Computer games to visualize music: a 270 year-old tradition for digital imaginaries

Within the field of game studies, narratological or ludological discourses provide different lights to understand computer games. Yet the digital design space is still young and one might wonder if there are other ways of approaching the design of games? With the purpose of opening a new line of thought, this paper turns to the historic past and examines a 270 year-old tradition called "color-music." Beginning first in 1735 in France, this paper traces color-music through various turns in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and into the 21st century as designers and artists attempted to build machines capable of allowing a user to manipulation visual elements, often in some relationship with music. This paper then uses this tradition to propose a direction for the design of games in which players are given radical control over the graphics engine as they listen to MP3s.