Last summer Xavier Aldekoa went to a concert of a new kind of classical music at the Musйe des Sciences de Valence . "A character of the video game Zelda appears on a giant screen. The show seems about to begin.
Suddenly the lights go on and the music rings out. The orchestra does not however play Vivaldi's Four Seasons, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. These are the sound tracks of video games like Zelda, Halo, Final Fantasy and Super Mario Bros that are being played.
The frontier between classical music and digital music has vanished in the video game field. Symphonic orchestras are giving live interpretations of the evermore elaborate music of the most popular video game. No longer contented with simply accompanying games with a series of beeps and hoots, the industry now invests as much in sound tracks as in the graphics or the practical manageability of games.
