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Before Games Could Listen: Thinking Beyond Interactivity in Early Game Music
Early game sound is often framed as a technological stepping stone, or, more negatively, as a crude precursor to the interactive and adaptive scores of later decades. This narrative of progress, while historically coherent, has tended to obscure the musical imagination and structural sophistication that flourished within early gaming platforms. My work reconsiders that narrative by showing how alternative modes of listening—attentive to structure, design, and technological limitation—can reveal distinct compositional logics and aesthetic priorities, inviting a broader understanding of creativity before games could “listen.”
About the Speaker
Andrew Schartmann is a composer and music theorist whose work bridges classical traditions and interactive media. He is a Professor of Music Theory at the New England Conservatory and serves as Audio Director of Yale’s XR Pediatrics Lab, where he creates sound and music for award-winning augmented-reality games, including SmokeSCREEN VR (Gold Medal Winner, 2020 International Serious Play Awards; Forbes Top 50 VR Games of 2019) and Year of the Cicadas (Unity for Humanity Winner, 2023).
Schartmann is the creator of NADIA, a mobile app that teaches music fundamentals through gamified learning, scheduled for release in November 2025. He is currently collaborating with William E. Caplin on an interactive website devoted to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and recently curated Beethoven: A Multisensory Experience, an exhibit that explores Beethoven’s legacy through play and interactive storytelling.
His books include Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack (Bloomsbury, 2015), Keiji Inafune(Bloomsbury, 2025), Analyzing NES Music (Intellect / University of Chicago Press, 2025), and a forthcoming volume on The Legend of Zelda for the University of Chicago Press. Schartmann is Associate Editor of DSCH Journal and serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Sound and Music in Games and SMT-V.
About the Music Forum Series
The MIT Music & Theater Arts Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and presented in partnership with MIT Libraries, the MTA Music Forum Series gives the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison, Julia Wolfe, Terry Riley, Don Byron, and others.