Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford Music / Media) Illustrated Edition

by William Cheng (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0199969975

ISBN-10: 0199969973

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Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative
engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers, composers, players, critics, and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and
discourses of music, noise, speech, and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, philosophy, and additional disciplines. With case studies
spanning Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe, sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here.

Foreword by Richard Leppert

Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"William Cheng tackles the wild west of game audio and conquers it with a combination of academic scrutiny, coupled by a gamer's unadulterated love of the art. Sound Play could very well be a turning point in the history of video game audio: the day when game audio came of age and inherited the mantle of serious art through the lens of scholarly analysis. With Sound Play, game audio finally has the academic credentials it needs to take its place among the other fine arts." --Christopher Tin, Grammy-winning video game music composer

"As addictive and energetically conceived as its subject matter, Sound Play enables even non-gamers to navigate the sonic waves and kinetic pleasures of story worlds that challenge us to rethink the complexities of human agency, identity politics, and embodied performance." --Maria Tatar, author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and editor of The Annotated Brothers Grimm

"A major contribution from a bold and brilliant new voice with exceptional interdisciplinary range. Cheng is a serious player: his virtuosic flair is fully matched by his technical rigor and depth of interpretive insight. Sound Play confirms that the New Musicology is truly out of beta." --Kiri Miller, author of Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

"Compelling from the first page, Sound Play is an engaging and sophisticated study of how audio-whether in the form of music, voices, noises, or effects-crucially shapes our experience of video games, and how gaming deeply informs our engagement with sound. But more than that, William Cheng's excellent new book demonstrates how the interrelation of sound and play in video games challenges us to think deeply about what it means to live in a world in which the virtual and the real are increasingly intertwined." --Mark Katz, author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music and Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ

"Captivating and inspired, probing and nimbly persuasive, playful yet bursting with profound insight, Sound Play is virtually and absolutely indispensable." --Charles Hiroshi Garrett, author of Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century and editor-in-chief of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition

About the Author

William Cheng is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (April 3, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199969973
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199969975
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.2 x 0.8 x 6.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,259,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #379 in Ethnomusicology (Books)
- #525 in Digital Art
- #863 in Computer Graphics

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William Cheng

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William Cheng is Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. His books include Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019), and Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford, 2019, coedited with Gregory Barz). He serves as a coeditor of University of Michigan Press's "Music & Social Justice" series.

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Michael L Austin

Sound Play is an excellent academic book for both the experienced gamer who wants ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2014

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Sound Play is an excellent academic book for both the experienced gamer who wants to learn more about reading video games as a social text and for scholars and students who want to learn more about the increasing social significance of video games. Rather than discussing music and sound on a more surface level (as one might find in a trade book), this book takes a deep look into implications of the use (and misuse) of video game sound and music. It's definitely not stogy and jargon-laden, but it's very smart, astute, and frankly, fun to read.

As someone who rarely finds time to play video games, I found it particularly helpful that Cheng carefully and insightfully walks you, the reader, through the games he discusses as if he were sitting next to you as you played them, giving even the most unexperienced player/ludomusicologist a remarkably clear picture of how the music, ambient sound, voice acting (really any audio) in these games colors a critical reading of a video game. Not only are music and sound considered in terms of their impact on immersion and the player's experience, he digs into complex issues of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, identity performativity and role-playing, ethics, and the significance of video game music and sound in a critique of these issues. His examples are among the most astute hermeneutic readings of video games and their sonic elements that I've found (I'm particularly impressed with his discussion of online player discussions regarding gender and sexual politics in TF2 found in Chapter 5). It's clearly among the best books on video game music and sound.

I would STRONGLY recommend this book for music courses in which video games are discussed and for media studies courses of all sorts. Although Cheng expertly discusses music and sound in games in great detail (and includes some great transcriptions of excerpts from a few game scores), it's not too technical for non-musicians. In fact, I've already recommended the book to several of my students by virtue of the writing alone. Cheng is a beautiful writer; his prose is clear and concise, yet he paints a vivid picture in the imagination of the reader (which is apropos considering the subtitle of the book).

2 people found this helpful

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Louis

Less about Cheng and his game experience. And more about the people.

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2018

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As someone familiar with these games. It was hard to find any in game analysis that was worthwhile and convincing. I advice others to spend some time in these games, so you may detox yourself from this text mere fiction.

Secondly.
I often felt that Cheng’s described gaming communities were left in abstraction due to broad generalizations. He tried to redeem his mininal approach to properly representing such communities, by dedicating part of his last chapter too it.

Helpful

Elizabeth Medina-Gray

This may very well be my favorite book about video game music and sound to date

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2014

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This may very well be my favorite book about video game music and sound to date. Cheng's writing is clear, engaging, and sprinkled with game-inspired fun (my favorite bit of prose involves a description of Silent Hill's soundscape as an "acoustic katamari"). More than that, Cheng's ideas about particular video games, game sound, and players -- informed both by ethnographic research and deep probing of his own experiences -- are amazingly insightful and provocative. Over the course of reading this book, I encountered critical questions and issues I had never closely considered, and I gained new perspective on some familiar and unfamiliar games and situations. And while this book is highly valuable from an academic perspective, it is also approachable -- vastly more so than many other academic books I have read. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in video games, game music/sound, and the people who play games!

One person found this helpful

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William Gibbons

Wide-Ranging and Insightful Analysis

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2014

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This book is a thought-provoking, well-written, and diverse look at the many roles music and sound play in video games. In Sound Play, Cheng (an award winning professor of music at Dartmouth College) focuses not on the technological aspects of game music, or even in its history, but rather on the effects of music and sound on players. The topics he addresses touch on many of the most pressing issues in gaming today, and how those topics intersect with the aural dimension of gaming: moral dilemmas reflected in the music of Fallout 3, gender issues in online play in Team Fortress 2, the nature of creative musical performance in The Lord of the Rings Online, and so on. The result is an always intriguing book that should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the serious study of game music, or of the role of games in modern culture.

One person found this helpful

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nufan312

I found this book to be a fascinating read. ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2014

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I found this book to be a fascinating read. It is a thoughtful, articulate examination of music and sound in a range of video games, and makes you realize just how much the games we play extend to "real-world" political and social issues. You don't need to be a video game enthusiast to get something out of this book. It's a worthwhile read for anyone interested in music and contemporary society.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

Wonderful selections by Cheng; very interesting read!

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BardicKnowledge

My new first recommendation

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2014

This book has become my first recommendation for anyone interested in studying game music in any context, whether as an academic or as a hobbyist. Will manages to tell engaging stories while sharing years of research -- the book is both entertaining and informative, a rarity in academic literature. Even if the reader isn't intimately familiar with each of the games that serve as case studies, Will's writing is so inviting previous experience with any one game under discussion (for instance, I am yet to play Lord o the Rings Online) is by no means required. Sound Play has set the new bar to which all of the research in this area should aspire, and I'm happy to recommend it.

One person found this helpful

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