Tag: game music

Queer Game Audio Network

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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.

Events, News

Queer Game Audio: An Opportunity for Initial Conversations and Discussions

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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.

Guest Contribution

How to Find Work Online as a New VG Composer

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Contributor: Chris Lines (http://www.gamecomposeradvantage.com/) shares his advice on becoming a successful video game composer. This is a short version of a longer series of articles from Chris’s site to help game composers. You can check out the longer in-depth versions here.

Many composers have either studied music formally for a long time or are self-taught to a pretty good level, and yet they haven’t actually worked on any video games at all, let alone been paid for one.

FGI was in a similar position until a few years ago… I’d always written music since I was fifteen, been in bands, had my own studio set up for years. But apart from a small amount of production music, and the odd student film, I had never really achieved that much. I decided something had to change…

I noticed that there were plenty of game composer websites talking about VSTs and DAWs but none on the actual hard work of freelancing. So I invested thousands of pounds in the best freelancing courses and books I could, and learned about positioning, pitching, selling and running a freelance business in general. What I learned wasn’t specifically tailored for musicians – most of my fellow students in fact were designers, photographers, web developers or other freelancers, but I found universal lessons that could be applied to music too.

What Most Composer Do Wrong

It’s all too common to see posts on game developer forums where composers are offering their services – and often for free. I have never done this. If a composer does get an answer, they’ll generally be asked to write for free, or for ‘exposure’. More likely than not they just won’t get a reply. When they don’t get inundated with offers to write music they then get disappointed.  “Why on earth not?”, I hear them cry, “I’m offering to write for free! What could be better than that, right?”

Most composers don’t see things from a developer’s perspective though. Try it for a moment – why would they trust this person who posted on a forum offering to work for free? Is this the way a professional composer would act?

There Is Another Way

What I quickly learned from my studies is that rather than posting adverts on forums and waiting for the phone to call, I came to appreciate the power of the hustle. By spending time upfront researching the most suitable developers, picking the games I really wanted to work on, and only then contacting the developers directly, things seemed a lot more hopeful.

Now I rather glossed over the part where I mentioned research – but this is essential and is where most of the effort should go. There’s no point pitching just anyone who is making a game. You need to choose carefully – take your time. The best places to look are game developer forums where devs are posting about what they are working on, but there are also sites like Kickstarter. Here’s a link to Quora with some suggestions of game developer sites.

And once you have found a game you like the look of you need to find the developer’s email address. Sure you could contact them via the forum, but I think email is best. You might have to do some digging and Googling to get an e-mail address, but again it’s worth it. Once you have an e-mail address you can then quite honestly tell them who you are, what you do and genuinely offer to help. It’s not magic – just maybe a bit braver than the average composer, and that’s the point. You don’t want to be the same as everyone else.

Get Used to Hustling

It has to be said, 9 times out of 10 a cold pitch doesn’t work. Game devs either already have a composer or they have settled on an alternative approach to the music. Or they just weren’t a good fit in the first place and just don’t reply. Don’t worry! Keep trying and occasionally… just occasionally… it does work.

Now it has to be said that cold pitching (even with the right research) is a numbers game. You’ll send out dozens and dozens of e-mails before you get any interest. And even when you do, you might only get a ‘maybe’. It’s then your job to keep in touch, keep pitching, making contacts and eventually something good will happen.

The point of this article is to show one method of finding work online. There are others, and I
should make the point that real life meet-ups, conferences and networking are just as important – they just aren’t the focus of this article.

What If You Aren’t Ready?

I’ve found a lot of composers are put off getting themselves out into the market because they feel they aren’t ready. This could be for a variety of reasons:

  • they don’t have a good enough website or portfolio,
  • they don’t know enough about games in general or interactive music
  • plus many other reasons.

You should at the very least have some kind of portfolio showing off your music, even if this is just a SoundCloud page. Otherwise how on earth will a developer hear what you can do? More than that is obviously nice, such as a smart, clean website with a dedicated portfolio section and maybe a blog, but it’s not needed in the beginning.

As for having expert knowledge of interactive music and middleware? In reality for your first few gigs as a game composer you aren’t going to need to know much of this stuff, if anything. Don’t wait till you are ready… take action now and learn as you go.

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