An audio research on the gameplay sounds of Atari’s “Pong” and the silence of Magnavox Odyssey’s “Tennis”
The first video game with a small fragment of sound effects is Pong (Atari-1972). Pong is a simple simulation of the sport tennis. When the digital racket hits the ball you can hear a short ‘beep’. The Pong’s creator and founder of the Atari’s brand, Nolan Bushnell wanted to achieve a cheering crowd for this collision, but it wasn’t possible to create those cheers out of the insufficient hardware. Game audio researcher Karen Collins comments on this: “It is interesting to note then, than the sounds were not an aesthetic decision, but were a direct result of the limited capabilities of the technology of the time” (Collins 2008: 9). Despite the fact that Pong had simplest aural notifications, it helped people to understand the game and give a gameplay depth while the other primitive digital elements couldn’t express properly. Although it was not the first computer tennis for mass audience.
The same year that Pong hit the arcades, the first home television console Magnavox Odyssey had along a tennis game variation, but it was completely silent and the fun remained only on the visuals. The visionary of the Magnavox Odyssey, Ralph Baer comments in his book Videogames — In the Beginning the differences between the similar games: “Alcorn [the engineer behind Atari’s success] did a great job and improved on the basic Ping-Pong features of the Odyssey by providing a segmented paddle for vertical ball control in place of Odyssey’s “English” control. He also added a wall bounce and scoring, and most effectively, he came up with that Pong sound which gave the game an unmistakable character.” (Baer 2005: 82). But what Baer meant with the phrase “unmistakable character”?
Today the audience can hear a rendition of the Pong’s sounds as an introduction of the Video Game Live symphonic concerts projecting the game’s audio as the beginning of something new or just as a simple reference to the past. The Pong’s sounds were indeed chosen by instinct, but they were added deliberately and their importance on the audio for video games is widely acknowledged. Professor of Computer Science, Ole Caprani makes an interesting observation for the harmonic interval between the sounds:
The duration and frequency of the three sounds are as follows:
•Wall sound: duration 16 ms, frequency 226 Hz.
•Paddle sound: duration 96 ms, frequency 459 Hz.
•Point sound: duration 257 msec, frequency 490 Hz.
The musical interval between the wall and the paddle sounds is 459 Hz/226 Hz = 2, i.e. an octave. Since this is the most harmonic musical interval, this choice results in a pleasant sequence of tones when the ball bounces of the walls and paddles for a while. The interval between the point sound and the paddle sound is a little more than a semitone, 490 Hz/459 Hz = 1.067. This means that the point sound is highly disharmonic with respect to the other two sounds and this together with the longer duration makes the point sound stands out.
Maybe Allan Alcorn […] had a pretty good intuition for sounds. (Caprani 2014)
A study about the psychological effects in the music intervals have shown that a 2nd minor and a 9th minor interval can create a spiritless anguish feeling. It has also discriminated the 2nds and the minor 9th from other intervals such as the 3rds, the 4th, the 5th and the 6th as the dissonances versus the consonances (Maher 1980: 321). Lecturer of games’ audio, Tom Langhorst instead has make a research based on the Pong’s sounds according to the new linguistic science field:
The Pong sounds may have been created more or less by accident, but nevertheless, as Al Alcorn said, “they sounded right.” If so, this implies that the sounds do indeed communicate meaning. The question is why and how? […] In addition to the auditory and visual domain, the meaningful perception of the Pong sounds can also be supported from the language (phonological) domain. Analyzing the originally intended sounds of the cheering and booing crowd, a prosodic affect providing the sound’s meaning, we can see that the most important differences between the two appear in the phonological aspects: (1) vowel timbre and (2) pitch. […] it can be concluded that the difference between the two vowels [the cheering e (ε) and the booing oo (ου)] is similar to the difference in the two Pong sounds. Since timbre can be used as universal prosodic code element to express and communicate musical emotion during music performance, one can conclude that the Pong sounds express and communicate musical emotion and thus meaning. (Langhorst 2014: 99 & 102)
Game scholar Axel Stockburger put the subject in more simple but clearer words. Thus:
The sounds of first-generation video games like Pong were still generated on the basis of specific electronic circuitry due to limited storage capacities. This meant that the options for integrating musical forms were severely limited. But still, even the characteristic noises of this early phase fulfilled the important function of generating auditive feedback coupled with the visual events on the screen. (Stockburger 2015: 129).
In 2003 Ralph Baer recreated a Tennis game in an active cartridge for the old console Magnavox Odyssey, but this time with the iconic ‘ping’ sounds and he ambiguously referred for its new audio: “It was really neat to be able to play Ping-Pong with that “missing” sound in action.” (Baer 2005: 88).
Bibliography
Baer, Ralph H. (2005). Videogames: In the Beginning. Springfield: Rolenta Press.
Caprani, Ole (2014). “The PONG Game.” Aarhus University — Department of Computer Science, Sound as Media, between Signal and Music — Introduction to Digital Audio: http://web.archive.org/web/20180309023632/http://cs.au.dk/~dsound/DigitalAudio.dir/Greenfoot/Pong.dir/Pong.html
Collins, Karen (2008). Game sound: an introduction to the history, theory and practise of video game music and sound design. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Langhorst, Tom (2014). “The Unanswered Question of Musical Meaning: A Cross-domain Approach.” in The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio, edited by Karen Collins, Bill Kapralos and Holly Tessler. New York: Oxford University Press.
Maher, Timothy F. (1980). “A Rigorous Test of the Proposition That Musical Intervals Have Different Psychological Effects.” in The American Journal of Psychology Volume 93, Number 2. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Stockburger, Axel (2015). “Games” in See this Sound: Audiovisuology, A Reader, edited by Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann and Jan Thoben. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandung Walther König.