Conference Agenda

In the context of films, Gorbman (2011) describes “artless singing” as instances of characters casually singing to themselves. Artless singing appears across screen media, including the video game Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (Rebirth) (2024). In this installment of a remake series, the act of characters singing themes from the Final Fantasy (FF) series not only offers sonic references for fans to appreciate, but is also one method by which “musicking” (Small, 1998) strengthens bonds between characters.

In this paper, I analyze spontaneous diegetic musicking in private spaces within Rebirth’s fictional reality—that is, the diegesis. I open with a response to Aksoy (2022) by discussing how Rebirth places FF series melodies into characters’ voices and how these musical acts may function inside and outside of the game world. For instance, players hear renditions of the FF series theme “Victory Fanfare” in three scenarios: randomly after battles, during a tournament’s conclusion, and during a childrens’ game. Rebirth also transforms Final Fantasy VII (FFVII) themes into songs; the work-song melodies of one character, for instance, are derived from multiple FFVII tunes. As Summers (2021) suggests, diegetic songs serve to build the gameworld and enrich the player’s experience. Meanwhile, Rebirth deliberately places these originally non-diegetic melodies—melodies only heard by the audience—into the mouths of its characters; these acts represent the development team’s relationship to FFVII, which then connects the developers to the player. My analysis then addresses the ninja, Yuffie Kisaragi, as she appears to compose songs at random. In addition to singing two FF series themes, she brings her own theme music into the diegesis. The player through the playable protagonist may choose to respond positively or negatively to her performance, generating different reactions from Yuffie, and therefore changing Yuffie’s relationship with the playable protagonist. Directly building upon Gorbman’s and Aksoy’s work, I argue that artless singing simultaneously strengthens the player’s relationship to FFVII’s gameworld through the developers’ intentional employment of musical nostalgia and enhances connections between protagonists during quieter narrative moments. More broadly, I highlight the relationships that manifest as a result of diegetically recontextualizing music in video game remakes.

When multiple versions of the same piece exist, which do you choose to play? What consequences and implications arise from that choice? In 2020, Square Enix released Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, a rhythm game that recapitulated the plots and soundtracks of the Kingdom Hearts video game series (2002-present). The gameplay encouraged players to engage with beloved tracks by pressing buttons in time with rhythmic content. The music originated either from Disney and Final Fantasy properties, or from previous Kingdom Hearts games.The better one knows the music, the easier the gameplay. When revisiting eight previous soundtracks, Square Enix had to choose between two iterations: a recording from the respective game’s original release or the orchestrated version from its 2010s “Remix.” Longtime players have experienced both versions, but newer players’ first (and potentially only) experience of the soundtracks were through the rereleases. Despite the remixes’ positive reception among fans, the developers chose to integrate audio from the original versions into Melody of Memory’s gameplay levels. This choice opens up a dialogue about the implications of musical change in the ever-growing body of video game remakes.

In this paper, I argue that Square Enix’s deliberate use of “originals” engages players in a nuanced experience of musical nostalgia. My analysis synthesizes Svetlana Boym’s typologies of nostalgia (2002) with research on timbral changes in live renditions of video game tracks to develop models of musical remembrance that react to player familiarity with the sounds of Kingdom Hearts. While there were likely technological reasons for using “originals,” Melody of Memory implements what Greenfield-Casas (2024) has called “post-existing music” as it collides with players’ experiences across multiple versions of the same music.

As time passes and new generations of players enter the series Kingdom Hearts, an intergenerational divide occurs. For those who have only played the rereleased “remixes,” Melody of Memory presents a novel timbral experience. For players who have grown up with the series since 2002, the music they hear in this rhythmic recapitulation is the “melody” in their “memory.” Such a dichotomy problematizes music’s role in the increasingly intergenerational gaming landscape.

Johnny Gioeli’s song “Live & Learn,” as performed by his rock duo Crush 40, first accompanied the climax of Sega’s video game Sonic Adventure 2 in 2001. The original recording of the song continued to appear in subsequent games and other Sonic media over time, earning its status among fans as an anthem for the franchise. Over twenty years after its debut, Gioeli’s separate contract with Paramount regarding “Live & Learn” allowed director Jeff Fowler and soundtrack producer Tom Holkenborg to re-create this musical-narrative moment in the film Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Paramount’s film adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2) as both an arranged motive and a remix of the original vocal recording. Then, shortly before the premiere of Sonic 3 in December 2024, Gioeli sued Sega of America over the ownership of “Live & Learn,” claiming licensing rights to the song’s master and composition, after he learned from a fan that the master for “Live & Learn” had appeared in approximately twenty-five other games without Gioeli’s knowledge. (Carpenter 2024).

In this paper, I argue that the contractual relations between Gioeli, Sega, and Paramount reveal how fans prioritize music as the “connecting tissue for a franchise” (Summers 2018) when engaging in the acknowledged “transposition of a recognizable work” (Hutcheon 2006). Whereas Sega recontextualizes its game music not through arrangement or covers, but through potentially uncompensated dissemination of master recordings, Paramount re-arranges and remixes the master recordings through allegedly transparent agreement. The diverse contexts for “Live & Learn” within Sega’s games lead fans to more readily associate the recording with the franchise, which in turn inspire the Paramount’s film director to recontextualize both the song and master through transmedial re-arrangement. Ultimately, these multiple recontextualizations across games and media lead to re-negotiating the legal “enclosure” (Boyle 2003) of musical elements as pieces of intellectual property. As I argue, the more we recontextualize video game music, the more rigid the music’s ownership becomes. Adaptation as “process and product” (Hutcheon 2006) therefore re-inscribes material and symbolic value to its transformed musical elements, catalyzing subsequent disputes of copyright protection between artists and their distributors.