Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games

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