New Wine in New Skins - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 392

reality”, prevails. As expected, the industry “dis-
sidents” of the family, the independent developers,
provide interesting aesthetic approaches to sound
design and usually make an effort to find their
own style. However, true innovation sound-wise
is relatively rare also here: Most indie games do
not move beyond the aesthetic level that animation
film has already reached, and the occasional use
of procedural technologies has, as yet, not been
applied to sound at all.
This is not necessarily a big problem. After
all, there are many great games with wonderful
sound out there. However, from the point of view
of a longer-term advance of computer games as a
medium and game sound in particular, the current
situation represents a dead-end, preventing the
development of a unique aesthetic identity. It is
time for game sound to come of age!

of the montage. Pudovkin (1929) further elabo-
rated this point, arguing that image and sound
are united by the resulting interplay of meanings:
The redundant use of sound is to be avoided and
image and sound have to be developed along
separate rhythmic paths by using counterpoint
as an essential compositional device. Around the
same time, in a different cultural context, French
director René Clair expressed his concern at the
stereotyped patterns that early sound films exhib-
ited even during the early experimental stage. He
saw more potential in the interpretation instead of
the imitation of noises, and argued for an alternate
use of the visual subject and the sounds produced
by it (Clair, 1929).
Over the following decades, sound became
firmly established in film. As a result, aesthetic ap-
proach to sound was extended, and also revised, in
some aspects. While sound was supposed to serve
the image (according to earlier writers), directors
such as Bresson emphasized the reciprocity of
sound and image. Sound should replace image,
not complement it, and it can also dominate the
image (Bresson, 1985). This concept has been
developed further, in particular by Michel Chion
(1994). Metz considers that attention towards
sound should move beyond a purely phenom-
enological understanding and towards sound as a
socially constructed entity. We experience sound
through a body of knowledge and thus its design
(and study) takes place within larger cultural and
ideological structures (Metz, 1980).

FILM sOUND: FrOM WALLFLOWEr
tO EMANcIPAtION

As stated in the introduction, my proposition is,
that film sound can teach us a few interesting les-
sons about how to find aesthetic independence.
I will elaborate upon what those lessons could
be within this section. I will firstly focus upon
the developments that had the biggest impact in
the aesthetic history of film sound and which are
potentially of interest to computer game sound.

Pioneering Approaches

New Hollywood and its relatives

Ever since the introduction of ”talkies,” 15 film
makers began to reflect upon the use of sound
in film. The seeds for an experimental aesthetics
in sound design were already planted during this
pioneering era of film sound when the medium
was not yet entirely defined and conventionalized.
In their famous Statement , Eisenstein, Pudovkin
and Alexandrov (1928) demanded that sound
needed to be used contrapuntally in relation to the
visual montage in order to avoid the destruction

Let us now take a look at the biggest aesthetic
revolution in sound cinema in terms of historic and
economic dimensions. Mainstream Hollywood in
the 1950s was growing rapidly and productions
became increasingly monumental, relying upon
rigorous division of labour and tight production
and marketing plans. This lead to the constant
repetition of conventional, formulaic, “designing
for the masses” approaches to film. This, in turn,