Sound and sundry

I've been listening to a band called Signal Hill recently (for those interested they're an exceptional instrumental band from the States, I believe some of their music is being used in Irrational Games' podcasts - which by the way are also a great listen!). Anyway, it got me wondering about why I'm attracted to certain forms of music over others and why, for me at least, music is so much more a personal experience than games.

"A composer causes an event, which reaches me, the listener, in an acoustical way, causing me to have an experience. My reaction to the experience causes an effect which I can communicate to myself and, if I find words for it, to others" - Herbert Brum.

This sentence is talking about the relationship between composer and listener. I think fundamentally music has to be a dialogue, but you can only respond truthfully within yourself. A piece of music that you enjoy (or even one you don't!) is capable of stimulating thoughts and imagery seemingly from nowhere, be it a memory or an emotion or something new; the composer speaks and you respond.

I find music has a much easier time tapping into the more abyssal emotions - the stuff buried waaaaay down there - than video games. I guess this could be because games are a fusion of sound, visual and motor information, so perhaps music has more of your focused attention? It's interesting that I find the most poignant, meaningful music is void of lyrics. I wonder if musical sounds are simply more abstract than speech or visual signals so offer more room for interpretation?

It's pretty rare for games to offer emotional experiences that go beyond the staples of joy, fear, anger, surprise and interest. A couple of great examples of games that delve into complex emotions are Jason Rohrer's Gravitation and Rod Humble's The Marriage. According to the authors, both games were constructed with a meaning in mind but never specifically alluded to in the games themselves - all interpretation is allowed to flow from the player. Perhaps this is helped by the fact they are both quite abstract in appearance (The Marriage doesn't have audio at all), but that alone doesn't answer why something like Geometry Wars feels less emotionally complex. Then again, Geometry Wars was designed specifically to elicit joy, fear, surprise and by proxy probably anger when you die.

In the scheme of things Gravitation and The Marriage are hardly mainstream, whereas the kind of music that offers me complex emotion is available on a high street store or at the very least i-Tunes. When are we going to see games that have the same universal appeal as music?