A Music Information Retrieval Approach to Classify Sub-Genres in Role Playing Games
Daeun Hwang (University of California, Santa Cruz)*, Xuyuan Cai (University of California, Santa Cruz), Edward Melcer (University of California, Santa Cruz), Elin Carstensdottir (University of California, Santa Cruz)
This paper will be presented in person
In the field of ludomusicology that overlaps the interests of sound and games, video game music (VGM) is often studied under the same lens as film music, which largely focuses on its theoretical functionality with relation to the perceived genres of the media. However, till date, we are unaware of any systematic approach that analyzes the quantifiable musical features in VGM across several perceived game genres. Therefore, we built an interactive system that extracts musical features from VGM on different perceived genres of video games, and then hypothesized how different musical features are correlated to the perceptions of each genre. This observed correlation may be used to further suggest such features are relevant to the expected elements associated with the sub-genre.