Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games

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.

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.

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