Modal Kombat: Competition and Choreography in Synesthetic Musical Performance

Public competition has been a part of the human experience for at least all of recorded history. The same is true for music. Modal Kombat is a live guitar competition channeled through the video game Mortal Kombat. The performance work builds on the idea of dueling banjos, one of the few examples of public musical competition. Modal Kombat takes this concept one step further by allowing a virtual mythological warrior to embody musical gestures. The result is a musical competition that utilizes advanced technology and popular media to exemplify the human passion for the spectacle sport. This paper describes the technological and musical challenges that face performers, composers, and programmers when producing performance works that incorporate the control of pre-recorded graphical animations with audio and MIDI. Topics covered will include the musical instrument as an interface, choreography and competition, visual theatrics, performance flow, and compositional structures that allow for asynchronous rhythmic patterns inherent to and resultant from game controller input. In addition to its theoretical inquiry, the paper will discuss the practical artistic and technical needs required to successfully create a public instrument-controlled video game competition/concert, through documentation of Modal Kombat, the first ever instrument controlled video game battle.