Conference Agenda

The year 2020 ushered in an unprecedented surge in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) technology consumption. On October 13, Meta (formerly Facebook, Inc.) released the Oculus Quest 2, a standalone VR headset with an accessible base price of 299 USD. By the first fiscal quarter of 2023, Quest 2 sales had reached approximately 18 million units, vastly outperforming previous VR/AR systems and significantly expanding mainstream adoption. The marketplace continues to diversify, with Meta and other companies—including newer entrants like Apple—unveiling ever-evolving platforms and applications.

Rhythm and dance-based games constitute a major sector of the VR/AR gaming industry and are particularly popular as entry points for new VR/AR users. Catering to diverse musical tastes and gameplay motivations—including dance, fitness, socialization, and competition—these games reshape boundaries between physical embodiment and digital performance. Multiplayer modes create dynamic virtual spaces where players can interact in real time, forming self-selected communities around musical preferences, skill levels, and gameplay styles. Features such as “cardio mode,” which encourages greater physical exertion, and “force mode,” which rewards precise, high-velocity movements, further personalize user engagement. Multiplayer spaces cultivate an ever-expanding range of social performativity, where players negotiate identity and presence through movement.

Building on discourse surrounding social play in non-VR rhythm games like Guitar Hero (2005–) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998–), this paper demonstrates how multiplayer VR/AR rhythm and dance games complicate notions of public and private performance, enhance machine evaluation and feedback mechanisms, and expand the possibilities for embodied co-presence in digital spaces. Examining Beat Saber (2019–) and Synth Riders (2019–) as primary case studies, this paper integrates insights from digital ethnography (Tom Boellstorff et al.) with ludomusicological perspectives on participatory digital performance (Kiri Miller), interactivity and social dynamics in gaming (William Cheng), and game sound (Karen Collins). I argue that these games not only reflect but actively shape new paradigms of musical interaction and social connectivity in the metaverse, positioning player actions within a (meta)diegetic framework where gameplay mechanics and self-expression become mutually reinforcing.

This paper considers the aesthetics of background music (BGM) in both virtual and real-life environments in Japan. While Muzak has largely been replaced by “foreground music” playlists of popular songs in many contexts (Kassabian 2013), BGM remains a presence in Japan’s urban spaces, from the departure melodies at train stations to the menu chimes emitted by ATMs. The kankyō ongaku (environmental music) boom in the 1980s of Japan aimed to elevate the aesthetics of everyday soundscapes; as Paul Roquet argues, music was a part of a broader trend in post-war Japan in ambient media that emerged out of a “strange dialectic between Muzak and modernism." While psychologists and architectural designers were responding to the sonic ills of urbanization by adapting Muzak and soundscape design, avant-garde artists associated with the Fluxus movement were creating experimental sound works that mined the “creative potential of discomfort.” At the same time, video game music emerged as a genre in its own right in the 1980s and 1990s, as the progression from 8-bit chiptune to pulse-code modulation allowed video game composers to achieve a wider range of textures. Today, the upbeat tunes of Nash Music Library and other BGM producers resound in retail spaces across the archipelago, pleasantly similar to the music that plays in the virtual urban environments of Japanese role-playing games developed by publishers like Atlus or Falcom. How might we understand this seeming convergence of sonic aesthetics in virtual and physical environments?

Drawing from debates around environmental sound in Japan beginning in the 1960s, as well as autoethnographic reflections on moving through Japanese retail spaces and video game environments, this paper sketches a theory of listening to BGM. I begin with an analysis of the Japanese discourse around environmental music beginning in the 1960s to the 1980s, as the term's meanings shifted in response to a perceived lack of aesthetic value in BGM. The second part of the paper analyzes the experience of listening to retail environments in Japan, flipping recent methods from the ludomusicology of video game environments back onto “real-life” listening.

In January 2022, fan-made video game Bloodborne PSX was freely released online. Created by a small development team, the project is a “demake” of the earlier game Bloodborne released in 2015 developed by mainstream studio FromSoftware and published by Sony. Tonguç İbrahim Sezen (2015) defines a demake as, “a retro-inspired reimagining or remake of a modern game, as if it had been created on an earlier platform.” As if it were a retro experiment, graphics, gameplay, and music emulate what the original game would resemble had it been released a couple of decades prior on earlier hardware.

In this paper, I argue that memory and nostalgia are expressed musically through timbre in Bloodborne PSX. Using spectrogram analysis (Nobile 2022; Lavengood 2020), I show how music is a source for understanding how memory and nostalgia are recalled and then reinterpreted in video game demakes. Changes in timbre evoke a sound world reminiscent of an earlier console generation through an emphasis on higher overtone frequencies. Certain musical features are added like bass pedals to account for sparse textures, or fanfare introductions reminiscent of battle music in the Final Fantasy series. Analysis of music in both versions of Bloodborne show how timbre, texture, and harmony work to express past and present.

Additionally, I examine online discussion forums and interviews to demonstrate a particular community’s own connection to a specific kind of nostalgia and recognition of how the game works as a legitimate media object. Nostalgia as a conflation of past and present (Kizzire 2014) intertwines with memory in the video game demake, in which there is an apparent false memory of an object that never actually existed in the first place. Rapid technological obsolescence and a fascination with the recent past (Guffey 2006) produce a want for such an object. This case study on Bloodborne PSX reveals several layered aspects of why we might hear certain music as sounding retro, how long-term musical memory is a trigger of both time and place, and how we negotiate nostalgia through music.