Description
Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. The virtual medium seemingly provides us with ample opportunities to behave and act out with relative safety and impunity. Or does it? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. Author William Cheng shows how the simulated environments of games empower designers, composers, players, and scholars to test and tinker with music, noise, speech, and silence in ways that might not be prudent or possible in the real world. In negotiating utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights from across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, and philosophy. With case studies that span Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe, sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here.
About the Author
William Cheng is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research on music, video games, opera, and other subjects have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Ethnomusicology, and 19th-Century Music. He is the recipient of the AMS Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, AMS Philip Brett Award, and SAM Mark Tucker Award.
Reviews
As addictive and energetically conceived as its subject matter, Sound Play enables even non-gamers to navigate the sonic waves and kinetic pleasures of story worlds that challenge us to rethink the complexities of human agency, identity politics, and embodied performance. * Maria Tatar, author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and editor of The Annotated Brothers Grimm *
A major contribution from a bold and brilliant new voice with exceptional interdisciplinary range. Cheng is a serious player: his virtuosic flair is fully matched by his technical rigor and depth of interpretive insight. Sound Play confirms that the New Musicology is truly out of beta. * Kiri Miller, author of Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance *
Compelling from the first page, Sound Play is an engaging and sophisticated study of how audio-whether in the form of music, voices, noises, or effects-crucially shapes our experience of video games, and how gaming deeply informs our engagement with sound. But more than that, William Cheng's excellent new book demonstrates how the interrelation of sound and play in video games challenges us to think deeply about what it means to live in a world in which the virtual and the real are increasingly intertwined. * Mark Katz, author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music and Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ *
Captivating and inspired, probing and nimbly persuasive, playful yet bursting with profound insight, Sound Play is virtually and absolutely indispensable. * Charles Hiroshi Garrett, author of Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century and editor-in-chief of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition *
William Cheng tackles the wild west of game audio and conquers it with a combination of academic scrutiny, coupled by a gamer's unadulterated love of the art. Sound Play could very well be a turning point in the history of video game audio: the day when game audio came of age and inherited the mantle of serious art through the lens of scholarly analysis. With Sound Play, game audio finally has the academic credentials it needs to take its place among the other fine arts. * Christopher Tin, Grammy-winning video game music composer *
Cheng uses interviews and virtual fieldwork to recount how real-world cultural values concerning musicality, performance, and virtuosity have spilled over into the game world...remarkably interdisciplinary. * Ryan Ebright, MAKE Literary Magazine, 17/07/2015 *
Book Information
ISBN 9780199969968
Author William Cheng
Format Hardback
Page Count 262
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Series Oxford Music/Media Series
Weight(grams) 580g
Dimensions(mm) 238mm * 162mm * 22mm
About the Author
William Cheng is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research on music, video games, opera, and other subjects have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Ethnomusicology, and 19th-Century Music. He is the recipient of the AMS Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, AMS Philip Brett Award, and SAM Mark Tucker Award.
Reviews
As addictive and energetically conceived as its subject matter, Sound Play enables even non-gamers to navigate the sonic waves and kinetic pleasures of story worlds that challenge us to rethink the complexities of human agency, identity politics, and embodied performance. * Maria Tatar, author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and editor of The Annotated Brothers Grimm *
A major contribution from a bold and brilliant new voice with exceptional interdisciplinary range. Cheng is a serious player: his virtuosic flair is fully matched by his technical rigor and depth of interpretive insight. Sound Play confirms that the New Musicology is truly out of beta. * Kiri Miller, author of Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance *
Compelling from the first page, Sound Play is an engaging and sophisticated study of how audio-whether in the form of music, voices, noises, or effects-crucially shapes our experience of video games, and how gaming deeply informs our engagement with sound. But more than that, William Cheng's excellent new book demonstrates how the interrelation of sound and play in video games challenges us to think deeply about what it means to live in a world in which the virtual and the real are increasingly intertwined. * Mark Katz, author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music and Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ *
Captivating and inspired, probing and nimbly persuasive, playful yet bursting with profound insight, Sound Play is virtually and absolutely indispensable. * Charles Hiroshi Garrett, author of Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century and editor-in-chief of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition *
William Cheng tackles the wild west of game audio and conquers it with a combination of academic scrutiny, coupled by a gamer's unadulterated love of the art. Sound Play could very well be a turning point in the history of video game audio: the day when game audio came of age and inherited the mantle of serious art through the lens of scholarly analysis. With Sound Play, game audio finally has the academic credentials it needs to take its place among the other fine arts. * Christopher Tin, Grammy-winning video game music composer *
Cheng uses interviews and virtual fieldwork to recount how real-world cultural values concerning musicality, performance, and virtuosity have spilled over into the game world...remarkably interdisciplinary. * Ryan Ebright, MAKE Literary Magazine, 17/07/2015 *
Book Information
ISBN 9780199969968
Author William Cheng
Format Hardback
Page Count 262
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Series Oxford Music/Media Series
Weight(grams) 580g
Dimensions(mm) 238mm * 162mm * 22mm
