Vocal Imitation and Linguistic Processing of Super Mario Theme Music by Yorùbá Gamers

An aspect of gaming culture among Yoruba millennials is the linguistic interpretations of the background music that accompanies the popular video game called Super Mario. The themes of the interpretations are comparable to those of music texts at traditional Yoruba events. Drawing on the Yoruba tradition, the account is that the gamers assumed that the background music of the game has a similar function as the music at traditional Yoruba events. The choice of words in the interpretation is conditioned by the situational contexts where the music is heard in the video game. The results of acoustic analyses show that the interpretations are also determined by mapping the pitch trajectories of the music melodies to the tones of the gamers’ language. Notably, the results of this study suggest that the linguistic processing of music may not only involve phonetic iconicity (Steinbeis and Koelsch, 2011) but situational context and social expectation.