133 8 Musical Representation in the Video Games Guitar Hero and Rock Band Nicole Biamonte This chapter explores some pedagogical applications of the videogames Guitar Hero and Rock Band through their representations of music nota- tion and form. 1 Guitar Hero and Rock Band are part of a uniquely perfor- mative genre of games that includes Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, SingStar, DJ Hero, and similar games, which create a new kind of performance space through kinesthetic interaction with musical record- ings. In Guitar Hero and Rock Band, songs are “played” or reproduced through instrument-shaped controllers that mimic guitars, drums, and mi- crophones. Accurate responses to onscreen notated cues trigger playback of a prerecorded song. The games have been described as sonic realizations of air guitar (or air drums), and their success is undoubtedly due in no small part to their performativity. There is as yet no keyboard instrument control- ler for the games, which is not only because of the difficulty of designing a simplified version but also because playing keyboards requires relatively minimal movement and is, thus, inherently less performative than guitar, vocals, or drums. Guitarists and vocalists can move around in ways limited only by their ability to simultaneously continue producing sound; the drummer is stationary but often very kinetic, with large, rapid, potentially showy gestures. 2 In addition to their performative aspects, other reasons for the games’ popularity are the social space created by the gameplay format, with multi- player options and complex background scenes that are clearly designed for viewers rather than players, and, most germane to this study, the unprece- dented level of musical interaction with the songs in the games. The success of these performance-based games has impacted not only the video-game industry but also the music industry, fostering new interest not only in the from Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom, ed. Biamonte, 133-147 (Scarecrow Press, 2010)