Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games

Listening to and Performing Ludic Soundscapes
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-23032-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 276 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

Reihe: Routledge Music and Screen Media Series

Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games brings together a range of perspectives that explore how music and sound in video games interact with virtual and real environments, often in innovative and unexpected ways. Drawing on a range of game case studies and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors consider the sonic environment in games as its own storytelling medium. Highlighting how dynamic video game soundscapes respond to players’ movements, engage them in collaborative composition, and actively contribute to worldbuilding, the chapters discuss topics including genre conventions around soundscape design, how sonic environments shape players’ perceptions, how game sound and music model ecological processes and nonhuman relationships, and issues of cultural and geographic representation.

Together, the essays in this volume bring game music and sound into the environmental humanities and transform our understanding of sonic environments as an essential part of storytelling in interactive media. Engaging a wide variety of game genres and communities of play, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, media studies, critical game studies, popular culture, and sound studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Galloway, Kate

Hambleton, Elizabeth

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures, Tables, and Musical Examples

Series Foreword

 

Prologue: Listening to, Performing, and Playing Game Soundscapes

Kate Galloway and Elizabeth Hambleton

 

Part 1

Worldbuilding and Representing Soundscapes

 

Chapter 1: Soundscape, Narrative, and Gameplay in the Assassin’s Creed Series

Stephanie Lind

 

Chapter 2: The Sonic Environments of Medieval(ist) Games

Karen M. Cook

 

Chapter 3: Quiet and Lonely but Proud: Narrative Sound Design and Composition in the Banner Saga Trilogy

Eric Segerstrom

 

Chapter 4: Radiation Acoustics and the Nuclear Soundscape in the Fallout Franchise

Reba A. Wissner

 

Part 2

Sonic Environments, Performance, and Analytic Play

 

Chapter 5: Currencies and Values of Game Sounds

Peter Smucker

 

Chapter 6: Virtuosic Play in Super Mario Maker 2

William Ayers

 

Chapter 7: Sound Affects and Musical Disorientations in Exploration Horror Video Games

Sara Bowden

 

Part 3

Meaning, Sound, and Place

 

Chapter 8: Strutting with Streets of Rage: When Dance Music Enters the Fight

Hillegonda Rietveld and Andrew Lemon

 

Chapter 9: I MUST BE BEAUTIFUL!”: Becoming Human Through Adaptive Vocal Soundscapes

Jennifer Smith

 

Chapter 10: Racialized Fantasy: Authenticity, Appropriation and Stereotype in Super Mario Odyssey

Thomas Yee

 

Chapter 11: Music in/as the Time-Space Continuum in The Outer Wilds

Elizabeth Hambleton

 

Part 4

Acoustic Ecologies of Games

 

Chapter 12: Ecological Precarity and Techno-Utopianism in the Soundscapes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Jordan Carmalt Stokes

 

Chapter 13: Sounds of Extraction and Collection and Listening to the Pixelated Resources of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Kate Galloway

 

Chapter 14: Sound, Semiosis, and the Selenitic Age of Myst

Stephen Armstrong

 

Chapter 15: Atmosphere as a Concept in Video Game Music Discourse

Michiel Kamp

 

Notes on Contributors

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Kate Galloway is Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA. Her research addresses how and why contemporary artists remix and recycle sounds, music, and texts encoded with environmental knowledge and the creative and social phenomena of internet music communities and practices of listening to the internet. With Paula Harper and Christa Bentley, she co-edited the collection Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans.

Elizabeth Hambleton is a librarian and an instructor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA, where she teaches audio for video games. Her research in video games focuses on virtual world soundscapes and sound design.