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.
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.
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
- Introduction
Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, Mark Sweeney
- Analyzing Video Game Music: Sources, Methods and a Case Study
Tim Summers
- Analyzing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model
Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University, London
- Modularity in Video Game Music
Elizabeth Medina-Gray, Independent Scholar
- Suture and Peritexts: Music Beyond Gameplay and Diegesis
Michiel Kamp
- “It’s a-me, Mario!” – Playing With Video Game Music
Melanie Fritsch, Independent Scholar
- Game and Play in Music Video Games
Anahid Kassabian, Independent Scholar, and Freya Jarman, University of Liverpool
- ‘Listening’ Through Digital Interaction in Björk’s Biophilia
Samantha Blickhan, PhD Candidate
- 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
- Isaac’s Silence Purposive Aesthetics in Dead Space
Mark Sweeney, University of Oxford
- 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
As many in the UK will no doubt be aware, the AHRC recently released a press release entitled ‘Game changing research networks for the Video game industry’. The research council is now supporting six new research networks dedicated to videogames, including Guitar Heroes in Music Education? Music-based video-games and their potential for musical and performative creativity, led by David Roesner at the University of Kent. The press release states that:
The network seeks to investigate the impact of music-games on how we define music-making, creativity and identity and what opportunities this provides for artist and teachers. In order to do so, the network will connect relevant arts and humanities academics with both game designers and musicians, who have embraced the soft- and hardwares of gaming for creating new ways of composing and performing. The network also seeks to explore the creative potential and influence these games will have on future game design and how these could be implemented in music education.
This is unquestionably an excellent sign for the development of the field, and we look forward to seeing the fruits of their labour.
