%0 Journal Article %T Chaos in the Cosmos: The Play of Contradictions in the 'Music of Katamari Damacy' %A Steven B. Reale %J Act : Zeitschrift f¨¹r Musik & Performance %D 2011 %I Universit?t Bayreuth %X At first glance, Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004) is a simple and cheery video game. The colors are vibrant, the music is upbeat, the controls are intuitive and easy to learn with very little instruction, and the player¡¯s task, to create stars to populate the night sky by rolling terrestrial objects into a sticky ball (katamari), is childish in its whimsy. Yet the game is full of thematic complexities and complications, which raise a number of ethical and aesthetic problems, including the relationships between childhood and terror, father and son, and digital and analog; furthermore, the complexities governing each of these pairs are cleverly underscored by the game¡¯s music.The article traces a musical theme that serves as the game¡¯s id¨¦e fixe as it appears and is transformed in the music across several of the game¡¯s levels. The theme first undergoes a transformation from acoustic, vocal production to digital post-production, then helps locate the game within a kawaii (cute) aesthetic that hearkens to childhood, and is finally obscured beneath a digital wash of sound in one of the game¡¯s advanced levels, where its appearance contributes to an overall disorienting sense of terror produced by both the song¡¯s unusual sonic effects as well as the level¡¯s difficulty. Because the music has the potential to affect player performance, even non-diegetic, non-dynamic video game music can serve profoundly different functions than non-diegetic film music. %K Katamari Damacy %K video game %U http://opus.ub.uni-bayreuth.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=903&la=de