Creating Immersion: A Semiotic and Compositional Insight into the Promotion of Immersion through Video-Game Soundtracks

This thesis identifies key criteria of how immersion can be promoted and induced through musical functions within soundtracks of video-games. The thesis is the primary component of the research offering a usable framework tool for composers and researchers when composing, or analysing, a video-game soundtrack.

Popular and well supported immersion theories are presented to identify similarities and differences between approaches to immersion. Links between the most suitable theories are outlined whilst forming an immersion framework, used for the analysis of the case study: Journey (2012). Two scenes from Journey are examined in detail and analysed through the created framework, identifying the successful compositional techniques that aid the induction and promotion of immersion, through the soundtracks support of the narrative, controls and game design. This designed framework helps structure the analysis, as well as provide a more insightful method of dissecting the phenomenology of the player’s response.

The thesis is accompanied with an original composition, scored for Limbo (2010), and was created with the framework to act as proof of concept. The score is self-analysed, identifying its effectiveness whilst expanding on compositional and technical strategies employed.