playing along

Virtual Transmission, Visceral Practice: Dance Central and the Cybershala [SEM 2011]

2012-01-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

I presented this paper at the joint meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Congress for Research on Dance in Philadelphia, PA (November 17-20, 2011). The Dance Central section represents my current research project (still in its early stages); the cybershala section is condensed from a longer treatment in my new book, Playing Along.

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Virtual Transmission, Visceral Practice: Dance Central and the Cybershala

screenshot from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPFr27b86tE

screenshot from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9ceH1xssk

Interactive digital media technologies are gradually transforming the face-to-face, body-to-body transmission contexts that have always played a crucial role in music and dance pedagogy. YouTube, blogging platforms, and other online social media forums have given rise to countless virtual communities of practice. Meanwhile, digital game developers are seeking to bridge the gap between virtual and visceral experience by creating new kinds of controllers, motion-sensing devices, and gestural interfaces (e.g., those employed by the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Kinect). Despite the limitations of current technologies, millions of people are turning to online media and digital games in the pursuit of new corporeal skills, experiences, and knowledge.

Today I’m going to present two case studies in techno-mediated transmission. First I’ll address the “cybershala” created by yoga bloggers, a web-based community of practice that sometimes comes into conflict with traditional authority. Then I’ll turn to Dance Central, a videogame that teaches players full-body choreography routines set to popular club music, offering real-time feedback using a motion-sensing camera peripheral. While time limitations will prevent me from doing justice to either case study, I think it’s worth our while to consider how they inform each other. These examples illustrate some new possibilities for the transmission of embodied practice, for converting virtual social connections into visceral common knowledge, and for imagining what it’s like to live in someone else’s body.

Cybershala: The Ashtangisphere Never Sleeps
One day in the summer of 2010 a friend posted a comment on one of my Facebook status updates, asking how my backbends were coming along.

My friend and I both practice ashtanga yoga, a method codified and popularized in the twentieth century by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009) through his Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, India. Ashtanga is a “flowing” yoga style, in which most asana (postures) are held for only five breaths; fluid transitions between asana are an integral part of the practice. The simplest explanation of what makes ashtanga distinctive is that practitioners always move through the asana in a particular order, matching their movements to a particular breath pattern. The prescribed sequence of asana is broken down into a structured curriculum: fundamentals, primary series, second series, and so on. Students learn each series through cumulative repetition, with the teacher deciding when a student is ready to add a new asana or begin a new series. In “Mysore-style” classes, the teacher does not instruct the whole group and rarely demonstrates asana. Instead, she or he moves through the room giving physical adjustments and working with students one-on-one as they each proceed through the series. [Hey ashtangis, I know this description is woefully incomplete, but this talk could only be 20 minutes long!]

At the time of our Facebook exchange my friend and I were both partway through learning the second series, 3,000 miles apart and working with different teachers. The ashtanga curriculum offers a structuring framework for online discourse and visceral common knowledge. (Cf. Hamera 2007 on how dance builds "relational infrastructure".) Everyone who practices second series knows exactly what it means when I say that I am working on kapotasana; they have their own sensational knowledge of that asana. If the asana came more easily to them than to me, then they also have a visceral understanding of the differences between our bodies.

I’mnot really sure what the Cybershala is but I’ve heard itreferred to more and more lately. It seems to be an online community notlocated at any one site or of a fixed membership. It seems to be made up ofblogs, comment threads and forums, corners of Facebook,YouTube, chatrooms, and Skypeconnections. Anywhere where one’s practice can be posted, discussed, commentedon . . .

(Grimmly 2010: part 17)

An overwhelming number of yoga blogs, videos, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, and other forms of online social media now constitute a “cybershala” of ashtanga yoga practitioners—many who work with teachers regularly, others who are cultivating a practice as “home ashtangis” (cf. Finnegan 1989 on “hidden musicians”). Yoga bloggers face a challenge familiar to ethnomusicologists and dance scholars: how can one communicate kinesthetic, multisensory experiences without bodily presence and a shared sensorium? Home ashtangis have adopted exactly the same tactics that the anthropologist Jaida Kim Samudra advocates for scholars writing about kinesthetic cultures: first, attempting to “linguistically record the minute details of one’s bodily training” even when this is explicitly discouraged in traditional transmission (2008:670); second, being attentive to one’s own internal bodily sensations in order to better comprehend other practitioners’ experiences (674); and finally, creating “somatic narratives,” which comprise both “the series of actions narrated by bodies during limited frames such as practice sessions, performances, or competitions” and “the stories people tell about what happened to and with their bodies during specific events” (674). Yoga bloggers often combine video, still images, and lengthy written accounts to communicate these somatic narratives online.

As I watched the videos my friend recommended, my body shifted in my desk chair as though operated by remote control: back straightening, shoulder blades sliding together, legs subtly rotating in hip sockets, toes spreading to grip the floor for a vicarious backbend. I heard myself breathing. I experienced the blogs and videos through my accumulated “sensational knowledge” (Hahn 2007), just as I had learned to reenact my teacher’s physical adjustments while alone on my mat—the virtual hand drawing my hip back, the virtual foot nudging the angle of my own foot on the floor, the virtual arm stopping me from taking my legs past vertical in a headstand. It was very much like the experience of listening to music that I knew how to play.

Watching these videos also gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I might be cheating on my teacher. Ashtanga students are not supposed to start experimenting with advanced asana of their own accord. On the other hand, the structured nature of ashtanga makes it particularly well suited to independent practice, amateur-to-amateur pedagogy, and online discourse among a dispersed community of practitioners. Browsing YouTube videos of ashtanga backbends quickly led me to “grimmly2007,” who had uploaded about 300 videos so that he could embed them in his yoga blog.

Grimmly is an ashtanga student without a teacher—an impossible contradiction to many practitioners, but one that is getting more possible all the time. He lives in the United Kingdom and works as a repairer of woodwind instruments. In early 2007, Grimmly’s flat was burgled and seven saxophones were stolen. This incident made him so angry, and then so irritated with his own anger, that he decided to take up some form of meditation. In the course of reading about meditation practices, he learned that “a lot of meditators were also doing yoga,” so he looked for a yoga book at the library and found Tara Fraser’s Total Astanga (Fraser 2006). As an overweight 43-year-old man, he was a bit embarrassed even bringing the book up to the circulation desk. On his blog, he wrote, “Going to a yoga class wasn’t something I even considered. A guy here, outside London, might think about going to a gym to get in shape but not a Yoga class, probably not even an aerobic class” (Grimmly 2010: part 1).

Grimmly began learning the sequence of asana from the book, practicing every morning before work, and soon began to order instructional DVDs and search for YouTube videos to help him develop his practice. He started his yoga blog in the summer of 2008, after about a year and a half of practicing at home alone six days a week. His posts often invoke a growing community of hidden “home ashtangis” like himself:

The blog was originally intended to document his progress on the “jump-back,” a transition between many asana. Grimmly eventually produced 57 posts on the jump-back, many including slow-motion videos of himself and other practitioners.

As Grimmly developed his home practice, some of his choices posed challenges to ashtanga orthodoxy. For instance, when Grimmly blogged about his decision to begin learning the second series of asana, one commenter told him that he should not be learning any intermediate asana before he could stand up from a backbend: “Then and only then you start to add intermediate to your existing primary. Your teacher would give you each new asana as he saw your progress. . . . Traditionally in India, yoga has been learned from teacher to student, not from a book or video. It’s really not right to decide to give yourself postures” (Sophia, comments posted on Grimmly 2008a).

When making such claims about traditional practice, ashtanga practitioners often invoke the ultimate authority: “how it’s done in Mysore,” at the Ashtanga Yoga Institute. But in this case another commenter offered evidence that the teaching method in Mysore had changed over time. Ursula, a woman from Germany, reported that at the Mysore shala she had been given the first pose of the intermediate series before she could stand up from a backbend. When another commenter suggested that this experience might have been “an aberration,” Ursula responded by invoking the higher authority of her own bodily experience: “Sorry to write this, but what I see is that people hanker for rules, because there is so much insecurity. . . . Why should I not do these softer back bendings which are good for the back? Only because there are rules, nobody really knows who invented them. . . . I listen to my body.” This discussion continued at length, showing how the print medium and time-delayed norms of comment threads have encouraged the development of cybershala discourse. Discussants can take time to craft their replies and cite their sources, which in this case revealed the fluidity of “official” ashtanga pedagogy in Mysore.

After a year and a half of home practice, Grimmly finally decided to try attending an ashtanga class at a shala. He went two Sundays in a row and was “blown away” by the physical adjustments he received from the teachers there. But a week later, he explained that he doubted he’d go back: “All the time it’s just been me on my mat, alone in a room early each morning, my practice…Somehow now, after visiting the Shala, it feels a little like I’m practicing for someone else…I feel more distant from my practice, less involved” (Grimmly 2008b). It’s clear from other posts that Grimmly developed his practice using books, famous teachers’ DVDs, YouTube videos, other students’ blogs, and any other media resources he could find. He often writes about insights gleaned from these sources. Nevertheless, the “live” teaching at the shala somehow alienated him from his practice. While he benefited from the physical adjustments he received, he was willing to forego them in order to maintain a sense of agency and responsibility for his own development: practicing for himself instead of a teacher.

Dance Central: Dancing in Someone Else's Body?
At this point I’m going to turn to another form of home practice: the dance repertoire transmitted by Dance Central, a digital game created by Harmonix Music Systems (the company that brought you the Guitar Hero games). Dance Central teaches players to perform choreographed dance routines to popular club music tracks from the last few decades.

There is no game controller involved; instead, a motion-sensing camera is constantly tracking your body movements and sending data back to the game software. The on-screen dancer is your instructor and model, not your mirror or your puppet. Unlike a conventional game avatar, the on-screen dancer doesn't do what you do. If you miss a particular arm motion, the avatar’s arm will glow red to show you where you are making a mistake, but the avatar won’t actually perform your mistake.

Like the ashtanga cybershala, Dance Central offers people an opportunity to learn a physically challenging and culturally marked repertoire in private. Many people consider dancing to be a potentially humiliating activity. Those who do dance in public are subject to evaluation: in most social-dance genres, there are established norms for moving your body in a manner appropriate to your gender, sexual orientation, age, and sometimes your race or ethnicity. But what if you could learn to dance from a virtual instructor who objectively evaluates and gently corrects the technical accuracy of your moves, but who can't judge you on your coolness, your body shape, or whether your moves "match" your identity traits? Some players experience this possibility as liberating. Others remain uncomfortable, particularly when the game compels them to transgress gender norms. (I’m going to focus on gender and sexuality examples today, since I have such limited time, but there’s a lot to be said about racialized and cross-racial performance, too.)Let’s take a look at some posts on the official Dance Central web forum:


[click to enlarge]

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After the moderator called attention to the implied use of profanity and requested more “constructive” feedback, xXShadowFrostXx clarified:

[click to enlarge]

[In case you don't feel like clicking to enlarge, here's the last bit:]

I’m sorry for that I just auto-censured myself lol. What I meant is that every songs should have a male and a female routine because as a guy, I do like by example: doing Just Dance routine because it’s one of my favorite but some moves are a little bit too girly to perform. I think it would be a good idea if both male and female routine could be similar but more suitable for our own gender, you know what I mean?

Here’s an example of a male player performing a dance that includes gender-coded moves. As you can see, he has garnered special praise on the Dance Central web forum for “actually dancing” rather than just going through the motions:

[click to enlarge]

In an interview, another player (RiffRaff) told me that in the case of “Lapdance” he thought the Dance Central choreographers had deliberately included both “male” and “female” moves as a kind of sly joke on players: “It’s funny just how quickly the mood changes from like really rough guy moves to like really girly, girly moves….I thought they were kind of like drag-esque almost. It was a little too exaggerated…When I was first trying out the song, I was like, “What is this?” and I just started laughing because I just found it really funny how they snuck that in there….You already bought the track, so what are you going to do?”

It’s worth noting that players can select among several different male and female avatars for any song in the game. So ShadowFrost could choose to perform songs like “Lapdance” with a male avatar—but he evidently still experiences some moves as uncomfortably “girly”. One player suggested the opposite approach: he told ShadowFrost, “Try dancing with Emilia to those routines; they have become some of my favourites LOL” (Derek555, Dance Central forum reply). This player’s other posts about the avatar Emilia, which focus on the sexy spectacle of her performances, clarify his meaning here: he is suggesting that indulging in the pleasures of heterosexual voyeurism would offer an antidote to the girliness of the choreography, even as ShadowFrost was himself simultaneously performing that choreography. Along the same lines, one female player posts YouTube videos that show not her own dancing, but the performances of her male avatar:

screenshot from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPFr27b86tE

As the player performs stereotypical female “stripper” moves, she can watch her male avatar perform the same moves against his gender type. Her videos are popular, and the comment threads are full of playful sexual fantasy:

[click to enlarge]

There is a peculiar deferral of agency here: the dancing player submits his or her own body to the will of the game choreographers so that the player can in turn fetishize the dancing avatar.

But this is only one strategy for approaching the gender politics of Dance Central. Another involves “butching up” one’s approach to feminine moves. In an interview for a player’s video blog, one of the game choreographers offered some tips:

[A quick dialogue excerpt:]

Ricardo: We made sure that it was for y’all [male players] too, so y’all could feel like men after you do it! . . . . Focus more on the arms. Like in "Rude Boy," you definitely see this going on: [moves hips]

MMC: You can’t hide from that.

Ricardo: Exactly! But what I do is -- and I still get a “Flawless” score! So I’m giving you guys tips on the game. Guys, just really like move more back and use your arms more. That takes away all of the things that may be uncomfortable for you, but being able to really like whip it down, the Kinect still sees that you’re doing the movement and still reads you as a flawless score….So you can focus more on the arms, and be more of a -- bam! -- masculine, dominant effect rather than being real roll-y.

Of course, some players embrace the opportunity to engage in cross-gender performance: either because they enjoy playing with their gender identity, or because they have unassailable confidence in a fixed gender identity and therefore recognize a satisfying technical and artistic challenge in the task of embodying another gender through dance.

For instance, this player told me, “I have received a few comments referring to my moves being too feminine or the choreo was too feminine for a straight guy to perform but I don't mind them at all. I considered them as compliments. Comments along those lines confirms that I performed the moves correctly.” Meanwhile, information in his YouTube profile and comment threads shores up his heterosexuality and his masculine cred: viewers learn that he has a wife and small child, and that he serves in the Navy.

[click to enlarge]

I began this section by talking about Dance Central gameplay as a form of home practice, an unprecedented opportunity for totally private dance lessons and performance. So if part of the appeal lies in the privacy factor, why do I keep showing examples of Dance Central gameplay on YouTube? While there are doubtless many players who keep their dancing entirely private, Dance Central has also given rise to virtual communities of practice that look a lot like the ashtanga cybershala. Company-sponsored and fan-produced web forums, Twitter feeds, Facebook groups, blogs, and YouTube videos encourage the production and circulation of game-oriented discourse and performances. Players turn to the web for human advice on the subtleties of tricky moves, and share their excitement about particular routines on Twitter.

Those who post performances to YouTube develop networks of friends and fans, with whom they also share the pleasures of defusing the inevitable “trolls” and “haters” who turn up in any comment thread.

A few concluding remarks
Both the cybershala and Dance Central make it possible for practitioners to learn a physically demanding, minutely codified repertoire without ever interacting with a physically-present teacher. Grimmly and his fellow cybershala practitioners are creating new transmission modalities for ashtanga yoga, from reflective writing to side-by-side slideshows that might reveal hidden traces of corporeal knowledge. Meanwhile, Dance Central players are learning hours of choreography while also working through their ideas about gender identity, public and private performance, and virtual community. These paradigm shifts in yoga and dance transmission might shed light on similar changes in the transmission of performing arts traditions that rely on a lineage of teachers and students, body-to-body pedagogy, and a codified repertoire or fundamental skill set. Dance Central and the cybershala show how professional game designers, home ashtangis, and living-room dancers are all finding ways to use available technology and social media platforms to support the virtual transmission of embodied practice.

Works cited
NB: Web materials are directly linked in the main text.

Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musicians: Music Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fraser, Tara. 2006. Total Astanga. London: Duncan Baird.

Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Hamera, Judith. 2007. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Samudra, Jaida Kim. 2008. "Memory in Our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience." American Ethnologist 35(4):665-681.

POSTSCRIPT, January 2012
Just as I was finally getting around to reformatting this conference paper for the blog, Gamasutra published an article on gender and self-expression in Dance Central, featuring an interview with Dance Central project director Matt Boch. Clearly these issues aren't new to the folks at Harmonix.

Dance Central -- "I see you, I see you"

2011-02-23T07:49:00.008-05:00

This month I've been getting to know Dance Central, the game Harmonix developed for the Xbox Kinect camera peripheral. It seems like the perfect next step for my research: I spent the last few years thinking about virtual and visceral embodied performance in Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and recently I've been increasingly interested in virtual pedagogy (that is, how interactive digital media are being used in the transmission of practices that have traditionally been taught and learned in a face-to-face, body-to-body context -- like playing guitar or developing a yoga practice). Dance Central teaches players how to do club choreography routines. It pretty much sidesteps the authenticity questions that bedeviled Guitar Hero and Rock Band; I have yet to encounter a reviewer or online commenter who makes the argument that players aren't "really dancing," and quite a few have noted that people who really get into it seem to score better than those who just go through the motions. (Although any player will quickly discover that the software is pickier about some moves than others.)

Instead of getting into the authenticity debate, some people ask why anyone needs a gaming system to dance around to popular music (alone or with friends). This absence of a controller -- no joysticks, no keyboard, no DDR dance pad, no plastic guitar, not even a handheld Wiimote -- is the big selling point for the Kinect, and it does feel pretty magical to wave your hands in the air to navigate screen menus. (It reminds of the first time I used a mouse, as a small child: whoa, rolling this thing around on the table is making something move onscreen! I recently realized that after several years of trackballs and touchscreens I actually kind of have trouble using a mouse now.) But if there's no controller, what are you paying for, and why would you want to keep your dancing tethered to a screen? The deeper issue here is that despite the "You are the controller" Kinect ad campaign, in Dance Central you are not controlling anything. The on-screen character doesn't do what you do. S/he is your teacher and model, not your mirror or your puppet. This is not a conventional avatar. This fact seems to really offend a lot of self-identified hardcore gamers, based on the comment threads I've been reading as I browse industry reviews of the game.

That's not to say the game isn't interactive. It's certainly really different from teaching yourself a dance routine by watching music videos. The Kinect can see you, and you get constant feedback on your moves. The feedback isn't very detailed -- e.g., I don't get credit for the "Blazer" (a pretty simple move) most of the time, and I can't tell if it's because of the angle of my elbows, the depth of bend in my knees, or what. But nevertheless, it's clear that the game is paying a lot of attention to what I'm doing. As the instructor in the "Break It Down" tutorials says approvingly from time to time, "I see you, I see you!" (The instructor is represented as "an aggressively positive street-talking boom box", which is a whole other fascinating thing to contemplate. Sometimes when I keep flubbing a move he also consoles me with "This game is lying!")

So yes, you could just dance to the radio in your living room, or go to a club with friends. But what you're paying for with Dance Central is a dance instructor -- and maybe even more importantly, for the opportunity to learn to dance in private. Practically every review I saw mentioned that this games requires courage to play in front of other people. That's not because of the nature of the game, per se -- it's because a lot of people believe they "can't dance," and consider it to be a potentially humiliating activity. What if you could learn to dance from a virtual instructor who objectively evaluates and gently corrects the technical accuracy of your moves, but can't judge you on your coolness, your body shape, or whether your moves "match" your gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation? That may be what's genuinely new about Dance Central.

So if part of the appeal lies in the privacy factor, what's up with all these people posting their Dance Central gameplay on YouTube? A subject for another day.

Thru-Who? A curious tale of amateurs rendered harmonious by a genius

2010-08-31T16:42:00.003-04:00

My third Arcade post.

In March of 2009 an Israeli musician and multimedia artist named Kutiman (a.k.a. Ophir Kutiel) uploaded seven videos to YouTube, calling the whole project “Thru-You". The videos were complex remixes of existing YouTube videos of people playing individual musical instruments. Kutiman layered together fragments of audio tracks from many videos to create virtual ensembles performing new songs. His own videos constantly cut among these sources so that listeners could see who was providing the backbeat, bass line, guitar riff, instrumental solos, vocals, and so forth.

The first video, “The Mother of All Funk Chords," racked up over a million YouTube views within a week of its release, thereby generating media coverage and attention from copyright reform advocates. Time later declared "Thru-You" one of the “50 Best Inventions of 2009”.

“The Mother of All Funk Chords” opens with an African-American man in a suit sitting behind a drum kit and playing a basic rhythm. As he plays, he asks, “Well, what can I do?” The video cuts to a white man wearing a backward baseball cap and holding a guitar; he seems to reply “You could play that 16th-note groove…” and a younger African-American man holding a bass in his lap cuts in with “Just straight,” playing a three-note bass riff. The screen splits to show four musicians in the four quadrants of the video, as though they were teleconferencing. (The first three musicians are joined by a conga player.) The guitar player says, “Go! You’ll be amazed.” The original drummer replies, “Okay!” and the four musicians begin to lay down a groove together, via Kutiman’s layering and remixing of their original videos. Before long the bass player suggests that there should be more than one guitar part, with someone playing chords and someone playing single notes. The guitarist says, “Okay, then let’s just pick the mother of all funk chords, let’s pick a ninth chord.” Four brass players replace the first four musicians; Kutiman builds up a chord from individual notes in their original videos and the song takes off.

Much of the media coverage of the “Thru-You” project celebrated it as an unintended virtual collaboration by "amateur musicians": Kutiman’s genius has made them more than the sum of their parts. For instance, indie-media advocate Timothy Karr wrote in the Huffington Post that Kutiman “mashed and mixed video clips of amateur YouTube musicians to create a near-flawless overture to the Twittering masses." The Time “50 Great Inventions” summary likewise stated that Kutiman drew on “footage posted on YouTube by amateur musicians...in the process creating an all-new art form that combines DJing, video montage, and found art." Brooklyn Vegan writer John Seroff rightly noted that Kutiman’s methods are in fact no different from those of countless other video remix artists; he also asserted, “What really makes Kutiman unique is his abhorrence of commercial recording; his samples hail from virtual unknowns and his work is distributed for free on the web."

In the “info” section for “The Mother of All Funk Chords,” Kutiman credits twenty-two source videos, only a small fraction of which could be described as “footage posted on YouTube by amateur musicians.” The twenty-one videos that were still available on YouTube in August 2010 can be categorized as followed:

* 10 professional or semi-professional music lesson videos, posted as feeders for lesson websites (funded by student payments, donations, or advertising)
* 5 amateur performances (most with a humor angle)
* 2 excerpts from professional music lesson videos (apparently reproduced without permission)
* 2 performances by professional or semi-professional musicians (people who are in bands, perform regularly, and included links to their band websites)
* 1 amateur-produced music lesson
* 1 video of a childrens’ cheer routine, promoting a missionary organization in the Philippines

Two-thirds of the musicians sampled in “The Mother of All Funk Chords” are professional music teachers and/or performers who uploaded the videos to drive traffic to other websites. One musician is quite well-known: the first person to appear in Kutiman’s video is Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, a well-known session drummer with a discography spanning four decades. (Another YouTube user apparently uploaded a clip from one of Purdie’s instructional videos, which are available for sale on Purdie’s website.) While other remixes from the “Thru-You” project do include a higher proportion of non-professionals, it is curious that so many commentators described the performers in “The Mother of All Funk Chords” as isolated amateurs who could only join a band through the intervention of a creative genius. In fact, most members of Kutiman’s virtual ensemble were already actively involved in various forms of virtual performance, web-based collaboration, and entrepreneurial self-promotion, mostly connected with web-based music lessons.

Why were these professional and semi-professional performers (and a few YouTube comedians) so often described as unjaded, uber-sincere amateur musicians whose natural joy served as Kutiman's source material? Kutiman himself certainly can't be faulted for failing to cite his sources. It appears that even people who are eager to celebrate the democratizing impact of social media are also sometimes hungry for a genius who can masterfully organize amateurs, rendering P2P chaos harmonious.

playing along

2010-08-27T15:52:00.002-04:00

So I finally seem to have settled on a book title that appeals to my editor and the marketing department at Oxford University Press.

Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

In honor of this milestone, I've changed my blog title to match. Now I just have to finish writing the book. It will include case studies on Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, and amateur-to-amateur online pedagogy. A few key themes:

* play (obviously)
* practices that compel focused attention/immersion/flow
* practices that bridge virtual and visceral experience
* digital ethnography
* embodied knowledge (and how to transmit it using digital media)
* dispersed participation
* amateurism
* repetition
* creativity as a state of mind (rather than as something that necessarily produces stuff)
* transmission of tradition
* the experiential intersections of gameplay, music-making, and learning

Amateur-to-Amateur Music Lessons

2010-07-09T15:54:00.010-04:00

My second post for Arcade...

Imagine that you’ve recently become a big fan of salsa or Cuban son. You decide you want to learn more about how the music works—maybe even take a few conga lessons yourself. On a whim, you do a YouTube search for “conga lessons”. Today, the top result is a lesson called “Poncho Sanchez- Fundimentals of Latin Music- Conga”, posted by Gordanius in 2007. It has attracted 469,226 views, which seems to lend it a bit of authority. You hit play, and Poncho Sanchez introduces himself and starts to explain the names of the different-sized conga drums in front of him.

While the video runs, you idly scroll down to the comment section. In the “Highest Rated Comments” section, a commenter seems to be defending Sanchez from a criticism that’s no longer onscreen:

Your Spanish is good enough for you to understand that this defense relies on the claim that no gringo can match the Latin touch, which is inborn in the blood of Latinos. (And if you’re me, you find this whole line of argument depressing.) Further down, another commenter criticizes Sanchez—first for pedagogical inefficiency (he could explain the same material in fewer words), but also for playing that lacks “sabor”; he’s fine technically, but he doesn’t SPEAK with the congas.

Another person recommends a different YouTube channel, and notes that these days students don’t have to rely on a single teacher’s example:

This seems like a good point, but you don’t feel qualified to compare different players’ techniques—you’re looking for beginner lessons. You back up to your search results page and click on the second video in the list, which is titled “Conga Lesson 1: Basic Tones- Nate Torres”. 68,158 views, not too shabby. Nate Torres introduces himself and promises that this video is the first in a series.

Both the teacher and the video production are far less professional than in the Poncho Sanchez example. It seems very likely that the Torres video was made for YouTube, whereas when you Google the title of the Sanchez video it looks like it’s probably an excerpt (unauthorized?) from an instructional DVD of the same name released in 2005. Sanchez is on stage or in a studio, with well-miked drums displayed from multiple camera angles. Nate Torres seems to be in his living room—or maybe more likely his parents’ living room, given his age and the visible décor. The lighting isn’t great and the sound reproduction is fuzzy. Torres fidgets with his hat and shifts in his seat; he has none of Sanchez’s gravitas. On the other hand, by 35 seconds into the video Torres is telling you exactly how to position your hand in order to get an open tone out of your drum. “What you’re going to do is have your fingers lined up just like this, close together, with your thumb out, so your thumb doesn’t get in the way.” He uses his own left hand to shape the position of his right hand, inviting you to do the same—a physical correction from an imagined teacher. He offers a visual cue for exactly where to strike the drum: “making sure that your knuckle line lines up with the rim of the drum”. Then he slowly demonstrates three strokes and looks right at the camera, seeming to ask, “Did you get it?”

When you scroll down to the comments, you see that Torres must be “prpapito3000”, the person who uploaded the video; he’s responding to comments and questions (though the last responses are from six months ago).

Both of these videos were first posted in 2007, an eternity ago in YouTube time. This no doubt partly accounts for their placement in the search rankings; they were among the earliest conga lessons uploaded to YouTube, and once they had attracted a decent number of views their view counts were positioned to snowball (among the limited audience entering a query for “conga lessons”, anyway). Neither video functions as a teaser for another online business or for private lessons with this teacher. While the Sanchez video appears to be excerpted from a commercially-available DVD, that DVD is not linked from the YouTube page or cited in detail (indeed, the title is even misspelled—probably a typo, but sometimes an indicator of deliberate evasion of copyright enforcement). Torres just seems like a friendly teenager who’s messing around with YouTube and imagining what he could contribute.

These YouTube videos and their associated comment threads offer an excellent example of amateur-to-amateur music pedagogy (how about A2A for short?). The first uploader, Gordanius, has posted a professional musician’s lesson as a public service; in the comment thread, viewers demonstrate their own expertise by offering criticism, defenses, and their own advice to learners. The second uploader, prpapito3000, is an amateur himself, but certainly knows enough to offer useful lessons to beginners; moreover, he’s willing to periodically interact with his viewers online, answering questions, offering encouragement, or brushing off typical YouTube slagging about his wardrobe with a format-idiomatic “lmao” (that’s “laughing my ass off”—and I’ve typed and deleted this several times now, wondering whether anyone who’s read this far would need an explanation). His youth and non-professionalism actually make him appealing; after all, if I’m watching this video I’m probably playing congas in my living room, too. And if I’m still just learning how to produce an open tone, do I really need to get a lesson from a venerable professional performer? It’s also quite likely that I’m only aspiring to be an amateur player myself, in which case maybe Nate Torres is a better role model for me than Poncho Sanchez. He’s certainly more accessible. Here’s a bit of the comment thread for one of his other videos:

I wonder what all this A2A pedagogy means for the future of music learning? I’m sure there are some people who would argue that Nate Torres shouldn’t be rubbing shoulders with Poncho Sanchez as a conga teacher. And after all, I’m a pro in this business myself; maybe I should feel threatened by the fact that a YouTube comment exchange can pretty much sum up a week’s discussion in my college course on Latino diaspora music (topic: is salsa Cuban, Puerto Rican, or Nuyorican?).

So far, though, I’m just happy to have help from both Sanchez and Torres in the classroom.

pick up a real guitar: musica practica 2.0?

2010-06-23T16:59:00.006-04:00

This summer I've agreed to write the occasional blog post for Arcade -- I'll be cross-posting here. My first post follows.

"Okay! As we continue our guitar journey, we need to talk about how you're going to be attacking the strings. And I'm going to recommend that you use a pick." David's tone is upbeat and encouraging, as always, and he seems to be looking right at me -- his ability to make eye contact with the camera is uncanny. Propped on his right thigh, his acoustic guitar looks like a natural extension of his body.

I have my (borrowed) guitar on my lap as well, and have set out a few picks on my desk. Though I've watched hundreds of guitarists perform over the years -- and I have David's example right in front of me on the computer screen -- I'm having a hard time figuring out how to even hold the instrument. In the previous lesson, "How to hold the guitar," David emphasized that I should hold it close to my body so it doesn't "dance around", and also that I shouldn't hunch or lean over the guitar. But these instructions seem somehow incompatible with my (female) anatomy. Nevertheless, I've moved on to "How to hold the pick."

I began to explore online guitar lessons as an extension of my research on Guitar Hero and Rock Band. As anyone who's paid attention to media coverage of these games already knows, Guitar Hero players are constantly being exhorted to "lrn2reeltar", so I thought I'd take up the challenge. A YouTube search led me to David Taub; he posts some lessons there as teasers for the extensive guitar curriculum at nextlevelguitar.com. I can't embed David's NLG lessons here because the ones I'm discussing are only available by subscription; as with traditional private instrumental lessons, my virtual guitar lessons cost money (although they are much, much cheaper than private lessons; I'm paying $75 for three months of unlimited access to the video curriculum). "How to hold the pick" is Lesson 11, and it's almost 11 minutes long.

Why would it take someone 11 minutes to explain how to hold a guitar pick? Here are my initial fieldnotes from Lesson 11:
Early on he really focused on the tactile nature of the pick -- especially the fact that it might be slippery, and therefore picks with raised letters might be an advantage at first. He asked the cameraman to zoom in on the pick and demonstrated subtle differences in the angle of the tip. He showed that you should hold the pick tight enough that you can't pull it out with your other hand, but not super-tight because it's important to stay "natural". This reminded me of two things -- how jewelry sales clerks explain how a ring should fit (you shouldn't be able to pull it right off), and those exercises where you close your eyes and feel/describe all the sensory qualities of a raisin (except there's no eating the pick at the end). By zooming in on the pick and talking about texture, slipperiness, tension of the grip, etc. David really encouraged a lot of physical awareness and sensitivity to subtle differences in picks or pick-related technique. I wonder if a face-to-face teacher would just physically correct the student instead, or hold his/her hand up to the student's hand.

My previous guitar-playing knowledge was derived entirely from Guitar Hero. Laugh if you will, but as I've been exploring in my research blog and a recent article, there really are some technical basics that cross over. (For instance, the distinct roles played by fretting hand and strumming hand -- when I first started playing Guitar Hero, positioning the fretting hand in advance of hitting the strum bar felt quite counterintuitive to this pianist/clarinetist.) However, since a Guitar Hero controller has no strings and the strum bar isn't detachable, the game didn't give me any advance training on holding a pick. As I followed David's directions and (in subsequent lessons) tried some vigorous strumming, it was surprisingly difficult to hang onto the thing. Paying attention to texture really did make a difference: the raised letters on one pick gave me crucial tactile feedback, both for judging the right amount of tension between my fingertips and for feeling when the pick was sliding around in my hand.

I can't say how or whether David's Lesson 11 was different from the way an in-person lesson might unfold, but I suspect that a typical private instructor wouldn't spend 11 minutes encouraging me to just explore what the pick felt like in my hand -- and if I were paying by the hour, I might feel cheated if s/he did. I'd certainly feel more anxious about having my pick go flying across the room, too. Having taken more online lessons now, I know that the total absence of performance anxiety is one major difference between this learning experience and the private piano and voice lessons of my teenage years: after all, I'm alone in my living room. Except that I'm also not alone, because at any moment I can click over to the NextLevelGuitar forum and seek advice and encouragement from other students, or send David a question, or do a YouTube search to see how other guitarists hold the instrument or the pick. And if I want an audience, I can post a video of my playing to the NextLevelGuitar "Audio/Video Showcase" -- "If you just started to learn to strum 2 weeks ago or applied something you learned from David's Intermediate advanced or a video song lesson we would love to see it. Any haters will be banned immediately in this section..."

1,894 posts in that section so far, and a wealth of crowd-sourced feedback. I could get to like this "real guitar" thing.

adventures in technomusicality

2010-05-18T09:17:00.003-04:00

So, the end of the semester has finally arrived and I'm embarking on a year of research leave -- hallelujah! This is when I get to tie together the threads of my research on Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and my new project about online music lessons (full refs here for my videogame work). The book doesn't have a set-in-stone title yet, but I've tossed around some ideas with my editor -- right now the working title is Technomusicality: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance.

I'm starting to keep track of media coverage about YouTube-based music lessons, and I've already interviewed some teachers and students at sites like Next Level Guitar and OnlineDrummer (as well as talking with a fiddle teacher who offers private lessons via video chat). Just this morning a friend tipped me off that this topic will be discussed today on WNYC's Soundcheck -- on the "Smackdown" segment, so that promises to be juicy!

I'd love to hear from anyone who'd like to share their thoughts about online music lessons -- please comment on this post. I'm excited to dig into this topic this summer (and to post here more frequently).

DJ Hero -- first impressions

2009-12-30T11:37:00.003-05:00

I had DJ Hero at home for a long time before I put the disc in the PS3. It's tricky when video games occupy such a peculiar category in my life: too fun to be high-priority during the work day, too much like work for the evenings. (And in some cases also too noisy/intense, both for the downstairs neighbors and for me -- after a long day, loud rock music and the incessant tapping of the RB drum kit feel like sensory overload). So the DJ Hero turntable controller was just sitting around for weeks, on the same table as my spouse's actual turntables and mixer. Yet somehow until I finally sat down to play the game it didn't occur to me how weird it is that the controller only includes a single turntable (maybe because during its sitting-around-in-the-corner period it had so much DJ-gear company, like it was the third turntable in someone's kit).

I have no DJing experience myself -- indeed, I still get nervous about actually setting a needle down on a record, on the rare occasions that I attempt such a thing. But I've spend a lot of time with DJs, and I've taught a lot of classes that revolve around post-turntablism music. When I'm teaching the first class meeting of a multi-week unit about hip-hop, I often begin by asking the class, "Why are two turntables better than one?" And when I watch a DJ at work with two turntables and a mixer, I'm often awed by his/her ambidextrous virtuosity. Of course club DJs today use all kinds of equipment, but given that DJ Hero features a turntable at all (vs. any of the myriad other interface possibilities for simulating real-time remix production), it seems peculiar to just use one. Especially when the game tutorial voiceover is by Grandmaster Flash (who starts things off by emphasizing his own turntablism pioneer status). There's something surreal about having Grandmaster Flash explain that each of the three buttons on the single turntable represents a different sound source, as though this had been his pioneering innovation. Someone unfamiliar with record players might conclude that all records come broken into three concentric rings, which you can mix and match on your single turntable and manipulate individually as you play your set. And of course this implies the presence of three invisible tonearms/needles (the controller doesn't include any representation of the tonearm/needle at all).

[Maybe now I have a better sense of the cognitive dissonance guitarists experience when they first encounter a GH/RB guitar controller, i.e., why the hell would you make a guitar with no strings? For me, a pianist with no stringed-instrument experience, the fret buttons just seemed like a very simple keyboard -- though the idea that one could fret before strumming required some mental adjustments.]

When I actually started to play a DJ Hero set, I discovered the satisfying click of the cross-fader. This click has strong associations for me; at a club the music would be way too loud for me to hear it, but it's a big part of the sound when my spouse is mixing in the living room. It helps me distinguish what he's doing with his mix vs. what was already part of the mix on each record (because the clicking cues me that he's shifting between the two sources). I also just like the sound -- the crispness of it, and the way that it makes a rhythmic pattern of its own that interlocks with the rhythm of the musical mix in interesting ways. So while the turntable part of the controller packed more associations visually, once I was playing the game it was the cross-fader that made me feel more aligned with a DJ's kinesthetic experience. The DJ Hero turntable doesn't even spin around (except when you briefly spin it backward yourself on "rewinds"); I certainly wasn't imagining a record was under my right hand. Maybe some kind of track pad, but not a record.

But was it fun to play? Yes, definitely, and also a lot more relaxing than playing GH/RB. This is dance music, after all, and instead of "star power" you earn and deploy "euphoria" (leading to bizarre screen texts like "euphoria used", but that's a subject for another post). As one might expect, this game's remixes/mashups are structured very differently from the rock songs in GH/RB, and the result is a trippier kind of immersion/flow. The musical selections are also much more in line with my own listening tastes, so waiting while someone else played a song was more fun than with GH/RB (plus it didn't have to be turned up so loud, since there's no need to drown out drum kit noise). But something about the game makes me think it's unlikely to be a huge hit (and not just because of the recession). I feel like it's too musically complicated to offer the visceral appeal of GH/RB, where each player is always following his/her specific part and feels deeply connected to it. Also, Guitar Hero greatly increased my appreciation for some kinds of rock and metal, but I'm not sure DJ Hero is going to increase a metalhead's appreciation for electronic dance music. And I can't imagine millions of teenage boys devoting a lot of time to mastering these mashups. While I'm usually the first person to point out that the videogame-playing demographic has long since expanded beyond teenage boys, I'm still not sure what core constituency might exist for DJ Hero.

Now I want to read some reviews and see if others have reached similar conclusions -- I haven't been keeping up with media reception of DJ Hero at all, but the fact that coverage hasn't been jumping out at me with no effort on my part leads me to suspect that sales have not been good.

"Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity"

2009-11-02T17:23:00.003-05:00

The article is officially published! In accordance with the journal's policy and my rights as the author, I am linking to a PDF of the finished version while also including the full bibliographic information and a copyright notice here.

Miller, Kiri. 2009. "Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity." Journal of the Society for American Music 3(4):395-429.
Copyright the Society for American Music, 2009.

JSAM website

article PDF

A Day with the Score-Oriented (FlowTV column #3)

2009-09-24T14:58:00.003-04:00

My final FlowTV column is out now -- it's about Rock Band tournament play.

Fieldnotes from a Rock Band Bar Night (FlowTV column #2)

2009-08-09T09:32:00.002-04:00

Just a note to say that my second Flow column is right here and will be reposted to this blog eventually. Tonight I'm off to rock at Orleans in Somerville.

Just Add Performance (FlowTV column #1)

2009-07-30T16:05:00.005-04:00

This column originally appeared here, but it seems like it belongs on the blog, too. (And I know how some people just hate to click through.)

***

[xkcd]

When I tell people that I’m doing research on Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I usually get one of three responses:

1. “But those games aren’t really musical, right? Isn’t it just pushing buttons in time?”

2. “Are you studying whether they get kids interested in playing real instruments? Because I read an article about how guitar teachers are getting a lot more students since that game came out.”

3. “I love those games! So, do you actually play? Like, for work?”

People who don’t already have personal experience with the games usually think it’s self-evident that Guitar Hero and Rock Band are only creating musical automatons who suffer from escapist delusions of rock stardom—or, as guitarist John Mayer has said, “Guitar Hero was devised to bring the guitar-playing experience to the masses without them having to put anything into it.” If I’m talking to a fellow ethnomusicologist, s/he often assumes that my project involves a critique of the games as the latest symptoms of the decline and fall of genuine musicality and DIY creativity. If there is a saving grace here, it can only reside in the possibility that the scales will fall from players’ eyes and they’ll be inspired to pick up real instruments: in the words of Sleater-Kinney guitarist/rock critic Carrie Brownstein, “[M]aybe by pretending to be in a band, there will be those who’ll find the nerve to go beyond the game, and to take the brave leaps required to create something real.”

My previous videogame project was on Grand Theft Auto, and there, too, much of the non-gamer media response revolved around the relationship between gameworld activities and “the real thing”—only with GTA, the winds of moral panic blew in the opposite direction. Clearly, games like this would inspire players to pick up a real gun or beat up a real prostitute. Think of the children, especially the underprivileged children! As Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-PA) asserted at a June 14, 2006, hearing of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, “It’s safe to say that a wealthy kid from the suburbs can play Grand Theft Auto or similar games without turning to a life of crime, but a poor kid who lives in a neighborhood where people really do steal cars or deal drugs or shoot cops might not be so fortunate” (transcribed from television footage).

[Congressman Pitts]

This kind of “media effects” discourse is so well-established and pervasive that it took Guitar Hero and Rock Band in stride. Will these games save real rock music or destroy it? News at 11!

Come to think of it, Congressman Pitts’s logic might be a more persuasive fit for Guitar Hero than GTA: it does seem more likely that a wealthy kid from the suburbs would have the resources to move from playing a plastic controller to taking private lessons on a Fender.

But really, I think this obsession with the relationship between playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band and playing “real music” is missing the point. My standard strategy for explaining my research to those caught up in the effects debate is to point out that playing these games isn’t just like playing real instruments, but it’s nothing at all like just listening to music. It’s a third thing, a new way of musicking. And if you want to get involved in value-oriented debates about it, here’s a thought experiment: rather than concluding that Guitar Hero players are wasting the time that they would otherwise be putting into long hours of practice on a real guitar, consider the possibility that they might otherwise spend that time just listening to recorded music (or, of course, playing Grand Theft Auto). Anyone who has played Guitar Hero or Rock Band for more than five minutes will tell you that it requires a deeper level of musical engagement than listening to an iPod—intellectually, emotionally, physically, and often socially. Moreover, everyone I’ve interviewed for my research reports that the games have substantially changed the way they listen to popular music when they’re not playing. This has certainly been the case for me; after playing drums in Rock Band I started to hear and understand drum parts in a totally new way (forever altering my visceral reaction to heavy metal, for instance). I’ve been running an online survey about the Guitar Hero/Rock Band gameplay experience, and so far 79% of my 480 respondents have indicated that the games have increased their appreciation for certain songs or genres; 75% have added new music to their listening collections because of the games. (A few more stats appear here.)

[xkcd]

My survey statistics only reconfirm what the music industry already knows: these games have created a huge market for value-added versions of previously recorded popular music. Every song licensed for release in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games has been broken down into parts and transcribed at four different difficulty levels, creating a new, hard-to-pirate digital music product. Once players have bought a game and a set of instrument controllers, and have invested the time required to achieve proficiency on one or more instruments, they are happy to spend money on new repertoire. (This is a venerable business model; in the nineteenth century, once a family had a piano in the house, they gladly kept buying four-hand piano transcriptions of the latest symphonies and chamber music for parlor entertainment.) In March 2009, Harmonix announced that the Rock Band franchise had surpassed one billion dollars in North American retail sales revenue in 15 months, including over 40 million paid downloads of individual songs. In September, Harmonix will release The Beatles: Rock Band, an extraordinary licensing coup—the Beatles back catalog can’t even be purchased on iTunes yet.

The transcription work, scoring mechanism, and on-screen avatar band are the obvious components of the value-added, of course, but I want to suggest that the most important value-added aspect is the potential for performance. Actually, the term “value-reconstituted” might be more appropriate: you reconstitute instant soup by adding water, and you reconstitute a recorded song by adding performance. In both cases, the quality of the original ingredients makes all the difference. Guitar Hero and Rock Band let players put the performance back into recorded music, reanimating it with their physical engagement and performance adrenaline. Players become live performers of pre-recorded songs, a phenomenon that I call schizophonic performance. Unless I’m off-campus, in which case I just call it a lot more compelling than listening to a recording.

Value-reconstituted songs make some people very uncomfortable, because rock music is supposed to be über-authentic hard work. Instant fame is only for industry-manufactured sellouts, and hitting buttons on a plastic controller to release someone else’s hot guitar solo seems a lot like lip-syncing—it’s not even as authentic as karaoke. But players aren’t deluded; they’re quick to point out that they understand the difference between playing instruments and playing Guitar Hero. (It’s worth noting that 74% of my survey respondents have experience playing instruments; 49% have experience playing guitar). They know that the “instant” songs that they play in Guitar Hero and Rock Band are packaged, commercialized, and designed to be labor-saving, but that doesn’t spoil their musical experience. Just add performance, and the music blooms into new life.

Just Add Performance

2009-06-26T09:10:00.003-04:00

I just published my first of three columns for FlowTV, titled "Just Add Performance". I'll republish the column on this blog eventually, but for obvious reasons they ask that I don't do it right away. Check it out!

[yr humble correspondent]

Schizophonic Performance article

2009-05-08T09:13:00.005-04:00

I'm excited to report that my first article on Guitar Hero and Rock Band has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the Society for American Music. According to my copyright transfer agreement, I have the right to post the unrevised manuscript version on a personal website -- see the PDF link at the end of this post.

Update: the article has now been published -- see this post for the final version.

Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity

Abstract: Music-oriented videogames like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are generating new modes of engagement with popular music repertoires. Tens of millions of players use instrument-shaped controllers to play along with classic and contemporary rock songs, generating appreciative feedback from a virtual crowd. These games inspire physically virtuosic, visually engaging performances. Players often “practice” at home and “perform” in public (or on YouTube). Advanced players gather online to share tips for mastering the fingerwork for complicated musical passages. In the course of their gameplay, players encounter and assess game designers’ conceptions of rock’s canonical repertoire, aesthetic norms, performance conventions, and symbolic value. But what does pressing buttons in time with a pre-recorded soundtrack have to do with music-making? This article investigates these games’ implicit models of rock authenticity, their sometimes-sincere/sometimes-ironic constructions of rock heroism, and their players’ ideas about authentic musicality. Drawing on ethnographic research—including interviews with players and game designers, a web-based qualitative survey, and media reception analysis—I discuss players’ concepts of musicality, creativity, and performance as they are developed through Guitar Hero and Rock Band gameplay and game-related discourse.

interview tidbits: on musicality in Guitar Hero and Rock Band

2009-01-12T15:40:00.003-05:00

During Brown's winter break I've been working on a talk I'll be giving in March; the Boston University Music Society (BUMS) has graciously invited me to be the keynote speaker for their annual graduate student music conference. My tentative title is "Virtual Virtuosity and Mediated Musicality: Why Guitar Hero Players Don't Just Play Real Guitars". I'm planning to focus on a very basic question: what’s musical about Guitar Hero and Rock Band? In particular, I will address the nature of the musical notation in these games, how playing a controller compares to playing a traditional instrument, and how gameplay affects musical listening. I discussed these matters in detail with a bunch of players who volunteered to participate in gameplay observation/interview sessions last summer, and I've been revisiting the interviews in search of material for this new talk. I thought I'd post a few clips here (with the permission of the interviewees, of course), since it's so interesting to hear people talk about this stuff.

Kevin (who has a little experience with trumpet, sax, and guitar) talks about whether gameplay feels like making music:

All of my interviewees reported that people had asked them why they don’t just play real instruments. Here are two clips from an interview with Josh, who has many years of experience playing jazz saxophone:

Another interviewee, Steffen, is an experienced rock drummer. He contrasted the experience of playing the guitar controller with the experience of firing a weapon in other video games:

You can hear Steffen trying to work through the apparent contradiction between feeling like he’s really playing music, even playing creatively, and knowing that he's doing what the game wants him to do.

Josh, the sax player, discussed the importance of muscle memory and embodied knowledge for both playing videogames and playing traditional instruments:

Here several interviewees compare their Guitar Hero or Rock Band gameplay with their other musical performance experiences:

Mike (a guitarist)

Dan (a singer-songwriter who regularly performs on acoustic guitar; he sings and plays lead guitar simultaneously in Rock Band)

Lauren (a drummer)

Sean (a pianist who has dabbled in guitar; the interviewer is my research assistant, Kate)

Josh (comparing playing sax and playing Guitar Hero)

Reviewing my interview and survey materials has also made it clear to me that for many players, the feeling of making music in these games doesn’t necessarily have to do with feeling like a star rock performer on stage. Here I talk about this topic with Kevin:

I'm still working through the tracks about the impact of gameplay on musical listening and/or learning about music, but here's a teaser from Dan:

All of these interviewees were undergraduate or graduate students here at Brown; none of them were music students. (I didn't deliberately exclude music students, but math/science/engineering types were much more likely to be on campus during the summer.)

some numbers

2008-08-15T10:48:00.002-04:00

As I work away on this article (now tentatively titled "Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Rock Authenticity") I've been reviewing some statistics generated by my qualitative survey on the GH/RB gameplay experience. Since this article probably won't be published in a journal for a year (if I'm lucky), I thought I'd share some of the stats here.

As of this writing I have received 414 responses. Survey respondents were self-selecting; most heard about the survey through recruitment messages posted on several high-traffic online messageboards devoted specifically to these games. There is no reason to assume that these players represent an ideal demographic sample of the many millions of people who have purchased or played the games. (The Guitar Hero franchise has sold more than twenty-one million game units since 2005; Rock Band has sold more than three million games and ten million individual song downloads since its November 2007 release.) However, the content and range of the qualitative responses in the surveys does seem to match the range of perspectives I have encountered through other research channels (reading messageboards and media accounts, interviewing players, etc.). Now, the numbers:

* 88% male, 11% female, 1% intergender/trans/other
* 60% aged 21 or younger, 23% aged 22-30, 17% over 30
* 100% have played some version of Guitar Hero; 37% have also played Rock Band
* 93% own some version of Guitar Hero; 25% own both Guitar Hero and Rock Band
* 45% typically play for 1-2 hours at a time
* 16% usually play at the “easy” or “medium” difficulty levels; 19% at “hard”; 64% at “expert”
* 76% have used “practice mode” (which breaks songs down into short sections that can be drilled at slower tempos)
* 57% often play with other people watching; 69% often play in a multiplayer mode
* only 41% reported having much prior familiarity with &ge 50% of the songs included in the games
* 79% stated that the games increased their appreciation for new songs/genres; 76% had added new music to their listening collections because of the games
* 73% had experience playing an instrument; 49% (of all respondents) had experience playing guitar; 32% had played in a band; 14% regularly performed music in public
* 34% reported feeling creative during gameplay

While I must re-emphasize the caveat that these statistics are not necessarily representative of all players, it does seem important that nearly three-quarters of respondents had played an instrument—particularly given that respondents were recruited primarily from gamer discussion boards (as opposed to some more specifically music-oriented population). This fact stands in intriguing tension with the mission statement often repeated in media interviews with Harmonix designers: “to give that awesome feeling [of performing music] to people who aren't musicians, who would never get to have it” (in this instance articulated by audio director Eric Brosius).

too much information

2008-08-12T08:29:00.002-04:00

This week I'm attempting to expand my IASPM conference paper into an article to send off to a journal. It's not easy, because I have much too much to say and an ever-growing collection of fascinating source material. I've had well over 400 responses to my survey on the gameplay experience (plus follow-up correspondence with a sample of respondents). I've held many gameplay observation and interview sessions on campus this summer, each of which yielded a 30-45 minute recording of a player saying insightful things about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. My wonderful summer research assistant, Kate, has tagged dozens and dozens of relevant online articles, messageboard posts, and YouTube videos. And now I need to write a 10,000-word article, not much more than twice the word count of the conference paper. (And less than the word count of the transcript of my interview with Harmonix's Rob Kay.) I wish I could just publish everything in my files with a big tag cloud and leave the interpretation to each reader. Sadly, that's not the path to tenure.

So, apologies for my infrequent posts. A few links to chew on: a new high-end drum controller designed to work with Rock Band 2; yet another newspaper article insisting that players aren't making music (the NY Times doth protest too much?); and a piece about my research in the Providence Journal (headline not of my devising).

Guitar Hero's Rock Pedagogy (IASPM-US 2008)

2008-05-05T14:47:00.005-04:00

I presented this conference paper on April 26, 2008, at the annual meeting of IASPM-US in Iowa City. I'm planning to work it up into a longer article over the summer (tentatively titled "Schizophonic Virtuosity").

Today I'll be talking about Guitar Hero gameplay as a form of rock music performance, and about the discourses of rock authenticity that are circulating in player and media discussions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I though I’d start with some clips from one of the many Guitar Hero performances archived on YouTube.

The guitarist here is Freddie Wong, a film student at the University of Southern California. He took first place in the World Series of Video Games Guitar Hero II competition, held in Dallas in July of 2007. Notice that this video has generated over 30,000 comments.

It’s pretty clear that Guitar Hero gameplay is a form of performance, whether it’s for the virtual crowd in the game (who cheer your successes and boo your failures), for YouTube viewers (who don’t mince words in assessing your skills), or for live audiences in your living room, at a local bar, or at a formal competition. A central question that animates my current research is whether these performances are considered to be musical. Since last summer I’ve been reading a lot of messageboards and media reviews, watching YouTube videos, running a qualitative online survey, interviewing game designers and players, and of course playing these games myself in an effort to work out how players and their audiences assess creativity, musicality, and originality in Guitar Hero gameplay, as well as how game design decisions, media coverage, and pre-existing rock discourses might influence those assessments.

Throughout this paper I’m indebted to Philip Auslander’s work on the concept of “liveness,” and particularly his observations about how album covers, videos, and live concert tours are all commercial products that serve to “contribute to the impression that rock music is a performing art,” as opposed to a studio-recording art. As Auslander writes, “However inaccurate that impression may be, it defines the experience of rock for its listeners” (Auslander 1999:65). I want to suggest that the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games are also products that affirm the crucial importance of live performance. Their version of a rock musician’s life provides for “practice mode,” set in a grungy bedroom, and “career mode,” consisting of performances at increasingly large and prestigious concert venues; there are no studio recording sessions in the narrative. (Though the games do make allusions to record deals, and of course the games themselves offer prime evidence of the importance of studio recording—not only through their very existence, but more explicitly, e.g., in bonus videos that show how the games’ cover versions of classic songs were recorded by studio musicians at WaveGroup, in California.) I’ll come back to the matter of performance a little later, after discussing some discourses about authenticity and creativity that are circulating around these games.

When I started reading media coverage of the Guitar Hero series, one of the first things I noticed was a preoccupation with the authenticity of players’ musical experiences: the word “real” comes up over and over in article titles and in responses to my survey. For instance, a San Francisco Chronicle article is titled “Rock Band, Guitar Hero III Video Game Do Rock, But Real Is Better” (Hartlaub 2007); an article in Guitar Player magazine about the musicians who recorded the cover versions of songs that appear in the latest Guitar Hero installment is titled “The Real Heroes of Guitar Hero III” (Ross 2008), and a review of Rock Band published in Spin appears under the heading “Even Better than the Real Thing” (Anderson 2007). Most assessments of “realness” in these articles are oriented around musical technique and creativity; while writers often dwell on the difference between playing a “fake guitar” and a “real guitar,” their discussions of the guitar controller’s “fakeness” revolve around what you can and can’t do with it, not around whether it is made of plastic or wood—that is, it would be a “real” instrument if you could make “real” music with it.

I subsequently found that players often have complicated views about creativity and musicality in Guitar Hero. In my online survey, I posed the question, “Do you feel you are being creative when you play Guitar Hero?”, requesting a yes or no answer and an explanation of that choice. I’ve received about 250 answers to the survey so far (89% of them from men, and 90% from people under 30). Answers to the creativity question are 68% negative to date. However, the responses entered in the “Please explain” box have suggested that players employ many different parameters for assessing creativity. (I’ve provided a small selection of answers in the handout, but I’ll just gloss them here rather than reading them aloud.) As one might expect, many of the “no” answers to the creativity question point to the fact that Guitar Hero players are playing someone else’s compositions, re-enacting someone else’s specific performance, and have almost no control over the resulting sound, apart from playing around with tremolo by using the “whammy bar” on long notes or simply making mistakes (in which case you hear a twangy clank). However, a lot of the players who answered “no” go on to use the “Please explain” box to discuss the creative aspects of physical performances techniques—not only “showboating” moves like Freddie Wong’s, but also the specific fingering patterns or alternative playing techniques required for the mastery of particularly challenging passages. In fact, a subgenre of Guitar Hero YouTube videos is devoted to teaching “tapping” or “hammer-on” techniques for certain songs.
[Here I played part of a YouTube video titled “Guitar Hero 3 Dragonforce Tapping Lesson”; this video is now private, but plenty of similar offerings are there if you search.]

Many players also point out the creativity of those who have created custom song charts and software hacks for inserting them into the games. A thriving area of the ScoreHero.com website is devoted to these custom charts [you must register to view the custom charts section], and the chartmakers also advertise their work on YouTube:

Over 6,000 of these custom charts are now available on ScoreHero alone. ScoreHero and other forums also track numerous hardware hacks,
from custom paint jobs to adding more realistic heft to the controller (in this case with metal washers) to rewiring the Rock Band controller for use in the Guitar Hero games. The discussions on these web forums demonstrate that these controllers can acquire the same collectible fetish-object status as real guitars. Indeed, a recent article in Guitar Player magazine made this connection with respect to game consoles in general: “For a while, it even appeared that PlayStation, XBox, and Wii were supplanting Fender, Gibson, and PRS as objects of desire for young and old alike. But, ironically, it may turn out to be a video game that helps shift the balance back” (Ross 2008:59). And here I can’t resist showing a new commercial product that bridges the gap: the ArtGuitar RiffMaster Pro Bundle (which consists of actual Peavey guitars modified to work as controllers, plus a set of speakers, for $2,000). Clearly, some players invest considerable creative energy in both individual instrument customization and generalizable modifications designed to bring the controller closer to a real guitar’s size, look, and feel.

But many of the survey respondents who answered “yes” to the creativity question gave explanations that had nothing to do with developing special techniques, showboating, making custom charts, or modifying controllers. Instead, they pointed to the creative aspects of the game’s fantasy world—for example, “I feel like I’m jumping into the artist in their time and playing along and maybe even feeling what it was to be that creative individual in their time” (iRone, m, 31-35). Still others suggest that Guitar Hero makes them more creative listeners, or that it amplifies and channels the creative inspiration that they always get from listening to music.

Last fall I visited Harmonix, the Cambridge-based company that developed the first two Guitar Hero games and was at the time of my visit on the verge of releasing Rock Band. In the Harmonix offices I recorded an interview with Rob Kay, the lead designer on Rock Band and the original Guitar Hero game. I asked Rob to what extent he felt that Guitar Hero was a musically creative experience. I’ll play part of the interview [blog readers: Rob preferred not to have the recording posted online] and you can follow along with the transcript:

KM: To what extent do you feel like Guitar Hero is a musically creative experience, and even for yourself as a player?

Rob Kay: Very low. I mean, it’s not—it’s funny—it’s kind of interesting, actually, that lots of people, after the success of Guitar Hero—there’s, like, this kind of little mini backlash of people being there, nothing big, but people going, like, “Oh, yeah, but shouldn’t people put their time into learning a real musical instrument instead of learning to press buttons to pretend they’re playing a musical instrument?” But from the beginning, we didn’t ever think that Guitar Hero was creative in its direct application, like, people play it to live a fantasy for ten minutes. And that’s primarily what it’s about; it’s about entertainment and kind of bringing people the feeling of playing music, which is actually pretty different than the karaoke and also the drums in Rock Band, which are much closer to actually playing the real instrument or being musical....[Y]ou aren’t physically creating the music, but we’re giving you that illusion that you are. And I think that, certainly, you learn some musical principles from it, and you certainly have to get your head together in terms of rhythm and hand-to-eye coordination and being able to read music in a very simple way using our note tracking system. But I think it’s—the real kind of creative space of actually deciding to do your own thing isn’t really there in Guitar Hero, aside from maybe with the whammy bar, where you can have a little bit of control over the sound. And you have this digital control over the sound as--are you playing well or not? But you don’t have any musical creativity, which is--it’s kind of this area that we actually do want to look more into and keep experimenting with....

KM: What about the creative aspects of the performance style that the people are bringing to Guitar Hero? I mean, and not just in public, but even in their living rooms, people will really stand up, play with their teeth, play behind the head, do all kinds of things like that. Was this something that you anticipated in designing the game?

Rob Kay: I don’t know if we anticipated the specific things people do. I mean, everyone wants to live out their rock style, persona, or alter ego, and I think the wonderful thing about Guitar Hero is seeing people do that. It was a revelation to be seeing my dad get into that. And I’ve never seen him pull a rock move before, and there he is doing all--lifting his guitar up and jumping around and twirling around. But we definitely wanted, in the design stage, to find a way to make the simulation more than just a clinical recreation of music, and we had this whole kind of ambition that started out pretty loosely articulated to bring some showmanship, as well as musicianship to the experience.

The distinctions Rob Kay makes between creativity, basic musical skills, musicianship, showmanship, and the feeling of playing music are all expressed by respondents to my survey, and hashed out in discussions on YouTube, the ScoreHero forums, and elsewhere.

I also conducted an email interview with Freddie Wong about his experience as a competitive player (the full text of which can be found on my research blog). At one point I asked him, “What are your aims as a performer when you play in public?” He responded, “The game is ridiculous. The fact that people are watching me as if this was a real guitar is ridiculous. So my goal is to just go with that, and just have fun with it....I like to think [audience members are] in on the joke. There’s a level of spectacle that lies in hitting difficult looking sections while doing stupid crazy stuff, but I think they feed into the good natured stupid fun of pretending to be a rock star.”

Freddie broke down the tens of thousands of comments on his YouTube performances into several categories, including calling him names, defending him, bragging about the commenter’s own skills, and telling him he should play a real guitar instead. He confirmed that he does in fact play real guitar, and that he puts a lot more time into it than playing Guitar Hero. When I asked him what he thought Guitar Hero taught people about rock, he replied, “Guitar Hero is very good at exposing people to artists and genres that they may not originally be familiar with, and perhaps more importantly, involves them in the music [in a way] that goes beyond simply passive listening. It’s nothing really deep, but it’s more than you get from listening to a song in a car—attention to rhythm, orchestration, song structure, tonality, etc.” His comments resonate with those of many survey respondents, who pointed to the games’ impact on their listening approach and their taste for particular genres. Listening pedagogy was also an aspect of the game design approach; Will Littlejohn, the president of the company that recorded the cover versions of many of the songs featured in the games, described his team’s efforts to isolate “the most visceral part you would play at any moment during the song, essentially the air guitar part” and to create a situation where “the pay-off is playing it right: Then you hear the song as it was intended to be heard and you are actively participating in the music” (Jackson 2008:52).

It’s important to note that by employing the idea of rock heroism as their core guiding concept, Guitar Hero and Rock Band actually celebrate models of musical creativity, originality, and authenticity that cannot be realized in the context of their own game designs. Players can develop the kind of virtuosic technical precision that would garner some praise in classical music circles, but they can never even attempt to live up to the improvisational-genius model of the rock guitar hero. In this sense, these games continually remind players that what they’re doing is not really playing rock music. Auslander notes that “Rock’s authenticity effects are...dependent on the nomination of something to serve as the inauthentic Other, whether that thing is current pop music or other rock” (Auslander 1999:71); I would suggest that Guitar Hero has nominated itself to serve this purpose, generating respectful appreciation of the gap between the game player’s performance and the real musician’s performance.

Popular music scholars have long emphasized the fact that rock authenticity is performative. As professional rock musicians do, these games continuously cite the norms of rock authenticity (Auslander 1999:72), both implicitly and in an openly didactic fashion (via in-game tutorials and tips that appear on a chalkboard while songs are loading). I contend that many videogame players are also deliberately performing rock authenticity when they play—but in a manner that self-consciously differentiates their own performances from live rock performances on real instruments. Steve Waksman writes that the electric guitar “is used to invest the body of the performer with meaning, to confer upon it a unique identity whose authentic, natural appearance works to conceal its reliance upon artifice and technology” (Waksman 1999:5); Guitar Hero and Rock Band encourage the same virtuosic style of physical performance—in which “every note takes explicit shape as a physical manifestation of the performing musician” (Waksman 1999:243). But here, artifice and technology are front and center.

The result is a kind of rock drag, a schizophonic virtuosity that is plainly unsettling to some viewers of these performances; the performing body is almost entirely severed from the musical sound coming from the speakers, voiding the processes of authentication that Auslander has linked to live rock performance (cf. Waksman 1999:129 on the unsettling effects of early amplification, which initially disrupted the relationship between body and sound). The term “drag” seems particularly well-suited to these performances because ideologies of gender and sexuality also play an important role here; as Millard and McSwain note, “the erect guitar” has long been “an essential part of the formalized ritual of the rock concert,” contributing to the process by which “the meaning of the sound meshed with contemporary notions of masculinity” (Millard and McSwain 2004:158). In the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, the guitar controllers have a tilt sensor: one activates “star power” by lifting the neck of the guitar into that classic phallic position, immediately generating adoring cries from the virtual crowd. For many commentators there seems to be a transparent connection between playing a real guitar and being a real man—a fake guitar implies a false masculinity. I have encountered countless homophobic and feminizing insults in YouTube comments about these performances; for instance, two recent comments on Freddie Wong’s YYZ video read, “Impregnate women? I’m pretty sure this guy has never seen a vagina” (posted 4/20) and “yur a gay ass mother fuckin fag ill bett you 20 mother fuckin dollars that this shit is fake” (posted 4/21). (Of course, in Freddie’s case, racial stereotyping also comes into play; he has noted that numerous commentators link his Asianness with nerdishness or effeminacy.) Similar assessments of the games appear in media reviews; for instance, San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Peter Hartlaub wrote, “Playing a Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar is a fairly effective form of birth control. Seriously, look at yourself in the mirror. No one who sees you playing this thing will want to have sex with you” (Hartlaub 2007).

While some Guitar Hero players, like Freddie Wong, are obviously savvy parodists of rock authenticity, my sense is that many players’ performances are more akin to the “authentically inauthentic” glam rock discussed by Auslander, which “takes rock’s ideology of authenticity as its point of reference and is therefore allied with that ideology” (1999:101). As with the Grand Theft Auto players who were the focus of my previous videogame research (Miller 2007, 2008), some Guitar Hero players adopt quite sincere and serious approaches to the game content, especially in terms of respect for the musical material; many others readily switch between sincere and ironic stances depending on the particular song or gameplay performance context.

Value judgments about “realness” in Guitar Hero and Rock Band tend to recall media coverage of the lip-syncing scandals that have beset popular music performers from time to time (see e.g., Wurtzler 1992 on Whitney Houston and Auslander 1999 on Milli Vanilli). In assessing the Milli Vanilli scandal, Auslander suggested that its main threat to rock ideology consisted in its possible foreshadowing of “a new era of music performance in which the visual evidence of performance would have no relation to the production of sound....Live concerts would become what recordings had always been: simulations—-recreations of performances that never took place, representations without referents in the real” (Auslander 1999:86). In some quarters Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been regarded as the realization of this threat; as the San Francisco Chronicle writer suggested, “something...seems fundamentally wrong when you pick up the video games....What kid will ever want to pick up a real guitar, when learning to play a fake one is so easy? If Rock Band had been available in the late 1980s, would we even have a Green Day -- or just three more no-name slackers killing a lot of time in their parents’ basement?” (Hartlaub 2007). Similarly, Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein asked in a Slate.com article, “[R]eally, if you are going to play the game with a group of friends for more than a night, shouldn’t you just form a real band? There is something sad about the thought of four teenagers getting Rock Band for Christmas and spending all of their after-school time pretending to know how to play” (Brownstein 2007).

Yet in their narrative structure, these games also celebrate the classic model of building a rock career through authentic live performances—and many reviewers have taken the approach of a writer for Guitar Player magazine, who asserted that “the game itself is a bit of a hero, as it leads generations of game-console fiends to consider the joys of actually playing the real thing” (Ross 2008:63). Brownstein, too, ends up adopting this position: “With so much of music blurring the lines between ersatz and authenticity, at least the Rock Band game is a tribute to rock, rather than an affront....[M]aybe by pretending to be in a band, there will be those who’ll find the nerve to go beyond the game, and to take the brave leaps required to create something real” (Brownstein 2007). Along these lines, as I was writing this passage someone posted a comment to my Guitar Hero research blog pointing me to GuitarHeroTab.com, which provides real guitar tablature for songs featured in Guitar Hero and Rock Band; the site promises, “If you want to be a real Guitar Hero or play in a real Rock Band, we’ve got all the tunes you need to get rocking on stage!”

Writing about Jamaican dub, Michael Veal has recently made an observation that strikes me as remarkably appropriate to this discussion of realness: “Virtual technologies such as sound recording and film were often misunderstood in their early years as serving purely documentary functions; their creations were often dismissed as inferior simulations of reality. A more expansive take is that creative manipulations of these technologies in fact create new forms of reality (that is, new ways of ‘hearing’ the world) within which they function as ‘prosthetic’ devices, ultimately extending human sensory perceptions into new areas....At the same time, these technologies essentially function as fantasy projection devices, containing, in their deceptively accurate simulation of ‘reality,’ the potential to disrupt human understandings of the ‘real.’” (Veal 2007:218) A major question in the reception discourses surrounding Guitar Hero and Rock Band has been whether they will revitalize and perpetuate that “real thing” model of rock or instead affectionately memorialize it while inspiring new modes of musicality. I would venture to suggest that the games might already be doing both these things in the hands of different players. While many players readily discuss familiar ideologies of musical originality, creativity, and rock heroism that inform their assessments of what counts as “the real thing” others are concluding that these authenticity discourses are simply no longer relevant to their own musical realities.

Works cited:

Anderson, Kyle. 2007. "Even Better than the Real Thing." Spin 23:104-110.

Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge.

Brownstein, Carrie. 2007. "Rock Band vs. Real Band." Slate (November 27, 2007). Accessed March 28, 2008.

Hartlaub, Peter. 2007. "Rock Band, Guitar Hero III Video Game Do Rock, But Real Is Better." San Francisco Chronicle (November 27, 2007): E1. Accessed March 28, 2008.

Jackson, Blair. 2008. "'Guitar Hero' Rocks: WaveGroup Carves Its Niche In Interactive Music Videogames." Mix 32(3):50-52.

Millard, André and Rebecca McSwain. 2004. "The Guitar Hero." In The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, ed. André Millard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Miller, Kiri. 2007. "Jacking the Dial: Radio, Race, and Place in Grand Theft Auto." Ethnomusicology 51(3):402-438.

Miller, Kiri. 2008 (forthcoming this summer). "Grove Street Grimm: Grand Theft Auto and Digital Folklore." Journal of American Folklore.

Ross, Michael. 2008. "The Real Heroes of Guitar Hero III." Guitar Player 42:58-63.

Veal, Michael E. 2007. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Waksman, Steve. 1999. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Wurtzler, Steve. 1992. "'She Sang Live, But the Microphone was Turned Off': The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of Representation." In Sound Theory / Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman. New York: Routledge.

belated

2008-01-31T11:37:00.000-05:00

For a long time I've been planning to write a post comparing GH3 and Rock Band, which both came in the mail at the end of November -- but my GH3 controller didn't work properly, and what with the troubleshooting and the exchange process I still haven't really been able to play it. Nevertheless, there were some interesting contrasts right out of the box. For example, the GH3 guitar looked like a toy next to the Rock Band guitar; Harmonix went with a larger, more realistic Fender Strat replica, and they removed the bright colors on the front of the fret buttons, substantially decreasing the tinker-toy feeling of the earlier controllers. Making the controller larger meant the neck might be too long for young children to comfortably reach the fret buttons, so an additional set of fret buttons close to the body of the guitar accommodates their short arms and also creates special showboating potential for virtuoso players. (Rob Kay discussed this design decision with me when I visited Harmonix and previewed Rock Band; I probably wouldn't have thought of the short-armed-children issue on my own.) Between the new guitar controller design and of course the much more dramatic change in available instrumentation (the addition of the drum kit and karaoke microphone), it immediately seemed clear that achieving a closer match with the aesthetic and physical experiences of actual musical performance was a design priority for Rock Band.

When I put GH3 into my PS3, the startup video made it clear that competition was going to be a key theme. The imagery included a mountain with a rock god icon at the top; a character worked his way past various challenges to reach the peak of the mountain and contend with the boss, a very old-school videogame narrative structure (no princess, though!). This accorded with what I'd heard in pre-release reviews of the game: that the focus would be hard-core competitive play, vs. the more collaborative orientation for Rock Band (e.g., you are encouraged to "rescue" a bandmate who is about to get booed off the stage). This might actually be considered a risk for Harmonix, since I would guess they don't want this game to seem too sweetly collaborative -- that could be read as kind of girly, right? I know this was an issue for the reception of karaoke games in the U.S. In any case, Harmonix also invested some energy in making it possible for bands to compete against each other.

I've been thinking a lot about how the drum kit and the karaoke mike are different from the guitar controller, in terms of having a more direct connection to "the real thing." (It might seem that the karaoke mike makes this connection a perfect one -- you are actually singing -- but because you have to sing exactly the pitches and rhythms that are laid out for you I'd say there's actually a significant gap between the game experience and a typical popular music vocal performance.) I already feel I have learned much more about playing a real drum set than my previous GH experience had taught me about playing a real guitar. The impact on my listening experience has been similar for both guitar and drum parts, though; I now hear those parts in a dramatically different way (and not just when listening to songs included in the games).

The new semester has started and I'm despairing of finding time to think, play, and read about all of this in the next few months. But I am hoping to set up a couple of GH/Rock Band nights in our recital hall so that students can come and play with a huge screen and great sound system. I certainly have no shortage of willing research assistants. Meanwhile, I've had the curious experience of being contacted for "expert" soundbites on these games (by the Christian Science Monitor and the BBC's On Screen program). Funny how the press hasn't shown so much of an interest in my years of research on an apparently less-sexy topic, which recently resulted in an actual book (rather than some depressingly sporadic blog entries).

abstract thoughts

2007-11-14T12:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a little abstract I recently put together to submit to a conference. Like a lot of scholars, I've discovered that committing to giving a conference paper on a new research topic is the best way to push myself along: I write a 300-word abstract, and if it gets accepted by the conference I have to write a 20-minute paper (~10 pages), which inevitably starts out as a longer draft, which can then be expanded into a journal article submission during the summer, which might then be rewritten as a book chapter later on. That's the idea, anyway. (And that's also why the pace of academic publishing is so slow.)

Guitar Hero's Rock Pedagogy

What does Guitar Hero teach players about rock's musical repertoires and aesthetic norms, rock as a mode of performance, and rock as an emblem of American individuality? This videogame series has greatly expanded the market for the "music & rhythm" niche in the digital gaming industry. Players use a guitar-shaped controller to play along with both classic and contemporary rock songs, generating appreciative feedback from a virtual crowd. As with the Dance Dance Revolution series, these games inspire physically virtuosic, visually engaging performances; they lend themselves to public competition and are often played in venues far removed from the isolated living room of the stereotypical gamer. Like musicians, many Guitar Hero players "practice" at home and "perform" in public (or on YouTube). Advanced players gather online to share tips for mastering complicated musical passages and extracting the highest possible scores through the strategic use of "star power." This paper investigates Guitar Hero's model of musical creativity, its impact on players' understandings of the physicality of rock performance, and its sometimes-sincere, sometimes-ironic constructions of rock heroism and the popular music industry. Drawing on ethnographic research -- including interviews with players and game designers, a web-based qualitative survey, and the exploration of web-based player communities such as ScoreHero.com -- I discuss players' implicit and explicit concepts of musicality, creativity, and public/private performance as they are developed through Guitar Hero gameplay in conjunction with other everyday musical experiences. I also address media reception of Guitar Hero, particularly debates over whether the games encourage or discourage the acquisition of "real" musical skills. Finally, I anticipate that I will be able to include some comparative discussion of the collaborative game Rock Band, developed by the same designers as Guitar Hero, which will be released this winter.

e-interview with Freddie Wong

2007-11-02T18:52:00.001-04:00

Recently I've been corresponding with Guitar Hero virtuoso / YouTube star Freddie Wong about his gameplay experience. (Special thanks to Devin for getting me in touch with him.) He was gracious enough to answer a bunch of official interview questions via email, and he gave me permission to publish his responses here. Some selections:

What do you remember about your earliest experiences with Guitar Hero?

I was on winter break back at home, and I had heard about Guitar Hero from an online forum. When I bought it, my brother and I played through it, he starting on Hard, and I starting on Expert. Having played real guitar for a few years by that point made it easy to start out on the hardest difficulty, and I only had problems getting through it on a couple of songs later in the game. I remember thinking that this was a really fun game - the primary game mechanic of timing strums with held notes was fundamentally satisfying, even though I'm not a fan of rhythm games in general. When I brought it back to LA after the break was over, my roommates both played through it as well.

What about the game inspired you to invest so much time into becoming an expert player?

To be honest, in terms of time invested, I don't play the game nearly as much as two of my roommates - most of the time it's a casual pick-up-for-a-few-minutes-when-I'm-bored type of deal. There's a very satisfying feedback between the physical action of playing the game and the auditory response, so I'd say that is what has me at the very least coming back to the game.

How long had you been playing before you made your "YYZ on Expert" video?

Since the first one came out, but I hadn't been playing the first one non-stop.

As of now, this video has generated 21,803 comments on YouTube. How many of these comments do you think you have read? What themes have you seen emerge in people's reactions to your YouTube videos?

Nearly all of them - they're more entertaining than the video itself at this point. Since about the beginning of this year, YouTube updated their comment displaying GUI to only display a small amount of the most recent comments. The comments tend to be cyclical in content. As I'm assuming any given comment maker isn't taking the time to read back many many pages of comments, it makes sense that there's a lot of repetition. Generally comments fall into the following categories:

- Calling me names/making fun of me
- Defending me, making fun of people who make fun of me
- Bragging about their own skills/their friend's skills/their best friend's dad's skills/etc.
- Telling me to play real guitar (or saying they'd be impressed if this was a real guitar)
- Pointing out parts of the video, quotes, effects, etc.

When we made the video originally, we actually planned for "talking points" or things that we actually hoped people would point out, in an effort to generate conversation - things like putting the strap on wrong, putting the alcohol on the television, flashing "crybaby" at the end as an easter egg, breaking the guitar. One thing that worked very well was that I actually missed notes on purpose - had I played the song perfectly, people would immediately start to think it was faked somehow (the debate in online videos of veracity being something that comes with the territory of apparently amateur user generated content and soured by the numerous failed attempts of advertising agencies to "put one over" on the internet audience - see the gloriously disastrous All I Want for Christmas is a PSP viral ad campaign that Sony tried last holiday season). At the time the video came out, it was fairly well known there was a hack to have the game play the song for you 100%, so we wished to avoid that dismissal, which would cause viewers to not pass along the video (which is instrumental in popularity).

As a result, every time someone calls the video fake, another user replies that the fact that I missed notes means it wasn't fake, so our strategy worked out perfectly. This also had the side effect of having people, the longer the game had been out, come into it and proudly declare that they could 100% the song, so they must be better than I was (and the response: well can you get 100% while jumping
around and doing all that crazy stuff he does?)

From studying the comments, it becomes clear that there's a pattern to people who comment on videos - almost universally, they do so as an afterthought without seeing if the same thing they've said has been said before. The fact that their comment, given the rate of comments, will likely not be seen by anything more than a handful of people before it gets pushed to a back page does not deter the act of commenting, despite the fact that many of the comments seem to be posted with the hope that others will read them (bragging about their own skills, for example). Assuming the user has an account, the act of commenting is made trivially easy and without investment. This too also favors people who comment with the goal of insulting - it's always easier to flame others than to compliment.

How do you respond to the people who say "Why don't you just invest that much time in actually playing the guitar?"

I make a point to actually not respond to any comments, because frankly, if I did, it might kill discussion. The single factor I attribute to the success of the video is that it generates conversation and controversy. That is to say, if so many people
didn't hate me, it wouldn't have as many hits as it does.

When someone recognizes me from the video and asks me, I do let them know that I probably invest a lot more time playing real guitar than the game, though.

What do you think Guitar Hero teaches people about rock? What (if anything) have you personally learned about rock from Guitar Hero?

Guitar Hero is very good at exposing people to artists and genres that they may not originally be familiar with, and perhaps more importantly, involves them in the music that goes beyond simply passive listening. It's nothing really deep, but it's more than you get from listening to a song in a car - attention to rhythm, orchestration, song structure, tonality, etc. On a fairly superficial level, the game illustrates a path of a band, from playing small gigs to large venues in the same way the Tony Hawk games usually illustrate the ascent of an amateur skateboarder to a pro.

Do you feel you have a personal style as a Guitar Hero player/performer?

My approach towards the game is that first and foremost it's a game, so I should at the very least look like I'm having fun with it. Too many people take it super seriously, sitting there and trying to nail all the solos perfectly and everything and spending a lot of time practicing and honing a skill that really isn't too useful outside the context of the game. While there is a sense of accomplishment from being able to do that, I think the point of a game is to have fun with it, and if I played the game like that I'd go nuts from boredom.

What are your aims as a performer when you play in public?

The game is ridiculous. The fact that people are watching me as if this was a real guitar is ridiculous. So my goal is to just go with that, and just have fun with it. Since I'm working with an analogous instrument, I figure analogous and unrealistic rock moves should go with it too.

Why do you think audiences respond to what you do?

I like to think they're in on the joke. There's a level of spectacle that lies in hitting difficult looking sections while doing stupid crazy stuff, but I think they feed into the good natured stupid fun of pretending to be a rock star. I'd imagine it's not unlike air guitar competitions, although here there's a point system.

Why do you think people get so hung up about debating the value of technique vs. showmanship?

People I think like the idea of competition and a tiered structure, to be able to conclusively say "this person is better than this person." From various conversations I've had with players, their argument is that it's a game with a point system - there's no need to muddy up the competitive waters with subjective evaluations of showmanship or performance, but to me, that level of rock posing is intrinsically built into the game to begin with. I'm going to copy and paste a response to an interview question that was similar here:

I've heard the controversy about having showmanship be a judged aspect, which I don't understand - the game is called Guitar Hero. Harmonix spent all that time designing different venues, creating all the crowd noise assets, and animating all the characters, and doing everything they can to create the simulation of being a rock star on stage from your living room and you're telling me that they expect you to sit down and just play it? If they wanted a game to focus on technicality, why not do what every other rhythm game does - have a tiered point system for accuracy of hitting the notes (like the good, great, perfect system in DDR), rather than a binary hit-or-miss? Even the star power activating mechanic requires you to tilt the guitar
up. On the other hand, if it was all about performance why bother with multipliers and scores? This is not to detract from people who play it technically at all, but I'm bringing up the point that if you think the game is "meant" to be played or judged only by technicality or showmanship, you're wrong - it's both.

What do you make of the media debates about Guitar Hero's impact on the vitality of rock as a genre? Do you think an argument could be made that the game promotes/discourages actual guitar-playing? (And does this strike you as an important issue?)

I think realistically in terms of societal impact, the most you can hope from this game is that it's exposing people to a wide range of music they may not have heard on their own, and expose them to some aspects of song writing. There will be those who will be inspired to pick up an instrument but I don't think teens are going to go out in droves to pick up guitars. Learning an instrument is a pretty time consuming endeavor after all.

One thing Guitar Hero seems to be doing though, and the one thing that I think the record companies are really anxious about, is that here is an avenue that could potentially give the ol' music industry a kick start. All efforts so far to get people to stop illegally downloading music have failed. What worked was making it convenient and reasonably priced, something Apple understood with their iTunes
store. But another way to go about this would be to change the rules entirely - to create a new form of music consumption that cannot be simply copied. Music consumption of the late twentieth century has been a passive effort. The most recent time period as far as I can tell that music probably has been actively consumed, that is, experienced beyond simply listening, was the ragtime era, where people would purchase sheet music of the hit songs of the era so they could play them at home on their upright pianos.

Now, with increasing stimulus, the act of sitting around at home and just listening to a record all the way through is no longer as commonplace as it once might have been. Music is consumed simultaneously with other activities - jogging, driving, doing homework, taking a shower. By and large people don't engage with it beyond a passive level. But now at least here's something that takes a very simple idea - interact with the music by making the act of listening into a game - and running with it. And more importantly - the game itself is a shell. You can plug in all kinds of music, and the core game can work with it. The potential for digital distribution for both Guitar Hero and Rock band is exciting as well as frightening because while many are excited by the idea of playing entire classic albums from one artist in the game, you essentially have a monopoly (the game's publishing company) as far as new content is concerned. There are no third parties that can produce content for these games, and the game company can essentially charge whatever they wish, and people will pay for it (See the recent article about Activision saying they saw no reason to lower prices on digital downloads because over 300,000 people have been paying for it). If the music companies and the game companies, two of the three entertainment giants right now, wish to use these games as a vehicle for delivering music content on any sort of long term scale, they need to recognize that people will buy their content if it's reasonably priced and convenient.

However given the history of greed, I feel the more likely course of action is for these companies to sacrifice long term relevance for short term earnings.

interview with Rob Kay

2007-10-22T13:45:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday I had a terrific conversation with Rob Kay (lead designer of Guitar Hero and the forthcoming Rock Band) in his office at Harmonix. I feel very lucky to have been able to talk with a game designer on-the-record, which is something I never managed to pull off during my Grand Theft Auto project. Rob gave me permission to post excerpts of the interview transcript here; I'll start with this one, which begins with my asking a question about "star power." (When you are playing a song successfully, you gradually build up "star power," which can then be deployed by lifting up the neck of your guitar; the crowd goes wild and you earn extra points for a while. The folks over at ScoreHero have made star power strategy into something of an artform, as Rob and I discuss later.)

KM:The other thing about star power that I think is really interesting is the way that it visually shakes you up when you’re playing. And I wonder what went into that decision.

RK: Do you mean, how the visuals react on-screen?

KM: Yep.

RK: So, I think one of the big things that you try to do in game design is give people instant gratification, feedback for anything that they do in the game. And feedback is always audio and visual. And if you can, if you’ve got these big moments, emotional moments in your game you want to make sure you’re using both the audio and the visual to really give you a positive feeling for doing something good in the game. So, star power is the big bonus moment, and you want to feel like you’re being rewarded for doing it. And then—you know, that’s like on a purely mechanical level? And I know we spent a lot of time trying to figure out, what should the visuals be, what should the sound be, and I was really keen that we had a theme, that we found something to link it all together. And so, we thought, well star power, should we put little gold stars or something like that, I was like no, that’s a little bit cheesy. And so then we thought it would be fun to go with the whole, hey look, it’s the electric guitar, you’re playing an electric guitar, so let’s make the theme electricity, and overloading, and all that kind of vibe. So we went with this kind of electric blue color scheme, and little kind of fizzes and spark sound effects when you deploy as well. So it was trying to bring a little bit of the raw, amp, overload kind of feel to the feedback. And that’s what drove the visuals. So as well as serving that functional purpose, which is to let you A. know when you’ve earned star power because you see the blue little sparks go off, you know that as your meter fills it’s blue, and it’s got sparks, so you’re identifying it conceptually, okay, blue glowy stuff is star power, it’s serving that functional job, but it’s also serving an aesthetic, an experiential kind of thing as well, making you feel like, oh yeah, it’s all electricity, and I’m kind of overloading the crowd with energy by releasing it. That was kind of an important direction.

KM: It’s interesting how that sort of replicates a really iconic, mythical moment in rock, which is the moment of Dylan going electric.

RK: [laughs]

KM: I don’t know if that ever occurred to any of you at all, but it just struck me just now when you were talking about it because it is this huge [snaps fingers] sort of transferral at this moment, although of course the crowd reaction was different—

RK: Yeah. Not explicitly. That’s right. Yeah, well that wasn’t an explicit goal at the time. But yeah. I mean, it’s very much a part of what, I mean Guitar Hero from the beginning was always, well, not right from the beginning, I think when we first started we didn’t know whether it was even going to be about rock or whether it was going to be about guitar. Because first of all it was about guitar, and then we only kind of realized a couple of weeks into the project that it made sense to make it all about rock.

KM: Really, so did you consider initially having a bunch of different genres so that you could be the country guitar hero, or the whatever guitar hero, the classical guitar hero?

RK: Yeah. Up until that point the normal thing to do in music games was to have a mixture of music from different genres. And I think the real, I mean, you could ask, why would you do that, it seems so obvious to put it into one genre and have a real identity, but I think people are probably just thinking about, oh how do we appeal to lots of people, oh, put lots of different music in there. And certainly in our karaoke games they were pretty pop-centric but they had a pretty wide range of songs. And Guitar Freaks, which I’m sure you must’ve heard about and looked into, had a strange mixture of songs, it had blues in there as well as rock, and you know we kind of had to make a decision early on, were we going to have blues as well, and were we going to have other stuff that people think of as typical guitar music, and it just seemed right to us to make it about, you know, balls-out rock guitar, that it’s the iconic thing that bringing a guitar game to America should be all about. Seems like the obvious think to do, to take it in that direction.

KM: So there is that American aspect to it. [NB: Rob Kay is from Manchester; one of the many limitations of this transcription is the fact that you can't hear his accent and speech cadences.]

RK: Yeah. I was always joking with Ryan who’s our art director, that it’s gotta be like a balls-out American thing, people identify with that I think. And it’s just the cliched thing, and often in videogames it’s those cliches that are easy to hold onto and get into, you just, you step out of yourself for a little while. And I enjoyed it, even though I wouldn’t necessarily identify, for me, you know, that American guitar rock as being my favorite thing. I know what it is, and I know how to get into it.

research questions

2007-09-23T20:18:00.000-04:00

It feels like my research has stopped in its tracks since classes started -- but of course that's what everyone said being a new faculty member would be like. Meanwhile, I'm trying to at least generate some questions about Guitar Hero in hopes that my brain will keep them on the back burner somehow. Here are some general areas I want to investigate (some of them already under investigation via my Guitar Hero survey):

What does Guitar Hero teach its players about rock -- about rock aesthetics, rock canons, and what counts as classic rock? And do different kinds of players receive this rock pedagogy differently? (For instance, players who already know most songs in the games vs. players who are learning them for the first time?)

On a more basic level, what kind of music pedagogy does Guitar Hero provide? How does it get across ideas about reading notation vs. learning/playing by ear? How does its tutorial compare to typical beginning guitar lessons?

Do players feel they are being "musical" or creative when they play? (I already know the answer is that some do and others definitely do not; I'm interested in finding out what concepts of musicality/creativity are in play. Also, do players with experience playing real instruments tend to have different views about this than non-musicians?)

Guitar Hero has gotten a lot of media coverage, much of it focused on the games' relationship to actual guitar-playing. (Three main categories of story: "Real rock stars who play Guitar Hero"; "Will Guitar Hero deter kids from playing real instruments?"; "Guitar Hero gets kids excited about guitar [and/or about rock]".) Why is this such a compelling topic for reception of the games? Having looked at a lot of moral-panic (or reaction-to-moral-panic) media connected with the Grand Theft Auto games, I'm interested in how critics make moral or ethical arguments about a game that's non-violent and not overtly political. In this case the ethical issue seems to be about whether this is authentic/genuine performance and whether it endangers or promotes actual music-making (somewhat in line with the old argument over whether video games isolate players or create player communities).

And continuing in this "performance" area: what about the growing number of Guitar Hero nights at bars, a la karaoke nights, and the public (and/or YouTube-disseminated) Guitar Hero competitions? How do players' and viewers' concepts of technical virtuosity and performance style/rockstar charisma play into their judgments about Guitar Hero? I've already seen some interesting debates about this in YouTube comment threads about people like Freddie Wong (a friend of a student of mine -- I need to arrange an interview with him as soon as I have the time).

Then there's the whole industry/marketing-synergy side, for which I really need to talk with the game designers (next month, I hope, thanks to a friend-of-a-friend at Harmonix). How did they choose the repertoire? How did they work out licensing issues? (All this applied to Grand Theft Auto, too, but I was never able to get the questions answered for that project.) Have sales of certain artists/songs seen a bump since the release of the games? If so, how much of this is nostalgia-related (as with GTA: Vice City's soundtrack) and how much has to do with actually creating a new fan base for this music? And what about the placement of novelty tracks with subcultural capital (like those from Homestar Runner), or tracks from little-known bands? Does this significantly increase Guitar Hero's street cred with certain kinds of players? Other things to ask the designers about: how did they come up with the various avatars? What sort of diversity were they hoping to achieve? Were they thinking at all about gender issues? (Or about how to pre-empt criticism re gender stereotypes? How does this all fit in with the legacy of Riot Grrrl?)

Another level of the "industry" topic relates to how the games depict the music industry, particularly with respect to an individual band's path to stardom. The order of cities, the assorted venue types, and the increasingly complex concert staging all say interesting things about how rock can rely on or create a sense of locality, as well as how hierarchies of venues get built up. The interstitial rock tips (during loading screens) place the game in the role of a kind of rock mentor, and the financial statements showing how little the band nets from each performance offer some wry commentary on romantic ideas of rock success. (My little brothers play in a band, and I would bet that some aspects of Guitar Hero ring true with their first multi-city tour experience. I wonder how many GH players have actually played in bands in public?)

While writing this post I've been trading songs with James -- I've 5-starred a bunch of stuff, but only on Medium. (And let me state for the record that "Beast and the Harlot" is a hilarious song.)

for MYC students: how to embed YouTube

2007-09-20T09:29:00.000-04:00

"Embedding" multimedia content on your blog is easy and makes for much more interesting content than just linking to other webpages. What you're doing, metaphorically speaking, is opening a little window to content hosted somewhere else on the web, and allowing your audience to look through that window rather than actually going to another site.

Embedding a YouTube clip in your blog is one of the simplest ways to do this. YouTube actually provides you with the HTML code that you need, in that little field that says "embed". (When you look around the web you'll notice that a lot of other sites do this, too.) When writing your blog entry, use the "Edit Html" view, and just copy and paste the YouTube code where you want the video. For instance, here's the Clash video we watched in class. (If you use the "View" menu on your browser and go to "View Page Source," you can see the code that created this result -- search for "youtube".)

for MYC students: how to post audio

2007-08-15T15:30:00.001-04:00

Just a scan of the San Andreas radio dial --

How did I do this? I uploaded an MP3 as an attachment to the "clip collection" page on our course wiki (well, first I recorded the track during gameplay, but that's another story). Then I embedded a link to it in this posting.

In your posting, use the "Edit HTML" tab. Here's what the code looks like:

<embed src="URL_of_Audio_File" autostart="false" loop="false" controls="console" height="62" width="144"></embed>

You'll want to replace "URL_of_Audio_File" with the actual URL of your own uploaded file. In this case it was https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/1443339
/GTAradiodial.mp3

For your own clip, it will be this same URL stem https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/1443339/
with your own filename tacked onto the end. (Of course, you could also use some other URL if your audio clip is hosted somewhere else on the web.)

UPDATE for current classes: Please note that the URL stem will be different for each course. See the course FAQ on the wiki.

new project

2007-08-01T09:12:00.000-04:00

I'm starting this blog to keep track of my Guitar Hero research efforts. I'm hoping to carry out an ethnographic study of this game, including perspectives from both players and designers. This blog will also serve as a model for the students in my courses at Brown this fall (Musical Youth Cultures and Introduction to Ethnomusicology), since I will be asking them to create their own research blogs for course projects.

playing along

Virtual Transmission, Visceral Practice: Dance Central and the Cybershala [SEM 2011]

Dance Central -- "I *see* you, I *see* you"

Thru-Who? A curious tale of amateurs rendered harmonious by a genius

playing along

Amateur-to-Amateur Music Lessons

pick up a real guitar: musica practica 2.0?

adventures in technomusicality

DJ Hero -- first impressions

"Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity"

A Day with the Score-Oriented (FlowTV column #3)

Fieldnotes from a Rock Band Bar Night (FlowTV column #2)

Just Add Performance (FlowTV column #1)

Just Add Performance

Schizophonic Performance article

interview tidbits: on musicality in Guitar Hero and Rock Band

some numbers

too much information

Guitar Hero's Rock Pedagogy (IASPM-US 2008)

belated

abstract thoughts

e-interview with Freddie Wong

interview with Rob Kay

research questions

for MYC students: how to embed YouTube

for MYC students: how to post audio

new project

Dance Central -- "I see you, I see you"