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March 15, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Designing Serious Games on Contemporary Music: A Case Study on Poème Électronique

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VMVittorio MurtasJRJuan-David RodasVLVincenzo Lombardo

Key Points

  • This research aims to explore how serious games can communicate intangible heritage through contemporary music.
  • Developed the mixed-reality game Edgar à GoGo to foster engagement with an electroacoustic piece.
  • Evaluated the game via expert feedback for design improvements.
  • Integrated physical representations to enhance interaction with intangible heritage.
  • The game facilitates post-listening engagement with the sound components of contemporary music.
  • Players can explore sequencing and manipulation of sound objects, enhancing understanding.
  • The experiential, non-linear narrative encourages discovery and recomposition of music.

Abstract

The communication of intangible heritage, especially for the contemporary repertoire, is a hard challenge. Interactive narratives can address this challenge by integrating the stories told by media scholars with physical and virtual engagement devices that display stylistic, cultural, and performative dimensions. In this context, contemporary music is particularly challenging, because of its opening to non-traditional sound timbres, spatial arrangement of the performance, and multimodality of experience. This paper introduces the mixed-reality serious game Edgar à GoGo, designed to foster post-listening engagement and enable players to explore both the sound components and their sequencing within an electroacoustic piece. The piece is a paradigmatic composition of Edgard Varèse, the Poème Électronique (1958), a landmark of electroacoustic music originally conceived for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair. This piece was a component of the multimedia show conceived by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of Iannis Xenakis, to display the potentials of Philips technology at the time. The game has been developed in a virtual prototype and has been evaluated by experts, whose comments have been taken into account for the definitive design, including physical twins that will embody material affordances for anchoring the intangible heritage. The narrative is experiential and non-linear, unfolding through discovery, manipulation, and recomposition of sound objects, echoing the creative principles of musique concrète. This work has been supported by the project PNRR - CHANGES (Cultural Heritage Active Innovation for Next-Gen Sustainable Society), Grant Agreement PE00000020. It is also part of the research within IRACF – INTERNATIONAL ROUTES: ARTS CREATING FUTURE (INTAFAM₀0055).

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Cite This Study

Murtas et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69b6068883145bc643d1c713https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19004405
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