Video Games & Music

“Video Games & Music” occupies the spaces of the Philharmonie de Paris from April 2 to November 1, 2026.

The curatorship pairs musicologist Fanny Rebillard and journalist Jean Zeid: they imagine a parcours designed as an open world, where thirty-nine objects, vintage consoles, photographs and artworks interact with 29 playable games and five collective installations.

Interactive stations and arcade terminals turn the visitor into a listening player: you listen by playing, you play to hear sound textures that tell half a century of technical and poetic innovations.

The entrance ticket also grants access to the permanent collection of the Museum of Music, extending the visit beyond just the video game parcours.

Mounir Ayache structures the parcours in five biomes: the orbit of legends, infinite dunes, the nocturnal metropolis, the tropical canopy, the electric volcano, each composed as audiovisual tableaux.

Primary colors, organic tunnels, tilted walls and projection screens transform rooms into digital landscapes: the visitor crosses volumes where the pixel and animated image orchestrate perception.

Animated projections by La Sagna & Racine envelope the devices; they make the scenography a sound as well as visual space, linking the game's aesthetics with the Philharmonie's interior architecture.

Resonating artworks punctuate the parcours: 8-bit mosaics by Invader, pixel art panoramas by eBoy and other pieces crossing contemporary art and video game culture.

Sound chips, arcade rooms and the birth of a repertoire. In 1972, engineer Allan Alcorn tinkered the first sounds of Pong from printed circuits. A functional signal, not a composition.

A few years suffice for integrating dedicated sound chips to turn those beeps into recognizable melodies: each chip imposes its palette of timbres, giving the game its musical signature. 650 35mm photos taken by Ira Nowinski in California arcades (1981, 1982). Arcade speakers broadcast these sounds in noisy, flashing rooms where video gaming is first a social experience, lived side by side.

Photographer Ira Nowinski documented this culture between 1981 and 1982 in the San Francisco Bay, from the Santa Cruz Boardwalk to Oakland arcades. Ira Nowinski, Pier 39 Series, 1981, 1982, silver gelatin print, black and white, 35 mm. The two black and white photos exhibited at the Philharmonie show players absorbed in front of arcade machines in crowded San Francisco Bay rooms in the early 1980s.

Nowinski, an American documentary photographer, made this series in several Bay Area locations including the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and San Francisco’s Exploratorium, site of the official Atari Asteroids competition. The full collection, acquired by Stanford’s library in 2012, contains about 650 images on 35 mm film.

As Henry Lowood, curator of history of science and technology collections at Stanford, points out, these images remind us that social and multiplayer gaming has not always been virtual or online.

From pinned cylinder to sound chip, an unsuspected heritage. Computer code extends the work of the chips. The binary principle, on/off, already existed in street organs and music boxes: computing opens new horizons, with some composers manually drawing the shape of sound waves.

In Japan, Kōji Kondō creates instantly recognizable melodies with Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986).

Nobuo Uematsu lays the foundation for orchestral writing with Final Fantasy (1987). The Nintendo-Sega rivalry makes sound a marketing argument, as shown by Masato Nakamura’s soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog (1991).

From 1989, the Game Boy puts these melodies in your pocket, from playgrounds to family living rooms. In the 'Diving into Code' section, an Ignaz Bruder street organ is featured.