The students gazed at their foreign professor in rapt attention. He'd been filling their heads with American culture for months now and they had a question. "Scott, what do you think of music in China?"

There was a slight pause as he measured out his words.

"I hate to tell you this, but, well ... China's where music comes to die."

The second time I went to India I brought a minidisc recorder to grab sounds, especially the music that I was certain would be surrounding me. I envisioned finding that everyone performed ghazalas and ragas all the time and that the music would utterly enchant me.

That didn't last too long.

I've written in earlier columns about some of those things that give travellers comfort, and music is definitely one. Even open-minded culturally sensitive people are eventually going to get frustrated with all that kooky foreign music because it just isn't familiar. Eventually it gets to the familiar stage and of course some people do get into the local musical tastes quicker than others.

But let's picture your standard D&D party. Probably not solely artists and aesthetes. And cities are noisy, filled with these cacophonies. When they're far from home play that up a bit. Instead of describing intricate lute playing, focus on the unintelligible noise of it all. It's probably best to prepare some metaphors that don't involve cats being slaughtered/tortured just to keep up the variety.

One time in India I stayed in the crappiest/cheapest room in this hotel. The room was just off the restaurant (like we had to walk through the restaurant and fumble with the key in front of all the dining people) which was filled with people carousing and a live band each night. Looking back on it now, it was much more similar to the fantasy tavern/inn deal than anything else I've stayed in. At the time I was just ticked off I couldn't get a nice early evening nap in.

This is all not to say that music is going to be all bad in your adventures. In a fantasy game you've got a cacophony of street performers, but since there aren't that many studios for the good ones to be hidden away in, you might actually get some quality.

And when we're talking about street performers, let's talk turf. I've never noticed it as much back home but here in China, it can get pretty obvious. My favourite was in the walkway under the road separating Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City. There was a young guy playing flute and it echoed spiffily. But there was a guy just down the way playing a drum badly in a quasi-accompaniment. Between the achingly serene folk songs, the flautist just verbally ripped into the drummer. So if you've got bard characters be aware that itinerant minstrels aren't going to be getting the choicest spots.

The connection to something that you know and can appreciate is intense for a traveller. After a certain amount of time even songs you hate will become a bastion you can retreat to, because they're sort of from home. Today it is increasingly easy to retreat with iPods and creating your own deafness to the rest of the world.

But the familiarity also gets old fast. When people tell you they know an English song and proceed to sing My Heart Will Go On, well, the first time you might grit your teeth and smile politely. After a year and a half, mass murder can seem like an acceptable response. The problem is that people think they're giving you a taste of home and don't realize that the taste is horrible. The music is foreign. You as a foreigner are foreign. Thus, you love it.

Now the internet and other accoutrements of scifi gaming might ameliorate this a bit. If your game is more cyberpunk/transhuman maybe more of this familiarity and identity wrapped into music won't work as well. But your nationalistic/tribal kinds of universes will. And with alien music going on too, the cacophony effect would be even more severe.

When we get into the Monoculture kind of deal that has every place being the same, the idea of foreign music probably won't mean quite as much. One of the things that'll happen as a culture (especially if it's some sort of Western-centric analogue) spreads across the globe/universe is that it'll absorb everything. When we start meeting up with alien cultures it will not be long before it's getting incorporated into our music into the way we think and behave and get down and boogie.

J Unrau
Hungry J Propaganda
www.djs5.com/hjp/