The exhibition 'Video Games & Music: la musique dont vous êtes le héros' ('Music Where You Are the Hero'), at the Philharmonie de Paris, April 1, 2026. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP
Listen, watch, but above all, touch. At the Philharmonie de Paris, the exhibition "Video Games & Music: la musique dont vous êtes le héros ("The Music Where You Are the Hero)," which opened on Thursday, April 2, is designed to be experienced hands-on. Joysticks, arcade cabinets, controllers, keyboards and plastic guitars line an interactive path where nearly 30 machines highlight the fruitful marriage of music and video games.
A playful reminder is posted at the entrance, where a round of tennis on the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) takes place in complete silence, as the first home console on the market had no sound at all. The exhibition then shows how video game music was shaped by technical constraints, in a tunnel reminiscent of both the pipes from Super Mario and the dark arcades of the 1970s and 1980s.
The minimalist crackles of Atari's Pong (1972) or Taito's Space Invaders (1978) escape from massive arcade machines. All those "beeps" transport visitors back to a not-so-distant past, when sound effects simply punctuated gameplay and signaled failure. This section then explores the successive technical advances that made increasingly complex audio worlds in video games possible. That era of rudimentary compositions still inspires the chiptune aesthetic, a nostalgic musical movement throwback to the earliest sounds of video games, as highlighted on one of the screens.
