Category: News

Ludomusicology in Germany: The FVMW Introduces Itself

Authors: Anne Heller, Fabian Müller, Tim Reichert

The European-Western origin of the academic study of music in German-speaking countries, in short musicology (dt.: Musikwissenschaft) as we know it today, can be traced back to Guido Adler’s treatise “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” from 1885. For him, musicology is divided into two sub-disciplines. Systematic musicology, which includes aspects of the aesthetics of the art of sound, including acoustics, psychology and philosophy, is contrasted with historical musicology. Historical musicology aims to investigate and demonstrate the compositional and historical contexts. In addition to working with sources, the focus is on the analysis of music. Ethnology in musicology was still part of systematics for Adler, who called it Musikologie. It is clear that the methods of musicology have developed further since its foundation and that the subject is now more interdisciplinary. Likewise, the boundaries between the systematic and historical sub-disciplines are less strict than they used to be. In the meantime, musicology has also taken on film music and pop music. In the German-speaking world, the study of video game music has so far only been part of media studies, cultural studies, and game studies. For a long time, there was no study that followed the German-speaking tradition of historical musicology. Fortunately, this has now changed.

In Germany, video game music is moving more and more into the public focus. Since this year, German public-service broadcaster ARD has been hosting the podcast Levels & Soundtracks by music journalist Fridl Achten, in 2022 the contribution “A History of Video Game Music” appeared on the podcast of Bayerischer Rundfunk, and video game concerts have been present in Germany since the first symphonic game music concert at the Gewandhaus zu Leipzig in 2003.

The scientific study of video game music is likewise not a novelty in this country. First publications by researchers such as Axel Stockburger, Axel Berndt, Michael Ahlers, Ellen Jünger, or Martin Pichlmair and Fares Kayali can already be found in the early to mid-2000s. Nils Dittbrenner’s Master’s thesis “Soundchip-Musik: Computer- und Videospielmusik von 1977–1994” (2007) was made available online and is one of the earliest comprehensive German-language studies on the subject.

Melanie Fritsch, currently an assistant professor at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies, gave a lecture in 2009 entitled “Zurück in die Jugendkultur – die Rückkehr der Musik über Computerspiele” at the alltogether now! Music Fair in Berlin. Since then, over the course of her career, she has published several fundamental German-language essays on the field, and her monograph “Performing Bytes: Musikperformances der Computerspielkultur” (2018). Furthermore, she spoke with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel about video games and was interviewed for several German newspapers. Melanie Fritsch is one of the more prominent researchers in the field, but of course not the only one.

Christoph Hust, professor of musicology at the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre, published the anthology Digitale Spiele in 2018. This volume included a section on video game music of over one hundred pages. Together with Japanologist and game researcher Martin Roth, he hosted the first Ludomusicology-conference in Germany the same year. Since 2022, he also leads the DFG project “Kulturen der Heimcomputermusik”, which has overlaps with video game culture as well.

Many German as well as scholars from German-speaking countries such as Austria and Switzerland have also participated in the Ludomusicology conference, such as Hans-Peter Gasselseder in collaboration with Maria Kallionpäa (“Re-Orchestrating Game Drama: The Experience of Dynamic Music in Videogames”, 2012), Fares Kayali (“Abstracting Music to Game Mechanics”, 2015) and David Roesner as the keynote speaker. In more recent years Reinke Schwinning (“Sense and Meaning in Video Game Music – Music as Information Carrying Part of the Game Inter-face”, 2018), Laurentius Alvin (“Introduction to Javanese-Balinese Gamelan music in video games”, 2022), Stefan Höltgen and Thomas Fecker (“From Daisies to @;&?$: Computer Voices in Early Electronic Games”, 2023) and Manuel Becker (“‘Donasdogama Micma’: Music from Hell in Dante’s Inferno (2010)”, 2023).

Therefore, it was about time that a German-speaking community is founded to offer a place for scholars to further their researches and interests in Video Game Music.

The foundation of the FVMW goes back to 2019 in Tübingen at the Institute for Musicology, when Manuel Becker held a seminar about music in video games. The seminar was one of the most well-attended ones at the institute in a long time. Thus, it is no wonder that many students showed interest in engaging with the topic even outside the curriculum. This seminar is also the place where the four founding members of the FVMW, Manuel Becker and the three students Anne Heller, Tim Reichert, and Fabian Müller, met. The novelty of the discipline impressed them, and made it clear to them that video game music should form a part of their own academic curriculum vitae. Therefore, the three students chose different aspects of this subject for their theses, which discussed the reception of Wagner’s music in video games, the technical developments in the Final Fantasy VII Remake and an answer to the difficult question of citing video game music. The search for usable literature that came from the musicological tradition we are familiar with was a challenge. Even while working on our theses, we met regularly to discuss the recent publications in the research field of Ludomusicology. It quickly became clear to us that the biggest problem in German-language musicology is probably the lack of an introduction to the subject area that is also aimed at researchers who do not otherwise deal with video games. Writing this introduction became our primary goal. We thus began to look into topics commonly found in ludomusicological studies and to work out the aspects that were important to us. During this time, we made contact with different researchers in this field, among them Melanie Fritsch. Following her advice, we started working on our secondary goal in 2022: the development of our own website where essays and other forms of contributions can be published.

The aim of the research community for video game musicology is to get to the core of the music and to classify the compositional aspects of the music historically. Likewise, we treat the video games as musicological sources. The methodology will be presented in an introduction to the new sub-discipline of video game musicology (Videospielmusikwissenschaft).

With our website we are trying something similar to LudoBande, an interdisciplinary community of students interested in the study of games. We want to provide a platform where students, scholars and people interested in musicology can come together and exchange ideas about the discipline. We’d like to help this research area grow and establish itself.

If you want to follow, support, or contact us, you can do so via the following links:

https://videospielmusikwissenschaft.de/

https://twitter.com/FVMWTweet

Ludo2024 Call for Papers

The Ludomusicology Research Group is pleased to announce the Ludo2024 Thirteenth European Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, hosted by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona at the Technocampus – UPF in Mataró, Spain, 11 – 13 July next year. The organizers of Ludo2024 are now accepting proposals for research presentations.

We welcome proposals on all aspects of sound and music in games.

This year, we are particularly interested in papers that support the conference theme of ‘Sound, Music, and Space’. Papers on this topic may include:
➢ Soundscapes (e.g. relations between ambient music and environmental sound)
➢ Spatiality and technology (e.g. spatial audio in games)
➢ Music in ludic spaces (e.g. pen & paper sessions, LARPs)
➢ Alien spaces (e.g. musical soundtracks and building fantastic realities)
➢ Crossover spaces and sound (e.g. game sound vs. other media realities)
➢ Sound, theatrical spaces and games (e.g. performances in games; game performances outside games)

Presentations should last twenty minutes and will be followed by questions. Please submit your paper proposal (c.250 words) with a short provisional list of literature by email to ludomusicology@gmail.com by February 29th, 2024. We aim to communicate the programme decisions by March 14th, 2024. If you require more information, please email the organizers.

We encourage practitioners and composers to submit proposals for showcasing practice as research. The conference will be held in person, but with remote access options available.

www.ludomusicology.org | #ludo2024
Hosted by Lidia López Gómez, Tecnocampus – UPF, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Organized by Melanie Fritsch, Andra Ivănescu, Michiel Kamp & Tim Summers.

Queer Game Audio Network

For informal discussions, sharing work and community support, consider joining our network of folks interested in queer perspectives on game audio.

We welcome anyone who wishes to engage with game audio from a queer perspective. To join, please contact tim [dot] summers [at] rhul [dot] ac [dot] uk telling us your name and areas of interest.

We welcome those identifying under the LGBTQ+ umbrella and allies. On this page, you can find some brief information and resources. For more interactive discussion use the contact above to join our private discussion channel and mailing list.

Discussions and Plans

We plan to hold semi-regular sessions where we share work and discuss a piece of queer theory in the context of game sound. In our first session on 16th August, we plan to discuss Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020) in the context of game audio. We also aim to schedule a symposium and methods workshops. Watch this space…!

Some Places to Start…

There is very little scholarship that pertains to queer studies and game audio. Here is a starter bibliography, but we hope it will grow. Please give us suggestions to add!

On music and queerness in games:

  • Summers, Tim, The Queerness of Video Game Music [Cambridge Element] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

On music and queerness in Gone Home:

  • Synder, Shane, “The Impossible Relationship: Deconstructing the Private Space in Gone Home’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 10 (2018): 7–20.
  • Tulloch, Rowan, Catherine Hoad and Helen Young, “Riot Grrrl Gaming,” Continuum, 33 (2019): 337–350.

On gender and sexuality in game music in the context of animation:

  • Chapters by Karen M. Cook, T.J. Laws-Nicola and Brent Ferguson, Dana Plank and Ko On Chan in The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music, edited by Lisa Scoggin and Dana Plank. New York: Routledge, 79–132. Karen M. Cook’s chapter on Xandir P. Wifflebottom explicily deals with queer themes.

On gender coding:

  • Austin, Michael, “Orchestrating Difference: Representing Gender in Video Game Music.” In Masculinity at Play, edited by Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018): 165–183.
  • Meléndez, Elisa, “For Those About to Rock: Gender Codes in the Rock Music Video Games Rock Band And Rocksmith,” PhD diss., Florida International University, 2018.
  • Mera, Miguel, “Invention/Re-Invention,” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2009): 1–20.
  • Yee, Thomas B. “Feminine Themings: The Construction of Musical Gendering in the Final Fantasy Franchise” in The Music of Nobuo Uematsu in the Final Fantasy Series, edited by Richard Anatone (Bristol: Intellect, 2022): 261–290.

Broad ideas of game music, gender and identity:

  • Cheng, William, Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Chapter 5 on voice and identity in online games.
  • Rietveld, Hillegonda C., and Andrew Lemon, “Female Credit: Excavating Recognition for the Capcom Sound Team,” in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 376–388.
  • Tonelli, Chris, “Game Music and Identity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 327–342.

On music, dance and gender in Dance Central:

  • Miller, Kiri, Playable Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and “Gaming the System: Gender Performance in Dance Central”, New Media & Society 17 (2015): 829–1003.

Queer Game Audio: An Opportunity for Initial Conversations and Discussions

There are a number of academics and practitioners who are currently working on topics related to game sound/music and queer themes (to greater or lesser extents).

This is an open invitation for a one-hour meeting to discuss whether there would be appetite for events, networks, workshops (etc.) related to this theme, and if so, what might be most useful. Some proposed ideas have included workshops on queer methods, opportunities to share work in progress, or roundtable/dialogues.

All working on, or with an interest in, this topic, are welcome to attend.
It will be held on Tuesday 6th June at 4:30pm London time via video conferencing.


If you have an interest in this topic but cannot make the meeting, please let us know. We can receive suggestions by email, and/or keep you updated about outcomes.

To register, email tim.summers [at] rhul.ac.uk with your name.

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