Out of Tune? Nudging Player Behavior Through Background Music Pitch Modulation

Marc Schuban, Rostyslav Hnatyshyn, Maximilian Altmeyer

ACM Link

About

This collaboration developed from my presentation of Capturing Cancer with Music. Marc approached me after I presented and we talked a bit about video games and music. His idea was to study how dynamically modulating a piece could potentially impact a player’s performance in a video game. We ended up collaborating – he developed the game and study while I wrote the code to change the music dynamically.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{10.1145/3744736.3749365,
author = {Schubhan, Marc and Hnatyshyn, Rostyslav and Altmeyer, Maximilian},
title = {Out of Tune? Nudging Player Behavior Through Background Music Pitch Modulation},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400720239},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3744736.3749365},
doi = {10.1145/3744736.3749365},
booktitle = {Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play},
pages = {132–138},
numpages = {7},
keywords = {Audio, Background Music, Games, Player Behavior, Empirical Study},
location = {
},
series = {CHI PLAY Companion '25}
}
Last modified: October 1, 2025