Fight Music, Life Music (k3nshi)
Confession: I love the Halo and Halo 2 soundtracks.
I have them on my iPod and listen to them frequently when I'm out and about. Practical matters such as the fact the music is all acoustic* means its easy to listen to whilst reading a book on the train, help contribute to its high play count. But mostly it's the fact I find the music utterly amazing and stirring. I can be having a really crap journey into work, or the day could be getting me down, and I know I can just switch to the Halo Soundtrack Playlist and get a near immediate boost from one of the many excellent tracks. But this post isn't about the merit or lack thereof, of the Halo and Halo 2 soundtracks. It's about questioning why I seem to react so much to this music.
It has been well documented how Halo was designed to make the player feel cool and powerful. AI reacting to your presence with awe and fear, a near perfect difficulty curve and some utterly amazing battles. And this is how I first and most frequently encountered the music: The soundtrack of my interactive experience of taking on the world and winning. I can't help wondering if the music would have such an effect on me if I had first encountered in a non-interactive and much less immersive context. I certainly have film soundtracks on my iPod which I occassionaly listen to, but none of them seem to provoke the same reaction. Hmmm.
*I don't listen to the rubbish "special tracks" on the Halo 2 soundtrack.
3 comments:
One of my friends at college once said how he had been acquiring the Halo 2 soundtrack, and I said "aren't the soundtracks to Halo games normally boring orchestral crap?" A few months later I actually got around to playing the game and it turns out that there are qute a few good tunes on there that really help to inject atmosphere into the battle scene that it is the soundtrack to. In short, there's nothing wrong with liking the soundtracks due to the way in which - unlike most - they are very listenable whilst at the same time being original (unlike, say, Vice City.)
I like to listen to proper music
The soundtrack to Halo 2 is ace. Steve Vai does some of it.
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