Designing Serious Games on Contemporary Music: A Case Study on Poème Électronique

Communicating intangible musical heritage is challenging, especially for contemporary and electroacoustic repertoires, where non-traditional timbres, spatial organization, and multimodal performance contexts are often unfamiliar to non-specialist audiences. Interactive narratives and serious games can address this challenge by turning musical materials into objects of exploration, manipulation, and reflection. This paper presents Edgar à GoGo, a mixed-reality serious game based on Edgard Varèse’s Poème Électronique (1958), originally conceived for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair. The game supports post-listening engagement by inviting players to discover, manipulate, and recombine sound objects. Its interactive narrative is experiential and non-linear: it unfolds through constrained recomposition of musical materials, echoing the creative principles of musique concrète. We report two preliminary evaluation moments. Findings suggest that the prototype can stimulate analytical curiosity toward the structure and the sequencing of the Poème. Feedback also highlights the need for stronger scaffolding, more robust interaction, and systematic evaluation. Finally, the study outlines a future design trajectory based on different degrees of materialization, from the evaluated virtual tabletop configuration to possible tangible supports for timelines and sound objects.