Murder Ballad: The Game is an interactive generative songwriting experience in augmented reality that explores and re-evaluates a storytelling tradition within songs that recount tragic tales known lovingly as “murder ballads.” Typically, these songs feature female victims who reject the advances of a man to their own peril. Ranging from hundreds of years old and passed down within cultures all around the world, what is it about this narrative song style and content that persists? As purveyors of tradition, there is a prerogative to keep an age-old practice alive. However, as we consider how to preserve and pass on this cultural inheritance, it is time we take a closer look at what exactly we are trying to preserve and the possible dangers therein. There is violence in this music, and it’s time we start singing another side of these stories. In recent years, folk music and folksong have seen an enormous revival, and there have been a few artists to challenge this narrative paradigm by writing new songs where victims defend themselves and manage to escape an otherwise expected fatal outcome. This project aims to do just that, rewrite the narrative in which victim can become hero, justice can be restored, and villains can reap what they sow. 

As a teacher, I like to encourage songwriters at all levels to explore folksong as a safe space to experiment finding expression. Songcraft within traditional idioms has a fairly modular phraseology, and it is very common that many of these songs share some of the same lyrics, sometimes in light variation or slightly different syntax if not verbatim, but all borrowing from the same lexical framework and poetic grammar. It is this quality that puts the “folk” in folk music, that total strangers from vastly different parts of the continent or globe can exchange and interchange the poetics of traditional vernacular lyrics and play together with no rehearsal. If you forget a line, you can borrow one from another song, and that is part of what makes this style of songwriting infinitely renewable and recombinant. As my songwriting practice began to adopt design-thinking and computational techniques, I developed decks of cards of stock lyrics and turns of phrase, and using principles of tarot card spreads, narrative songs began to write themselves very quickly. This caught on with my students as a playful creative iteration exercise, but the narrative affordances of the form and its content leaped from the cards as if they were trying to tell me something. And so, I listened— and the vision of this songwriting tool with the sorcery of technological application emerged from my desire to animate the inanimate and give voice to the voiceless. As this concept is partly drawn from tarot, I also wanted to build a ritual dimension to songwriting, as if the spirits of these songs’ victims beseech the player and enlist their help so they can find eternal peace at last. 

The original mechanic of Murder Ballad was inspired by an award-winning game called Gloom by Keith Baker, a macabre collaborative storytelling card game where the objective is to put your poor unfortunate characters out of their misery through ridiculous and tragic twists of fate while your opponents attempt to thwart you by bringing them good fortune. Months after I developed my first prototype of Murder Ballad, I discovered that the Decemberists had enlisted the services of Keith Baker to collaborate on a game together called Illimat, as an asset toward their next LP release. The first time I played Illimat, my friend and I put on the new Decemberists’ album, setting the environmental tone and sonic backdrop to the world-building that Illimat effectively carried out, a highly aesthetic and tangible ritual experience that enhanced our listening of the music beyond our expectation. Just as no two play-throughs of a game will ever be identical, this dimension is similarly built into the listening experience in a fashion that rewards the players with each new listen.

Click here for more on Keith Baker’s Gloom from Atlas Games

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