Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford Music / Media)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.57 (919 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0199969973 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 264 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. "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
Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. 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. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. 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 permissio
"Sound Play is an excellent academic book for both the experienced gamer who wants" according to Michael L Austin. Sound Play is an excellent academic book for both the experienced gamer who wants to learn more about reading video games as a social text and for scholars and students who want to learn more about the increasing social significance of video games. Rather than discussing music and sound on a more surface level (as one might find in a trade book), this book takes a deep look into implications of the us. Elizabeth Medina-Gray said This may very well be my favorite book about video game music and sound to date. This may very well be my favorite book about video game music and sound to date. Cheng's writing is clear, engaging, and sprinkled with game-inspired fun (my favorite bit of prose involves a description of Silent Hill's soundscape as an "acoustic katamari"). More than that, Cheng's ideas about particular video games, game sound, and players -- informed both by ethnographic research and deep probing of. Wide-Ranging and Insightful Analysis William Gibbons This book is a thought-provoking, well-written, and diverse look at the many roles music and sound play in video games. In Sound Play, Cheng (an award winning professor of music at Dartmouth College) focuses not on the technological aspects of game music, or even in its history, but rather on the effects of music and sound on players. The topics he addresses touch on many of the most pressing issues i