On form - Games for Music

On form

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A form of a piece is its overall structure in time. Many musical traditions stick to a fixed set of available forms of clearly distinguished parts, and this approach is still somewhat important, even for us.

When thinking or writing about form, we can ask a few helpful questions:

Can we distinguish parts in the piece? (We will mark parts with capital letters from the beginning of the alphabet).
Are there some repeating parts? (The letters may appear many times to mark repetition).
Are there parts in clear familiar relation to each other? (Variants of parts may be marked with apostrophes by the same letter).

This way, forms are noted down as sequences of letters, ABC, ABA'CAB'CAD, or ABBA.

Talking about musical form may not always be hard science (at least for our purposes here, some hardcore musicologists could argue). Repetitive fragments may be split in parts of different sizes (AA? AAAA?). Or, if we imagine a seamless non-repetitive evolution of sound, it usually won't be treated as "formless", but different people may arrive at subjective divisions with smooth transitions between the parts (be it AB, ABC, or ABCD). Individual sensitivities and conventions within a given genre matter a lot.

Form in music

At the start we avoided the term "genre" to mention "musical traditions", because the form may be a distinguishing factor of "genre" when it's used within a specific tradition. But the form is rarely the only such factor, and exactly how the parts relate to one other will be equally important.

In the Western classical music, relation between the parts was most often achieved by shaping melodies and the harmony. Famous "sonata form" (exposition — development — recapitulation), signals a very specific relation of parts' material, not only "three parts". In contemporary composition, timbres and textures are at least equally appreciated as form-building parameters.

In contemporary music, composers may also define "modular forms" when parts are not in a set order but there is some freedom for performer (to different extents, maybe e.g. like a difference between ABCDE and "ABDCE"). Another frequent composition technique may be ad libitum repetition, resulting in ranges e.g. from AABBCC through AAAABBCCC etc. Such options were naturally occurring in many traditional genres for ages, but for the Western classical music, they were considered 20th century "innovations".

An especially fleeting theoretical approach to form was presented by Edgard Varèse, when doing an inspirational comparison to crystals (Varèse and Weng-chung 1966, 16):

There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is the consequence of this interaction.

Varèse worked with fixed music, but such an emergence-based approach is also fitting to indeterminate compositions, moreover, one could argue that this is a natural state for the form of games.

Form of games

In many classic board games there are no parts set by the rules. Still, in many such cases players distinguish three stages of their games: opening, middle game, and end game. This "ternary" division is, interestingly, tied to the replayability of games. After repeated playing, practitioners of many games may notice that at the start there is a clear closed set of useful moves and responses to those moves, then the game becomes too complex to be that predictable, until finally some recognizable patterns show up again before the very end.

Different games follow that to a different extent. There is a huge theory of Chess openings, but the game only sometimes reaches an "end game". In Chess there is also a fitting dynamics of "possible moves" (those allowed by the rules); the first move may be done in exactly 20 ways, then the number (generally) grows with consecutive moves in the middle game, and is again quite limited closer to the end. But the availability of options is not a good overall metric for game forms, because in Go, which also shows its three emergent stages clearly, the amount of possible moves (generally) falls down with each turn as the 361 available spots on the board fill up.

Still there are classic games with a more marked form, like, if we use apostrophes to mark "same but different stage" we could have Backgammon as AA'A"… if we choose to mark parts together with consecutive "doubling" of the points¹. With that we have clear stages (following a possible escalation of stakes) with the game nevertheless being played very similarly at each stage.

For comparison, Bridge (four players in pairs, with traditional playing cards) may have many forms with a clear "refrain", possibly like: ABABACABAC etc. We may need to mark A for bidding, B — for dummy play, and C — for no-trumps. Again, not a hard science — if you care a lot about shuffling and dealing, you would also set them as separate phases, etc., with none of them appearing at the end of the form, resulting in something like ABCDABCE etc.

Modern board games may be very explicit about setting clear repeating phases or provide some unpredictability about when the change will happen. In contrast to classic games, there's a general trend of controlling the overall length of the game.

Notation summary and extension

So far we introduced just letters and apostrophes to mark the form, but there are more possibilities. Firstly, you don't have to constrain yourself to a single form (resulting from a single playthrough). For open forms, we can add options of notation to mark a few possibilities at once.

This is not a common convention, but here at the wiki, if there's possible repetition of unspecified amount, we'll mark it by parentheses, like (A)(B)(C), for the minimalist-style AAABCCCCC or AAAAABC etc., like in one of the examples above. Such notation doesn't require repetition, so if that's needed, you will have to add letters and mark your form as e.g. A(A)BB(B)CCC(C) — depending on necessary minimal amount.

Another piece of additional notation will be a choice between a few options: [X/Y/Z]. With this, a general form of Bridge game could be written as AB(A[B/C]. If we needed to be very exact, we would need to calculate the minimum amount of repetitions in Bridge (left for the reader…)

In general, for working in specific genre context, you may use specific letters to mark parts with specific functions (like a "P" for "prechorus" or "O" for "outro"). With vocal music, you may have a need for upper and lower case to mark if the words are repeating or if the new words are added to repeated music at its each occurrence (e.g. "aBaBa"). On the whole wiki these options won't be binding.

Using form in music game design

As designers/composers we should be very careful with form of our games, but we can also use musical forms in different ways.

First and foremost musical games may be used as tasks for players. They are to fill a given form with their improvisation. This is a frequent proposal in Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians or on the cards of Tonic.

Here at the wiki, we have reusable Form cards at your disposal, with a few random examples below: