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Waypoint

The Horrifying Sound of Death in Games

The 'Call of Duty: WWII' trailer uses gut-wrenching audio to sell its pathos. It's not the only one.

I'm a fan of the Call of Duty franchise. From that first battle across the fronts of World War 2 to the most recent gung-ho shoot em up across the solar system, I have been checked in and ready to go. When the trailer for the newest game, the simply-named Call of Duty: WWII, dropped, I was ready to watch it immediately. I followed this rag-tag group of soldiers from one explosion to the next. I saw tempers rise. The camera cut quickly around someone's head being smashed in. And it was all soundtracked to swelling classical music from Henryk Górecki and the sounds of people dying.

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There's are two points of strangeness here. The first is that the song used in the trailer is the second movement of Górecki's Third Symphony, or the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (thanks to Dan Golding for pointing this out). Written after Górecki was ultimately unable to produce music in response to the Holocaust and the horror of Auschwitz in particular, the Third Symphony revolves around a relationship between mother and child, between a figure who remains and a figure who has been lost.

And while the composer distanced himself from readings of the symphony that would reduce it to the horrors of the second World War, it's hard to swallow the dissonance between a video game about American soldiers tearing it up across the European theater and a symphony of such profound sorrow and loss that was written after someone was unable to musically come to grips with one of the most profound tragedies of human history.

The second strangeness is the second layer of sound: the cries of the dying. Watch the trailer again. Turn your sound up. Pay attention to :53, 1:09, and that brutal murder at 1:25. There's a layer of beautiful vocals and swelling sound, and above that, a thin dull roar of the dying. At some points in the trailer it blends into yawning roar of machines. Sometimes it seamlessly transitions into the sounds of buildings crumbling in response to plot points.

What strikes me about this use of music and the use of the sounds of the dying is that it means that this trailer and this World War II action game are both built on the sonic interpretation of human tragedy. The people who made the creative decisions for a trailer that is meant to sell millions of copies of this game to millions of excited players thought that the best way to do so was to lure you and me with the sounds of suffering and death as much as the visuals around them. It's brutal to watch a man get his head beaten in. Listening to him scream is a certain kind of aesthetic multiplier. It's a matter of intensity.

This isn't unique within the war genre. Medal of Honor: Frontline, a personal favorite in the WW2 shooter genre, fills its opening scene of storming the beach at Normandy with the screams of the dead and the dying built on the back of the familiar scenes in Saving Private Ryan, a film which contains one of the most horrifying scenes of the sound of a man dying in cinema.

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