Exploring Sonic Space in Games and Game-Based Music

Abstract This article examines how spatialized sound operates as a structural element, an active agent, and a creative medium in immersive digital games and game-based music environments. Drawing on the practices of contemporary composers and media artists such as Alexander Schubert, Marko Ciciliani, Ricardo Climent, and Jennifer Walshe, it examines how spatial sound shapes perception, behavior, and participation in interactive frameworks (Carrasco and Minard 2019; Kamp 2024; Ciciliani, Lüneburg, and Pirchner 2021; Climent, 2024a, 2024b). Focusing on spatiotemporal sonic structures, the study analyzes how sound objects are strategically positioned within virtual space to enhance perceptibility and construct nonlinear, exploratory forms of sonic dramaturgy. Through the interaction of primary and secondary sonic spaces, transitional textures emerge that reconfigure spatial perception according to movement and perspective. Compositional strategies—linking amplitude to distance, localization to viewpoint, or pitch to virtual motion—along with transformations such as filtering and further synthesis modulation techniques and effects, shape the perceptual spatial spectromorphology of the sonic environment (Smalley 1997, 2007; Tanaka 2019; Ciciliani, Lüneburg, and Pirchner 2021). The article further explores participatory models in which sound is intertwined with gesture, embodiment, and decision-making, addressing concepts such as open form, feedback systems, and game-based structures. Considering the performer— avatar relationship and the game world as a dynamic score, it ultimately proposes a model of sound space as a multidimensional behavioral system in which music, movement, navigation, and interactivity converge within an immersive performative ecology. The article focuses on technical questions concerning sound synthesis and generation, as well as the algorithmic and procedural composition of sound spaces in game-based environments (Plut and Pasquier 2019, 2020). Ultimately, this article proposes a model for composing and performing within sound spaces conceived as multidimensional behavioral systems, in which music, movement, spatial navigation, ethics, and interactivity coalesce into a responsive and immersive performative ecology.