonata. Thus, ludomusicology contributes vitally to the semiosis of a video game’s meaning as a holistic, multimedia entity.
About the author
Thomas B. Yee Thomas B. Yee (b. 1992) is a composer, theorist, and semiotician at the University of Texas at Austin. While some composers found their love of music at the symphony hearing Brahms or Beethoven, Thomas discovered his from the 16-bit beeps and boops of the family Super Nintendo video game console. Thomas’ composition catalogue is published with Murphy Music Press and at www.thomasbyee.com. Blending the roles of composer and theorist, Thomas’ scholarly concentration is in musical semiotics.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Robert Hatten (The University of Texas at Austin) and William Gibbons (Texas Christian University) for allowing me to peruse their forthcoming manuscripts prior to publication during the composition of this article. Additional thanks go to Matthew Thompson and the planning committee of the North American Conference on Video Game Music 5 for selecting the presentation version of this article, which I debuted in January 2018.
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