Theme and Variations: A Study of Linear Twelve Tone Composition

This two-video series explores how the scoring to the video game Portal 2, published by Valve Corporation, not only helps tell the game’s story, but also comments on the game developers’ philosophy of puzzle design. The first video explores how the game’s title theme 9999999, including its texture, voice leadings, and chord qualities, musically enacts dual aspects of the character of the game’s central antagonist GlaDOS: once human, her personality was uploaded into a computer mainframe where she has become a sociopathic, homicidal artificial intelligence who takes delight in subjecting humans to hazardous scientific experimentation. The second video demonstrates that 9999999 serves as the theme for a set of double variations in the game’s middle act. Since Valve’s philosophy of player training centers on iterative puzzle-design that systematically increase in complexity, and the musical accompaniments for these puzzles feature coordinated developments in musical complexity, the scoring here lets us parse the puzzle design into a kind of set of gameplay theme-and-variations.

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Western Thoughts on Pitch Structure Shown in Isang Yun’s Early Twelve-Tone Music - Structural Contexts of Pitches in His Music of 1958-1959 -

Journal of the Science and Practice of Music ◽

10.36944/jspm.2019.04.41.67 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

pp. 67-104

Author(s):

So-Yung Ahn

Keyword(s):

Twelve Tone ◽

Pitch Structure

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Autism

10.1093/oso/9780190871208.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Joseph N. Straus

Keyword(s):

Twelve Tone ◽

Serial Music ◽

Cognitive Deficiency

Autism and twelve-tone serial music are related, mutually reinforcing forms of cultural modernism. Both have been understood as excessively isolated or alone, with each entity self-contained and self-enclosed; as uncommunicative, or communicating in atypical ways, with an excess of private meanings and self-references; as demonstrating an unproductive preference for routines and rituals; as incongruously hypertrophied in certain respects (often hyperrational) and atrophied in others (often emotionally or expressively defective). They have also been understood as inaccessible fortresses; as incomprehensible aliens; as cold, unfeeling machines (especially computational machines); and as idiot savants (with isolated islands of excellence in a sea of cognitive deficiency).

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