Bringing Baroque Music to a New Generation Through a Tafelmusik Video Game
Bringing Baroque Music to a New Generation
For many people, Baroque music feels like a distant relic—something that looks and sounds as though it belongs to an inaccessible past. The project described here was commissioned by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in Toronto, Canada. Their mission: to build an informed, enthusiastic younger audience by designing educational resources about Baroque music. Tafelmusik already had a strong public outreach effort: Baroque education days for schoolchildren, teaching materials aligned with the provincial curriculum, an award-winning CD for kids, and most recently an attempt to tap into the media that still fascinates many young people (especially boys)—video games. For us, a team of academic researchers and educational game designers, this was a golden chance to create a learning-rich game that uses mainstream gaming conventions and reconfigures them into an engaging, informative interactive tool that teaches about Baroque music culture and conventions.
A Theory of Learning Through Play
In the first part of this chapter, we cover a theory that has gained traction in education studies in support of media learning: what we call “ludic epistemologies.” Drawing on our previous design-based research, we present a project that directly tests our own assumptions about games and learning—a Flash-based Baroque music game titled TafelKids: The Quest for Arundo Donax. We then describe the game-creation process, focusing on the tension between designing an online resource that an audience aged 8–14 would find fun and engaging, and the mandate to include historical facts, sounds, musical structures, and cultural conventions of Baroque music. Finally, we present results from play-testing, identifying a very different set of “learning outcomes” than those typically found in instructional design. While the tension between educational games and curricular content is nothing new, we show how we worked through that tension to reach an audience that might not care about Baroque music but is already motivated by learning from playing digital games.
We describe various game elements—the overall learning environment and the mini-games—and highlight the mismatched expectations between our design team and our client regarding what counts as knowledge in a game designed to cultivate musical appreciation. Similar differences appeared, though to a lesser degree, in play-testing with children aged 12–14. We conclude by detailing the difficulties of reconceptualizing educational content when moving from one medium (audio, in the case of the TafelKIDS CD) to an interactive, multi-modal, graphically rich medium, and we consider this from the standpoint of broader questions about representation and epistemology.
Learning and Play: A Classical Connection
Jean-François Lyotard and Marshall McLuhan, though writing from very different perspectives and on different subjects, both predicted that digital media would bring about new ways of knowing. For McLuhan, it is only after a media shift has fully passed that we can understand the epistemological and ethical changes it caused. In Lyotard’s view, computerization brings a corresponding shift in both the forms and relative value of knowledge, as well as its social and instrumental legitimacy. Following a Marxian distinction between use-value and exchange-value, Lyotard argues that in the “postmodern condition,” what and how we know changes drastically: knowledge worth having for its own sake becomes less valued. Instead, knowledge is produced in order to be sold—it “is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production,” as he puts it, and in both cases the goal is exchange.
It has been argued that formal education, especially through the use of digital technologies in recent decades, has embraced this instrumental conception of learning—one with no intrinsic value but only instrumental utility. Education has become a commodity exchanged for marks, credentials, and opportunities in a globalized “knowledge economy.” In this model, the classical notion of knowledge formation as an inherently beneficial and even pleasurable pursuit has very little space—witness how arts and music education in Canada have become almost obsolete as public education pivots toward standardized testing and a return to “fundamentals.”
Lyotard’s distinction between narrative and scientific knowledge highlights a rift between institutional knowledge structures (like universities and school curricula) and more participatory, community-rooted oral traditions of knowledge creation through multimedia production, online social sharing, and interactive activities such as computer games. By creating a free Flash game delivered online—unauthorized by any formal curriculum, disconnected from official assessment—we tried to subvert the instrumental educational economy Lyotard described. The tool has little to no “exchange value.” At the same time, it leverages playful interaction to support a more open, exploratory notion of knowledge formation, far removed from simple economic utility.
Instead of propositionally-organized information, we privileged embodied interactive play. In doing so, we tried to give players the chance to better understand a genre of music and, we think, to enjoy it more. The conceptual and interactional conventions already present in digital games become scaffolding for a learning experience that feels familiar and fun—a kind of “stealth” engagement with Baroque music and culture. Borrowing heavily from the imitative, enactive learning seen in games like Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, we sought educational value of a different, classical kind: one that revives the very old and very strong link between learning and pleasure, education and play.
We harnessed two forms of knowledge to create this Baroque music game. First was the potential for interactivity—both conceptual and embodied—as players “keep time” with Baroque music. Second was the combination of visual and auditory modes of presentation, offering complementary, not redundant, understanding through participatory play. These two possibilities are not available in pedagogies built from other media, and they come nested in a context—digital games—already popular with the intended youth audience.
The description that follows is a case story of design-based research, building on our previous work designing educational resources. As with our earlier projects, this involves exploring and documenting different ways of enacting play-based learning—or “ludic epistemologies”—and avoiding instrumentalist, content-driven educational forms.
Instrumenting Content
Baroque music is widely enjoyed—just think of how often Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” shows up in elevators and wedding playlists. Yet it’s not a subject area with widespread deep familiarity. Many people know the names Bach, Purcell, Vivaldi, or Handel, but may not know what instruments make up a Baroque orchestra, or what distinguishes a Baroque bassoon from its modern version. When we began the project of creating a digital game about Baroque music, history, characters, and instruments, we realized we first had to become well-versed in this highly specialized discourse, and would then have to find ways to make the subject intelligible to a lay audience, in a manner that exemplifies ludic epistemology.
We faced two primary epistemological problems. The first: how to take the highly specialized knowledge of a professional Baroque musical group (Tafelmusik) and represent it in a game for children. The second: how to convert the organization’s educational objectives into both play-based and knowledge-based digital media. This required not only historical knowledge but also, through interactive activities, the introduction of tempo, arrangement, orchestration, and notation characteristic of Baroque music. Very important for was how to let children playing an online digital game experience the same kind of pleasures that knowledgeable musicians and devotees enjoy when performing or listening to Baroque performances.
Tafelmusik wanted the game to cover three primary knowledge spheres: a historical understanding of Baroque music (notable figures and instruments), a practical understanding encompassing instruments and composition, and an opportunity to gain familiarity and enjoyment with Baroque music. With these goals in mind, we first educated ourselves—about instruments, composers, how, in a Baroque orchestra—etc. The starting point was the existing children’s CD produced by Tafelmusik in 2006, also titled The Quest for Arundo Donax. The CD follows the children of Henry Purcell, charged by Queen Anne during England’s war with France, to travel to the court of King Louis XIV in search of the special cane (Arundo Donax, in Latin) from which high-quality reeds for woodwind instruments (including oboes and bassoons) were made—and are still made today.
The storyline takes the characters through Venice, on a visit to Vivaldi, and then to Versailles, where they gain access to the French king’s court and fulfil their quest for the scarce reed. This narrative presented our first challenge: how to take a very linear story and turn it into a Flash game. The narrative worked well as a non-interactive story, but because it was tied to specific times and places, it left little room for the open-ended, non-linear exploration that games permit. Ultimately, we kept the original narrative as an overarching framework but moved to a less linear structure, granting players a greater degree of choice. This came with trade-offs: strict historical fidelity gave way to agency and play. We settled on a repurposing of the story into a less plot-driven game world. Henry Purcell’s two children became the playable characters, traveling to the originally featured destinations (Venice and Versailles) which became the locations for mini-games. These mini-games would provide the learning Tafelmusik wanted from all three angles: historical facts, instruments and instrumentation, and musical appreciation.
The second major obstacle was the prescribed content itself. Only some of it related directly to the game (and the narrative). How could we incorporate information about select instruments and composers, including obscure details about their contributions—without simply cutting and pasting text from one medium to another? Too often that’s how educational design projects proceed, but our task demanded we carefully redesign propositionally organized content to fit an interactive medium, translating highbrow culture into terms a popular-knowledge, young audience could grasp. For example, the Baroque Learning Centre on Tafelmusik’s website presented instrumental and composer overviews, which we were required to include—perhaps not in the game itself but in an extracurricular format. We decided to keep this information secondary to gameplay, embedded as an interactive feature. However, direct transfer from the Learning Centre site into the game was not possible—the original text wouldn’t “translate” for a game or its intended audience. On Tafelmusik’s website, the bassoon was described this way:
The trumpet in the baroque era remained very basic in design and function. Originally without valves, slides or holes, the baroque or natural trumpet was limited to exact notes within the harmonic series in each key for that year period. The key, and therefore the available notes, are determined by the length of the brass tubing, which could be changed by adding crooks of different sizes.
For the game, we rewrote it with a different emphasis:
The trumpet is a member of the brass family. It has the highest sound in the brass section. The Baroque trumpet could not play all of the notes in the scale; even though it had tubing twice as long as modern trumpets.
The information itself is not drastically different, but the presentation is. The original emphasizes the relationship of trumpet design to sound, whereas we made this more accessible by comparing it with current instruments. Most notably, we separated the text across a series of “bubbles” that players click through, giving a modest interactivity to what would otherwise be still. As a member ourselves of the intended public who could benefit from such insider insight entered availability reasoning more serve building naturally likely the types finding better output also evidneces came out with rebranding their resources intention deliver things enjoyable pursuit worth for modern connections by properly ensuring not less boos– nor distraction too careful devation direct style course possible ways audience just new form point with quest continue matter make barrier a narrow outcome possibly forming state mind but anyway they consistent thinking play very meaning possibly break original far any single design point perspective essentially could it stands.
Cultivating Playful Appreciation
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Pushing Content to the Margins: A Baroque Game Shell
Because we had considerable textual material that needed to appear somewhere on the website—and because we needed, from a narrative standpoint, to convey movement and travel along thematically at which potential outside larger reading acts for narrative bridge appear new engaging display, we created use interactive show travel across middle section form parts creative.
An interactive map pinpoints locations, games, and content (Source: Authors’ screenshot).
Tafelmusik: where renowned Baroque composers lived, what distinguished them, a sample composition, and descriptions with audio clips of Baroque instruments. Players explore musical instruments by clicking an interactive frame near the screen’s base, toggling between instruments and composers (Fig. 37.2). Images of both instruments and composers appear recognizable but blurred until interacted with, at which point they sharpen, signaling what has been heard and what audio remains. Historical figures and composers are investigated by clicking their map location, triggering animated bubbles with brief biographical facts (e.g., Purcell in England, see Fig. 37.3), accompanied by a short musical excerpt by that figure. During the first activation, players cannot close the facts or stop the piece, effectively mandating listening for the track’s duration, whether or not they read the biographical details. This enforced listening aims to introduce players, however briefly, to the broad Baroque repertoire. At this point, educational content is delivered most didactically and heavy-handedly. Because we desired a structured click-listen interaction sequence, the game shell seemed the natural container for the content we intended to embed within the larger website framework. The subsequent three mini-games, however, offer escalating player interaction and challenge, fostering a more endogenous learning style by appropriating popular game genres.
Playing with/in a Baroque Orchestra
This mini-game’s two primary goals are learning about Baroque orchestra instruments and distinguishing them not by facts but by recognizing each instrument’s unique sound, delivered through an interactive nine-piece ensemble. The tutorial begins with players listening—in any order they choose—to each instrument playing its part of a larger orchestral work. After hearing each solo voice, the full orchestra performs the piece, integrating each part; we also introduce musical terms (e.g., the command to play together: “tutti”). In level one, players identify which instrument is playing from a random solo excerpt. Level two introduces multiple voices, asking players to identify, based on distinctive sounds learned earlier, which instruments play together. In the final level, players freely arrange instruments, attempting their own orchestrations with all available parts.
(Source: Authors’ screenshot, showing the game shell with Baroque instruments at the bottom.)
Through this game, we aim to introduce Baroque orchestra instruments, sections, and configurations via ‘stealthy’ ear training through musical experience, not textual explanation. Our goal was helping players unaccustomed to hearing and distinguishing multiple orchestral voices apprehend that complex, beautiful interweaving. This worked well because brief sound snippets remained memorable; after playing, one could easily recall harmonies and countermelodies of other instruments while listening to a single voice, and genuinely hear ALL parts during the “tutti” passage. Learning primarily occurs through trial and error, and replaying misjudged parts. By decomposing, playfully re-composing, and recombining orchestral music, players appreciate and hear the orchestra both as a whole and in parts, affording a much richer Baroque music experience.
Bach to Basics: The Musical Inscription Game
Whereas the orchestra game cultivates attentive listening to subtle instrumental differences via basic point-and-click, the Musical Inscription game’s main objective is introducing players to Baroque musical notation through active engagement with the score, invoking values of production (e.g., players co-produce music through timely mouse clicks). Inspired by popular rhythm-based games—particularly Nodame Cantibile, Osu!Tatakae!Ouendan!, and the more common Guitar Hero and Rock Band—the game features a moving horizontal timeline of an original Baroque score where some notes are active (clickable).
Players must click the correct position of active notes on this scrolling score. After an introductory cutscene featuring an angry Bach (Fig. 37.4), whose scores have partially faded from sun exposure, the game begins with players filling in a continuo (Baroque bass line). Listening helps players read ahead and anticipate actions. Players then progress to more complex arrangements with more notes. In the final level, players face concurrent scores representing two different parts that advance in time with the music (Fig. 37.5).
Fig. 37.4 Bach introduces the Music Inscription game (Source: Authors’ screenshot)
The educational affordances stem from appropriating popular rhythm games, which require listening attention and eye-hand (embodied) coordination. Invoking Truax’s “listening positions”—modes of auditory attention developed alongside technology and media soundscapes—rhythm games shift the player’s listening from background or distracted to “analytical” listening (Truax). According to Truax, analytical listening deconstructs music’s basic building blocks: tempo, timbre, flow, pitch, and envelope. Whereas Truax focuses on noninteractive listening, rhythm games add another dimension by activating melody and harmony through player inputs, affording a unique listening that is not only analytical but participatory.
Fig. 37.5 Music Inscription game, level 2 (Source: Authors’ screenshot)
The Gigue Is Up: Learning Baroque Dancing
After completing the above mini-games, players unlock the final mini-game set in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. The narrative concludes as players must dance into the king’s favor to secure a supply of Arundo Donax for England.
Like the Musical Inscription game, play mechanics are modeled after popular rhythm games—in this case, Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). As with DDR and its spin-offs (e.g., Stepmania, Flash Flash Revolution), players press key combinations in time with icons moving vertically across the screen (see Fig. 37.6).
Fig. 37.6 Dance for the Sun King’s pleasure (Source: Authors’ screenshot)
Whereas DDR avatars’ dance animations have little connection to player inputs, characters here perform actual Baroque dance steps—from basic plié and élevé to more advanced steps like pas assemblé and pas-coupé. Thus, skillful players perform digitally mediated Baroque choreography. Difficulty levels correspond to dance types: from the slower Menuet, to the up-tempo Gigue, and finally the fast Bourrée. Well-timed keystrokes synchronized to downbeats (as in real Baroque dance) produce fluid motions that raise the Sun King’s “Mood Meter.” Wrong keys or mistimed keystrokes cause stumbling and lower the Mood Meter. A high score earns the king’s favor, triggering a concluding cutscene that returns players through each journey stop to growing applause.
As with our other mini-games, this engages players in Baroque cultural expression rather than historical fact exposition. This is accomplished by amplifying player input—which Poole describes as a central digital game pleasure—so minimal but timely inputs cause the character to execute complex, fluid movements imitating the grace and precision valued in formal Baroque dance.
Play-Testing: A Different Set of "Learning Outcomes"
In documenting our design process, we highlighted where divergent views on the educative value of knowledge mobilized through play, versus knowledge expressed as facts, emerged between the development team and clients. Play-testing sessions revealed similar tensions as students engaged with the content-heavy game shell and mini-games. Groups of students aged 12–14 (150 total) played for 60 minutes with little or no instructions on navigation or objectives. Each session was observed by one or more authors, with documentation including video, audio, and extensive field notes. Sessions occurred in an impoverished Canadian city community; none of the 150 students had ever listened to or encountered Baroque music before playing.
Gratifyingly, we observed clear indications of high engagement across sessions: pleasure, excitement, chatter, laughter, and desire to keep playing. Pairs often played together or made decisions based on neighbors. Of the three mini-games, the two rhythm-based ones (Musical Inscription and Baroque Dancing) were most played. In one session, two groups of boys competed for high scores in the inscription game, calling out scores after each level. In another session, a particularly skilled dancer unlocked a hidden element we had purposefully included: a stick figure made of different meats that a programmer had used for testing (Fig. 37.7). The student and everyone present were delighted, giggling and shouting, “I want to do that too,” gathering around to watch him play as the meat dancer. We had, almost inadvertently, created an audience of Baroque listeners from a population who had never before experienced this music.
The orchestra mini-game was played much more during a school-based music class session than others, partly because the class provided context for thinking about and listening to music and instruments. Music class participants were already generally familiar with modern orchestra sections, and their teacher was pleased that Vivaldi’s eyes follow the mouse around the screen. That session showed the same kind of enjoyment we witnessed elsewhere, including willingness and desire to keep playing.
Fig. 37.7 Players “meet” the new dancer (Source: Authors’ screenshot)
Content Versus Play
It was unsurprising that students instantly recognized the interactive map and its content as ‘curricular.’ Nonetheless, they spent considerable time exploring the map, clicking on, listening to, and sometimes reading pop-up bubbles—partly because they ignored instructional text. Notably, students who were lost would call over a researcher for help rather than read initial instructions. Ignoring instructions is arguable normative in gaming culture, as we have observed elsewhere. Skilled players skip instructions and begin playing immediately, believing they have encountered enough game genres to figure things out. Many of these self-described gamers likely expected the game to emulate familiar designs, allowing them to skip instructions and dive in. This strategy worked somewhat for the mini-games (two based on popular rhythm games), but the map could not be navigated this way, likely due to its function as a static content reservoir.
When we provided a worksheet to guide participants through the map, we observed players reading content differently than intended—as justification for the fun of playing games. They were eager to fill in blanks, though with varying completion. Asked what someone their age might learn by playing, participants noted the games communicated history about the Sun King, types of dances (dancing game), how different instruments sound (orchestra game), and how the music looked (inscription game). These remarks are not decisive proof of learning success, but they suggest educational games should focus less on conveying information and more on developing affect—keeping players pleasurably engaged in spaces where educational content permeates all design elements: graphics, narrative, and crucially, sound and music. We read pleasure and enjoyment as educationally significant, indicative not only of players’ (even temporary) appreciation for Baroque music but also of playfully attentive engagement with Baroque cultural forms. We viewed markers of high attention—laughter, uninterrupted screen looking, and voluntary continuation—as evidence that learning was ‘in play.’
Retuning Our Learning Instruments
To emphasize, the idea that learning should be pleasurable and participatory is not new, yet centuries of text-based pedagogy privilege retention, fact regurgitation, and writing as primary vehicles for expressing learned content. In a Web 2.0 world of learning and play, where interactivity and multimodality are more than buzzwords—simply how things work for many students—educational game designers must do more than repackage old content in new forms. They must explore how games cultivate positive dispositions, use digital media not only to educate differently but also to recognize different forms of knowledge and learning pathways: affective relationships to material, imaginative creativity, deep understanding, risk-taking, experimentation, or simply having fun as potentially valid and valuable outcomes.
This case of experiencing Baroque music through a Flash-based game exemplifies a “ludic epistemology” approach—simultaneously old yet renewed. On one hand, it traces our design work merging static and participatory learning and play while leveraging popular gaming conventions and resisting educational media’s typically unsuccessful attempts to masquerade as entertainment. On the other, our play-testing highlights learning indicators not typically attended to in instructional design: pleasurable engagement, communal learning, confronting challenges, competition, negotiating rules, and an embodied opportunity to experience Baroque music. In an era with few, if any, school music programs, such resources can at least provide a preliminary, pleasurable encounter with musical genres for students who might otherwise lack reason or opportunity to listen. As one early user tester put it: “I never heard this kind of music before: that means it’s educational for me, right?” Right indeed—if only more educational experiences were so transparent.