Psychology of Sound and Game Music

 Sound can affect the listener in a variety of ways, including inducing particular moods in the ear to make players feel a certain way when playing a game. This provides the player, a more participatory experience by bringing them closer to the game. The music sets the tone and helps player feel the way the developer wants them to.

Modern videogames rely heavily on sound design and music to enhance the entire experience. Game audio may aid designers in creating tension, evoking emotion, increasing immersion in the game environment, and even resolving design issues.

 

The chosen game will be used for an example is ‘Def Jam Fight for New Your’.

EA Games' Def Jam: Fight for NY is a hip hop-influenced action video game. It was published on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube on September 21, 2004. It follows Def Jam: Icon and is a sequel to Def Jam Vendetta.

There are 3 ways to judge the sound which is:

·       Mood

·       Loudness

·       Timbre

How to judge the sound?

·       Mood

The sound mood of the game is excitement and frustration, when a character is going to win a game and it doesn’t have to be the player character or the enemy character, cheering of the crowds get louder when one of the characters use the power attack which is on the right image and below the health bar, there is some sort of a fire with a ‘blazin’ word on it, it will make the character do the finishing move on the opponent and it depends on who use the power attack which will result either excitement or frustration to the player if they win or lose the game.

And each time that a character punch continuously to their opponent, the cheering gets louder and slight faster but it will cool down if the punches are not frequent.

·       Loudness

During a fight scene, the area will always have either small group or people or even more than 20, they will always be cheering for the fight but not for either character. The sound will include shouting, cheering, glass breaking and excited cheering when one of the characters about to win. There is no background music during the fighting scene as only punches, glass breaking, body fall onto the ground or body slammed to the wall, cracked bones and many more sound included during the fight.

 

·       Timbre

Timbre is the musical note's quality. It is what distinguishes one musical note from the next. The timbre of a sound can be described using words like round, brassy, crisp, or bright.

The flavor of different apples is a wonderful example for timbre music: they are all apples, but they all have different flavors. Even though they are both string instruments and may play the same notes, a violin and a guitar have very different timbres.

Even two violins, however, have distinct timbres! Because sounds have numerous layers of tone, practically all sounds, not only those in music, have several layers of tone. Becoming able to extract these sounds from the instrument and employ timbre expressively in music is an important part of being a skilled musician.

In the introduction scene in Def Jam Fight for New York, the timbre instruments that can be heard are drums, flute, bass electric guitar and many. The drums and the bass electric guitar give the intro the hype and give the players the excitement as they start to play the game. In most of the cut scenes there will always be a simple beat for the background music but sometimes it doesn’t really noticeable because on how loud the characters are talking but it is there.