We are thrilled to announce that our volume, Ludomusicology Approaches to Video Game Music has just published! Supplementary materials to the book will be published on our website soon, so look forward to a further announcement about that in the coming weeks.

The last half-decade has seen the rapid and expansive development of video game music studies. As with any new area of study, this significant sub-discipline is still tackling fundamental questions concerning how video game music should be approached. In this volume, experts in game music provide their responses to these issues.

This book suggests a variety of new approaches to the study of game music. In the course of developing ways of conceptualizing and analyzing game music it explicitly considers other critical issues including the distinction between game play and music play, how notions of diegesis are complicated by video game interactivity, the importance of cinema aesthetics in game music, the technicalities of game music production and the relationships between game music and art music traditions.

This collection is accessible, yet theoretically substantial and complex. It draws upon a diverse array of perspectives and presents new research which will have a significant impact upon the way that game music is studied. The volume represents a major development in game musicology and will be indispensable for both academic researchers and students of game music.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, Mark Sweeney
2. Analyzing Video Game Music: Sources, Methods and a Case Study
   Tim Summers
3. Analyzing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model
   Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University, London
4. Modularity in Video Game Music
   Elizabeth Medina-Gray, Independent Scholar
5. Suture and Peritexts: Music Beyond Gameplay and Diegesis
   Michiel Kamp
6. “It’s a-me, Mario!” – Playing With Video Game Music
   Melanie Fritsch, Independent Scholar
7. Game and Play in Music Video Games
   Anahid Kassabian, Independent Scholar, and Freya Jarman, University of Liverpool
8. ‘Listening’ Through Digital Interaction in Björk’s Biophilia
   Samantha Blickhan, PhD Candidate
9. Palimpsest, Pragmatism and the Aesthetics of Genre Transformation: Composing the Hybrid Score to Electronic Arts’s Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed
   Stephen Baysted, University of Chichester
10. Isaac’s Silence Purposive Aesthetics in Dead Space
    Mark Sweeney, University of Oxford
11. Remixed Metaphors: Manipulating Classical Music and Its Meanings in Video Games
    William Gibbons, Texas Christian University

Thank you to all of our fantastic chapter authors for your hard work in bringing this volume together.

Technical Details

hb ISBN 9781781791974
£60 / $100
pb ISBN 9781781791981
£19.99 / $29.95
Pub date: July 2016
Extent: 240pp 15 Figures
Format: 234 x 156mm (9.21 x 6.14 inches)
Readership: scholars and students
Subjects: Popular Music
Series: Genre, Music and Sound