Kiri Miller

Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band , and Virtual Virtuosity

This article addresses Guitar Hero and Rock Band gameplay as a developing form of collaborative, participatory rock music performance. Drawing on ethnomusicology, performance studies,popularmusicstudies,genderandsexualitystudies,andinterdisciplinarydigitalmedia scholarship, I investigate the games’ models of rock heroism, media debates about their impact, and players’ ideas about genuine musicality, rock authenticity, and gendered performance conventions. Grounded in ethnographic research—including interviews, a Web-based qualitative survey, and media reception analysis—this article enhances our understanding of performance at the intersection of the “virtual” and the “real,” while also documenting the changing nature of amateur musicianship in an increasingly technologically mediated world. A video camera pans over the wheels and body of a red motorcycle and comes to rest on its rider, who introduces himself as he dismounts: “What’s up, Internet? My name’s Freddie.” As a deferential roadie helps remove his black leather jacket, Freddie Wong proclaims his intention “to come and rock you with ‘YYZ.’ ” He explains the heavy chains he wears around his neck: “The reason I have them on is that my solos are so blisteringly fast that if I didn’t keep them tied down somehow, I might impregnate women.” Another assistant hangs a miniature electric guitar around Freddie’s neck, and he turns to a TV topped with liquor bottles to begin a virtuosic rendition of Rush’s “YYZ.” Guitar Hero II’s on-screen streaming notation is superimposed over close-up views of his performance. Every hammer-on and pull-off has its exaggerated flourish; Freddie plays some passages with the guitar held behind his head, turns away from the screen to demonstrate his mastery of the material, and often lifts the guitar neck into rock-god phallic position. At the end of the song, he smashes his instrument into pieces. This YouTube video has been viewed over six million times and has inspired over 37,000 comments since it was posted in October 2006. 1 Freddie Wong is a film student at the University of Southern California; he took first place in the 2007 World Series of Video Games Guitar Hero II competition.

Grove Street Grimm: Grand Theft Auto and Digital Folklore

This article investigates the Grand Theft Auto videogame series in order to demonstrate the potential of a folkloristic, ethnographic approach for the analysis of digital games. I discuss Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a story collection, a frame for performance, a virtual museum of vernacular culture, and a widely circulated pop culture artifact whose double-voiced aesthetic has given rise to diverse interpretive communities. This case study suggests that digital gameplay should be regarded as a form of performance practice with the capacity to invoke traditional folkloric genres and engender new traditions.

Forum on Transcription

Introduction Fifty years ago, in September 1964, the journal of a young Society for Ethnomusicology published the ‘Symposium on Transcription and Analysis: A Hukwe Song with Musical Bow’, a text that has since become a cornerstone within the ethnomusicological corpus. Drawn from a session organized by Nicholas M. England for SEM’s November 1963 annual conference, the Symposium was built from what England called the ‘devoted labors’ of Robert Garfias, Mieczyslaw Kolinski, George List, and Willard Rhodes, four key figures in the emerging discipline, each of whom contributed an idiosyncratic transcription of a performance by a San bow player named Kafulo that England had recorded in September 1959 in what is now northeastern Namibia. Charles Seeger served as the ‘Chairman-Moderator’ and provided a report that included a ‘synoptic view’ of the four transcriptions. [See Figure 1.] The Symposium stands as a monument to musical transcription – or what Seeger in his report calls, pertinently (though somewhat reductively), the ‘visual documentation of sound-recording’. It throws into relief perspectives that, fifty years on, are still relevant – almost axiomatically so – for scholars who produce and analyse transcriptions of musical and sonic events. Amongst these perspectives are the following: total accuracy is impossible (Garfias: ‘No system of transcription, mechanical or otherwise, can preserve all of a musical example accurately’); the sonic is recalcitrant to inscription (Rhodes: ‘I was keenly conscious of the minute variations of pitch, dynamics, and rhythm of both the bow and the voice, but I found them so small as to elude accurate notation with our present means’); a transcription can be full or partial (Kolinski: ‘[whether the recording] should be transcribed in extenso or whether it suffices to select a representative portion of it’); transcription is contingent (List: ‘In transcribing a musical fabric as complex as the one under consideration I should probably change my opinion concerning certain details on almost

First Sing the Notes: Oral and Written Traditions in Sacred Harp Transmission

Every January the Chicago Sacred Harp singers hold an Anniversary Singing to celebrate their continuing existence as a musical community. It is a one-day singing, not a full weekend Sacred Harp convention, and visitors usually face terribly bitter weather. Therefore the Chicago Anniversary Singing mostly attracts singers from the Midwest, along with a scattering of former Chicago singers and well-wishers from Sacred Harp communities in Southern states.1 Roughly a hundred singers gather in the hollow square formation characteristic of Sacred Harp singings: a square with sides several rows deep, one voice-part on a side, all the chairs or pews facing into the central space where song leaders will stand. This is an intimate group compared to the crowds that attend the Midwest Convention, Chicagos showcase singing, for a full weekend in late spring. The mood is less formal at the Anniversary Singing; more people know each other, and the arranging committee is under less pressure to push through the list of people who have signed up to lead songs from The Sacred Harp.2 This relatively relaxed atmosphere, combined with the historical selfawareness implicit in celebrating an anniversary, has given rise to the Founders Lesson, one of the peculiarities of the Chicago Anniversary Singing.3 The original core members of the local singing community are recognized by the assembled singers, and someone-usually Marcia

Gaming the system: Gender performance in Dance Central:

This article investigates how the Dance Central game series (Harmonix Music Systems) invites and persuades players to experiment with gender performance. Dance Central uses the Xbox 360 Kinect, a motion-sensing interface, to teach players full-body dance routines set to popular club music. This study offers evidence that performative, constructivist gender theories informed the development process for these games, and explores what happens when designers enlist players in putting theory into practice. Dance Central stages visceral encounters with gendered choreography, generating both embodied gender work in the course of gameplay and reflective gender discourse in public-sphere social media. Grounded in qualitative ethnographic research that gives equal attention to interface affordances, game design, player experiences, and game-related discourse, this article offers a case study for understanding how digital media become enculturated as technologies of gender.