Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination

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


Author: William Cheng
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 04/03/2014
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780199969975

About the Author

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