How do we not only watch but listen to video games, and how does this compare to the way we listen to music? In research in his native France and now at Université de Montréal, Hugo Angel explores this question.
Angel is a classically trained musician with a master’s degree in music and musicology from Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès. He taught piano, flute, solfège and music appreciation in France for five years.
Long a video-gamer, he pursued professional training in sound and sound design in order to work in the video game industry. But after a six-month internship, he realized the business wasn’t for him and so returned to his alma mater, in an administrative job.
“That gave me time to refocus and the opportunity to get to know professors and researchers,” Angel recalled.
“At the time, my best friend was starting a PhD with Serge Cardinal," a professor in UdeM’s Department of Art History, Cinema and Audiovisual Media who studies the synchronicity between music and cinema.
"Later, when Cardinal visited France, she introduced me to him, and he agreed to take me on as a student too.”
With a three-year, $25,000 'Bourse de la montagne' scholarship awarded last year, in his PhD Angel is focusing on the act of listening to classical music and video games. “I want to see how these two forms of listening can challenge and enrich each other,” he said.
Multiple entry points
Key to his exploration is the concept of “rhizomatic listening” which he developed in 2021 while working on his master’s degree, building on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the rhizome.
Rhizomatic listening is an open-ended, non-hierarchical approach to engaging with sound. Instead of seeking a central point or fixed structure, it follows multiple entry points and allows elements to freely influence one another—like a rhizome spreading along the ground, rather than a tree with roots and branches.
Can listening to classical music be like playing a video game? Angel wondered. And can people play a video game the way they listen to classical music?
“I’m also interested in whether listening can be a vector of engagement with a work of art in the experiential and philosophical sense,” he said. To explore this, he drew on the concept of the “listener-as-artist” formulated by the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould.
“Gould believed that, in engaging with a piece of music, the listener recomposes, transforms and reappropriates it,” Angel explained. “This puts the listener almost on the same level as the musician on stage. There's an exchange: they create music together.
"It goes beyond the traditional definition of a concert. Does this listener-as-artist exist in video games? And can video games help us understand the listener-as-artist in classical music?”
Grounded in the real world
While his research at Création Sonore, UdeM’s centre for sound studies in cinema and media arts, draws heavily on philosophy, Angel wants to stay grounded in the real world. The Bourse de la Montagne will help him do just that.
“This type of PhD requires a lot of reading and reflection, and I also want to talk directly to gamers,” he said. “The Bourse will let me do all that, plus give me time to rest my brain and stay mentally healthy.”
Angel also knows that achieving his goals will require strong organizational skills and a willingness to continually re-evaluate his thinking.
“An idea can seem amazing one day but foolish the next, so you have to always question yourself and push your thinking further,” he said. “To do that, I need to develop good communication and networking skills and be willing to learn from professors and more experienced doctoral students.”
A career in teaching and research isn’t necessarily the only path open to Angel. He's also thinking of returning to work in the video-game industry after his studies.
“Thanks to my doctoral research, I will certainly be able to explore new areas, particularly in sound design,” he said.
