Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination

by William Cheng

Overview

Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers, composers, players, critics, and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and discourses of music, noise, speech, and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, philosophy, and additional disciplines. With case studies spanning 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.


Foreword by Richard Leppert

Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199969975
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2014
Series:	Oxford Music / Media
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

William Cheng is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Richard Leppert
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Tune at the End of the World
Chapter 2: How Celes Sang
Chapter 3: Dead Ringers
Chapter 4: Role-Playing toward a Virtual Musical Democracy
Chapter 5: The Wizard, the Troll, and the Fortress
Epilogue
End Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Playfully written and remarkably interdisciplinary" - Ryan Ebright, MAKE Literary Magazine

"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

"With Sound Play, Cheng has set a precedent and a groundwork for future game music scholarship."—ECHO: A Music-Centered Journal

"William Cheng's Sound Play is a book aimed for an audience of academics, particularly those interested in game audio, but probably also any who study sound and the moving image. Cheng writes with an intellectual flair, referencing Plato, Adorno, and numerous scholarly works yet uses a personable style that makes reading him a delight...Throughout the book, Cheng has done a superb job of referencing discussions from vibrant online forums where game-and game audio-communities thrive. Links to audio and video examples add depth to the reader's understanding of the written examples and images Cheng provides. Overall, the work is a superb collection of powerful ethnomusicological writings that will undoubtedly become a staple text on the game audio scholar's library shelf."—Journal of Play

"A book that keeps on giving—one whose branches of inquiry seem endless. This combined with Cheng's penchant for vivid metaphors makes Sound Play an essential (and enjoyable) text for anyone interested in how sound influences not only how we play video games, but also how we view them with respect to the world at large."—Journal of Popular Music Studies

"Cheng brings a deep knowledge of his subject as both a musicologist and a gamer, and the result is an exceedingly thoughtful and provocative book. Throughout Sound Play, Cheng demonstrates convincingly the importance of video game music and other sound as a locus of player experimentation and imagination, and the value of scholarly attention to this multimedia."—College Music Symposium

From the Publisher