"To Smother Your Furies and Banish Your Fears...": Trauma, Psychosis, and Empathetic Engagement in the Music of the Hellblade Games

With speaker Dana Plank, PhD

Friday, September 12 at 5:00PM
Ithaca College Center for Music
Nabenhauer (JJWCM 4308)

This event is free and open to the public, with a reception.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017) follows a Pict warrior on her quest to recover the soul of her dead lover. Senua is joined by voices she calls the Furies that whisper constantly around her, urging her to turn back, encouraging her forward. Audio team David García and Andy LaPlegua utilized binaural audio techniques to simulate a three-dimensional space, rendering the experience more immediate and visceral. The rich timbral textures of the musical score place particular emphasis on the blurring of the line between sound design and musical composition through vocal writing, synthetic noise, echo, and distortion. The resultant soundscape envelops the player in Senua’s recurring traumatic flashbacks and/or schizoaffective disorder symptoms and makes the player question their ability to distinguish underscore from diegesis, atmosphere from information. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (2024), with music by García and Scandinavian experimental folk trio Heilung, focused on Senua’s path to healing from complex trauma.

In this talk, I explore these games’ evocative soundscapes through the lens of music and disability studies, trauma studies, and studies of empathy and subjectivity, demonstrating how the scores' emphases on stasis, fragmentation, and reverberation serve to characterize Senua’s traumatic experiences as a disruption of normative time; situate the games' hallucinatory interjections into the soundscape through the voices of the Furies; and to reflect on the games' ultimate potential as persuasive media and a site of potential empathetic engagement. Even if the developers manage to capture the look and sound of Senua’s psychotic symptoms, to what extent will that feeling translate across an affective, experiential gap to the player? To what extent is this merely a sympathetic experience versus true empathy? We cannot ever fully cross into another’s embodied experience (Ayers, 2021), but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach out a hand across the divide and be changed by the encounter itself.

Speaker Bio: Dana Plank is an independent scholar whose work focuses on intersections of music and representations of identity, particularly video game sound and gender, sexuality, and disability. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. She served as co-editor of The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing with Lisa Scoggin (2023, Routledge), and has a second project under contract with Routledge entitled Gender and Sexuality in Video Game Sound co-edited with Karen M. Cook and Michael Austin. She serves on the boards for Game Sound Con and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. In addition to her scholarship, she is active as a freelance violinist and violist, chamber musician, transcriptionist, arranger, and Twitch streamer, co-hosting a weekly stream on video-game music with Ryan Thompson, Julianne Grasso, and Karen Cook on Thursdays at 9 p.m. Eastern at twitch.tv/bardicknowledge.