Diegetic Music - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 64

performance of Arthur Benjamin's Cantata Storm
Clouds the assassin tries to cover his noise by
shooting in synch with a loud climactic cymbal
crash. Even screaming Doris Day is perfectly in
time with the meter of the orchestra.

ings. Diegetic music should come from where it is
performed. The human listener is able to localize
real world sound sources with deviations down to
two degrees (Fastl & Zwicker, 2007). Depending
on the speaker setting, this can be significantly
worse for virtual environments. But even stereo
speakers provide rough directional information.
Localization gets better again when the source
is moving or the players are able to change their
relative position and orientation to the source. In
either case the source should not “lose” its sound
or leave it behind when it moves. It would, as
a consequence, lose presence and believability.
Positioning the music at the performer's location
in relation to the listener is as essential as it is for
every further sound effect.
But up to now only a very primitive kind of
localization has been discussed: setting the sound
source at the right place. In interactive environ-
ments, the player might be able to come very close
to the performer(s). If it is just a little clock radio,
a single sound source may suffice. But imagine a
group of musicians, a whole orchestra, the player
being able to walk between them, listening to
each instrument at close range. Not to forget that
the performer, let us say a trumpet player, would
sound very different at the front than from behind,
at least in reality. Each instrument has its individual
sound radiation angles. These are distinctively
pronounced for each frequency band. The radia-
tion of high-frequency partials differs from that
of medium and low frequencies, a fact that, for
instance, sound engineers have to consider for
microphonics (Meyer, 2009).
How far do developers and designers need to
go? How much realism is necessary? The answer
is given by the overall realism that the developers
aim for. Non-realistic two-dimensional environ-
ments (cartoon style, for example) are comparably
tolerant of auditory inconsistencies. Even visually
(photo-) realistic environments do not expect re-
alistic soundscapes at all. Hollywood cinematic
aesthetics, for instance, focus on the affect not on
realism. Ekman (2009) describes further situations

Design Principles

However, when a musical piece is entirely per-
formed in the foreground, it creates a problem. It
slows the narrative tempo down. This is because
change processes take more time in autonomous
music than on the visual layer, in films as well
as in games. In contrast to non-diegetic music,
where changes are provoked and justified by the
visual and narrative context, diegetic music has
to stand on its own. Its musical structure has to
be self-contained, hence, change processes need
to be more elaborate. Such compositional aspects
of non-diegetic film music and its differences to
autonomous music have been discussed already
by Adorno and Eisler (1947).
For an adequate implementation of diegetic
music, further issues have to be addressed. In
contrast to non-diegetic music, it is subject to the
acoustic conditions of the diegesis. A big church
hall, small bed room, or an outdoor scene in the
woods, each environment has its own acoustics and
resonances. Ever heard disco music from outside
the building? The walls usually filter medium and
high frequencies, the bass is left. This changes
completely when entering the dance floor. Diegetic
music as well as any other sound effect cannot,
and must not, sound like a perfectly recorded and
mixed studio production. A solo flute in a large
symphony orchestra is always audible on CD but
gets drowned in a real life performance. Accord-
ing to the underlying sound design there might,
nonetheless, be a distinction between foreground
and background mixing that does not have to be
purely realistic. Furhter discussion of this can be
found, for instance, in Ekman (2009).
The sound positioning in the stereo or surround
panorama also differs from that of studio record-