Impressions of Musical Pieces in the Pokémon Series

Abstract

In recent years, Japanese anime and video games have been highly regarded as a part of Cool Japan content. Among them, a video game series Pokémon is standing out as globally famous content. The Pokémon series is a role-playing game developed by Game Freak Inc. and sold by The Pokémon Company. It has been popular since the release of Pokémon Red/Green in 1997, with many titles being released up to the latest. Throughout its long history, one of the important factors that has kept Pokémon popular is music.In a previous study, the character design of monsters was investigated, but there was no investigation on the music used in the Pokémon series. Pokémon includes various situations and scenes, such as battles with trainers and monsters, transfer on bicycles, walking around the towns, and visiting the hideouts of evil organizations, and so on. In the Pokémon series, corresponding musical piece is prepared for each situation and scene. The pieces are composed based on the theory and experience of musicians and it is not clarified whether they are matched to the situations or scenes. In the present study, a perceptual experiment was conducted to research the impressions of musical pieces in the Pokémon series using semantic differential method, and investigated whether the musical pieces are matched to the situations and scenes. For the experiment, 151 musical pieces used in the Pokémon series were prepared as sound stimuli. The stimuli were presented through headphones STAX SR-407 at the level of LAeq=55.9-70.4. Eighteen students of Kanazawa Institute of Technology participated as listeners. The participants listened to a stimulus and were requested to rate their impressions for the piece using 25 bipolar seven-step scales. The rated scores were averaged for each scale and used for factor analysis. The results of the factor analysis showed that the three-factor solution accounted for 86.9% of the data variance. These factors were labeled pleasantness, powerfulness and speed, respectively. The tonality of the musical piece determined the pleasantness, i.e. a piece with a major key was perceived as pleasant and a minor key was felt as unpleasant. A piece with a wide range of loudness change sounded powerful and a piece with a narrow range of loudness change sounded powerless. Contemporary game music is produced with various real sound sources and this allows realizing a wide range of loudness change. The rhythm and tempo of the musical piece determined speed. A piece with a fast rhythm and tempo sounded rapid and vice versa. Moreover, the results showed that the musical pieces were suitably composed and matched to the situations and scenes, in the Pokémon series. For example, the pieces used in the battle situations sounded powerful and rapid, the pieces used in the scene of towns sounded powerless, pleasant and slow, and so on. The results of the present study suggest how to compose for a situation or scene suitably, controlling the tonality, dynamic range of the loudness, rhythm and tempo.

Keywords: Game music, Pokémon, Semantic differential method

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004995