Christopher Cayari Interview: Studying VGM
Christopher Cayari has been studying YouTubers and VGM musicians for years, but I wasn’t aware of them until Super MAGFest 2018. As I watched them conduct their panel about VGM musicians, I was awestruck by their passion, their knowledge, and their personality. Fast forward to mid-2019 when I randomly caught one of their tweets. Their name and face seemed familiar, and they were once again talking about VGM, but it wasn’t until I reached out to them for an interview that I realized this was the same person who hosted one of my favorite panels all those months ago. If you don’t know Christopher Cayari, I hope you will by the end of this interview—they are an important figure in the VGM community because they are studying what makes it so special.
Create! Put yourself out there. Publish as much as you can.
How did you discover the VGM community?
As a consumer of VGM, I have been listening to OSTs for a while—since about 2009. My favorites were always Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Between the two soundtracks, there are like nine hours of content, at least! I would put them on, and my partner and I would take road trips.
As for the VGM cover community, it takes a little bit of explanation. I was lucky enough to be one of the first researchers in music to publish on YouTube and the cover artist community in 2011. The article, The YouTube Effect: How YouTube Has Provided New Ways to Consume, Create, and Share Music, describes how a 19-year-old ukulele/guitar player used the platform to develop an audience and make collaborative music on a virtual performance stage. I went back to get my doctorate in 2012 and my dissertation looked at how YouTube artists used multitracking to create virtual choirs of clones. Given how often I post about my work on social media, most of my friends knew I loved watching and talking about multitrack videos, so people would tag me in Facebook posts of their favorite YouTube artists, and people would share multitrack videos with me all the time.
I was visiting Seattle in the summer of 2017 and my friend, Nick, knew I was playing Undertale, the indie game by Toby Fox. He said, “You have to check this out!” and played “Ghost Battle” by Insaneintherainmusic. In that moment, I knew I had to do a research study on Carlos Eiene. However, when I was watching his videos, YouTube kept showing me different artists who were doing songs from Undertale, and that exposed me even more to the VGM community.
What makes the VGM community so interesting to you personally?
Throughout my interviews with VGM cover artists on YouTube, I see how they are all connected somehow. While groups like Materia Collective and GameLark are establishing themselves as communities that bring musicians together around video games, the friendships and personal connections that have been happening for about 10 years is quite fascinating to me. Before Twitch, people would gather in chat rooms. I am sure that way back when ICQ and AOL were running the internet, people were gathering and sharing MIDI arrangements of their favorite VGM. Research participants have told me about how sites like musescore.org or OCRemix allowed them to connect with other VGM fans, build their own friend base online, and get their music, arrangements, and talents out there. These communities facilitate collaboration, learning, feedback, exposure, and so many other things.
Returning back to the idea that everyone’s connected, I love to see collaborations, especially in groups like Materia Collective where a professional horn player from a major symphony orchestra in the US can play on the same track as a teenage EDM artist from the UK and a violinist who is living in Korea. The relationships and networking that happen are fascinating. As an educator, I love seeing people coming together, sharing their creative processes, and creating with each other.
I challenge VGM artists to stay as humble as they have been and embrace the newbies in the spirit of learning and gaming!
Who were some of your favorite VGM artists initially?
It’s so not fair to ask me my favorites, especially because I love how every artist brings something different to the mosaic of VGM. I listen to Ben Briggs’s music more than anyone else. So, objectively, I can’t deny that my Spotify listen count doesn’t posit him as a favorite.
Obviously, Carlos Eiene was initially one of my favorites, and might I add, still is. It has been an honor working with him as a researcher/presenter at MAGFest, and watching him grow as an artist. As a college professor, I have been extremely jealous watching him post things online about what he’s doing at Berklee.
Finally, someone else that has really impressed me is Julia Henderson. As a researcher of vocalists on YouTube, it was so cool to come across her music because she is a classically trained opera singer. We had similar training in the academy, so it was so cool to see her doing some really progressive and creative things. She also went back to school to become a better music producer, and it has been cool watching her grow.
What kind of research have you done on the VGM community?
I do case studies, which require me to look far in depth about the uniqueness of some entity, and the entities I look at are YouTube Channels. I use YouTube to limit myself, because, as you can imagine, the internet can expand any topic almost indefinitely. In my article about virtual performance practices from YouTube, I describe how the YouTube channel can be seen as a bounded entity that allows me to limit how far I go with digging.
For example, I try to focus on the videos, comments, and analytics of any given YouTube channel. I will then do one to three interviews with the creator of that channel. The questions are based on the observations I did on their YouTube channel. I did a multiple case study on musicians who used YouTube to produce Undertale covers, which is currently being written now. For this article, case reports are written about each channel, then I analyze each of the cases as to how they relate to my research questions. For the Undertale study, the questions are about how participants are inspired by a video game to create, learn, and collaborate online.
I also conducted a study at Super MAGFest 2018 (Editor’s Note: which I attended!) about how VGM musicians acquire the skills they need to produce, perform, and publish musical performances online. Most people have some music classes in school, but a lot of people who pursue popular music genres like VGM rather than classical Western Art music do a lot of learning outside of school. So that study is looking at the usefulness of school music and informal, outside-of-school learning to be able to publish VGM online.
What makes the VGM community different from other online communities?
When I started studying VGM communities online, it was starting to boom, and this was a question I kept asking myself. My participants kept telling me that they all knew each other, and that’s due to a common bond that they have—they’re gamers and musicians. You go to a party as a guitarist, and it’s not going to take long before someone else is like, “Oh you play guitar? So does this other person. You should talk!” and you have an instant friend (or new arch-nemesis).
There’s a sociological phenomenon called affinity groups. It’s where people who have similar interests tend to congregate together, develop connections, and get something of value out of being around others with those common interests. The size of the VGM community before 2016 was very small, so if you were a newbie, you instantly had a group of people who would talk to you, and all these online VGM artists were trying to do this new thing together.
You might ask, “Is that changing now that the VGM community is growing?” It has to change because it constantly evolves. A person who aspires to be a VGM artist has so many more role models today than they did in 2006 when YouTube started. I challenge VGM artists to stay as humble as they have been and embrace the newbies in the spirit of learning and gaming! I’ve been really pleased to see a lot of the artists I have been studying try really hard to give every viewer, every commenter, every fan some form of attention by responding to comments, answering questions, and doing events or videos where the barrier between performer and audience is taken down.
What have you learned from the studying VGM artists? Are there lessons that could be imparted to other online creators?
I wish I had more articles about VGM out at this point, but stay tuned and subscribe to my Twitter (@DrCayari) for announcements on publications or come to Super MAGFest 2020 and hear the panels I am doing with some amazing folks about community building and learning through video games!
To give you and your readers a nugget, I research mostly VGM artists who have a moderate to high degree of success. They get there by just going for it. As a music performer and educator who does musical theater, a highly competitive and over-saturated art form, the question is always: “How do I get the break I need to become a famous actor?”. The answer is usually, “Put yourself out there!”. The advice also stands for online creators, but they have an advantage over those who want to be on a stage because their potential audience is already accessible.
Create! Put yourself out there. Publish as much as you can. It’s ok if it’s not that great. Teachers used to tell young artists not to put products online until they were polished and perfect, but my research might contradict that advice. I keep asking participants why they leave videos online that are “less than perfect” or what they call “embarrassing”. They always say something like, “So people can see where I’ve come from. So they can see how I’ve grown.” Participants in my studies always hope that the apparent growth seen from early videos to recent videos will inspire someone else.
The days of being able to focus on only one platform are over.
Have you attended any VGM conventions or concerts?
The participants in my Undertale study kept talking about MAGFest so I went in 2018. I returned in 2019, and I’ll be at 2020 too.
Who are some of your current favorite VGM artists?
I still listen to Ben Briggs all the time, and DJCutman is often on my Spotify playlist (he has the most beautiful cat that I get to see on Twitter, so that gives him bonus points). In addition, Insaneintherainmusic and Julia Henderson will never not be on the favorite list. The collaborations they have done in 2019 because of their school projects have been so cool to me.
I also love progressive rock, so guitarists like Ro Panuganti, the artist formerly known as SwigglesRP, and Christian Richardson rock my world. Doug Perry, AKA DrumUltima, and Diwa deLeon the StringPlayerGamer are some of my favorite musicians who have taken instruments in the classical tradition into VGM, and I just love it. I wish I saw more a cappella artists coming out of the woodwork that hearken to the time of SmoothMcGroove. There are a few people doing great stuff in that style, but I want more!
How do you see the VGM community evolving in the coming years?
Actually, I want to ask other people that question. I don’t know if I have much to offer on that except that VGM artists need to diversify their presence online. The days of being able to focus on only one platform are over. People are now trying to run a YouTube channel, Discord server, stream on Twitch, and monetize on Patreon, Spotify, and Apple Music. But I want to encourage people to remember that it’s ok to just do this as a hobby or to try to make a living out of it. Just enjoy what you do, and love sharing your renditions of your favorite songs that pay tribute to the best games!
Do you have any publications related to VGM coming out soon?
The challenge with academic publishing is that it moves very slow. You have to think up a study, get it approved by an ethics board, conduct it, analyze it, write it up, and then send it to a publisher. After that, the editor reads it and decides if it is ready for review. If it is, they send your article off to two or three reviewers who are volunteering their time and expertise to give you feedback, and they recommend the editor either accept or reject the article. Most commonly, you are given the feedback of the reviewers and have to resubmit the article with certain changes before you are given a final decision. Sometimes, however, there are multiple rounds of revisions between the reviewers, editor, and author. To put it in perspective, a quick turnaround is four to six months of revisions. If you finally get a green light to publish, the article is sent off to copy editors and formatters who get the article ready. That part of the process often takes one or two months.
The two articles about MAGFest 2018 and Undertale are being written, and I hope to have them submitted for review by March 2020. So, I am hoping those articles could be out by the end of 2020!
I also have a chapter in a book about popular music and youth culture that shows how Carlos Eiene developed online communities around his Insaneintherainmusic YouTube channel and other social media. That is being planned to be sent to the press in May 2020 at Bloomsbury, and the volume editor is an amazing scholar named Andy Bennett from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. My chapter has already gone through revisions and is nearly ready to go so I can’t wait for that to come out, hopefully before 2021. Unfortunately, I am at the mercy of many others who are above me to get my work out there.
