Browsing by Author "Stevens, Joshua"

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    Stations of awakening: musical subject-strategies in the unconscious levels of the video games Kingdom hearts: birth by Sleep (2011) & Persona 5 (2017)
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Stevens, Joshua; Venter, Carina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dept. of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study focuses on the non-diegetic soundtracks of what I dub Unconscious levels: video game representations of the human Unconscious. My aim in this study is to illuminate the inner workings of Unconscious levels as complex interactive representations of character subjectivity, where music plays a meaningful role in the constitution of those representations. The Unconscious levels of the video games Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (2011) and Persona 5 (2017) are chosen as demonstrative examples and interpreted from the perspective of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory. These interpretations aim at detailing the assertions each level makes about the psychology of particular characters and their inner life. The soundtracks of these levels are subsequently analyzed under the rubric of musical subject-strategies, a concept coined by Susanna Välimäki (2005), which refers to instances within a musical text where music represents aspects of (psychoanalytic) human subjectivity through the use of gesture, topic, melody or other musico-semiotic units. In discussing Unconscious levels and their soundtracks as complex interactive representations of character subjectivity, I hope to shed light on a common but relatively undertheorized component of a large number of postmillennial video games and demonstrate how contemporary media representations of subjectivity simultaneously influence and are influenced by popular sociocultural understandings of the experience of human subjectivity as a whole.