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SOUND PLAY: VIDEO GAMES AND THE MUSICAL IMAGINATION

William Cheng



 

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.

 

PUBLICATION DETAILS

LANGUAGE

BINDING

EDITION

ISBN

YEAR

PAGES

English

Paperback

Illustrated Edition

9780199969975

2014

264

English

Hardcover

Illustrated Edition

9780199969968

2014

262

English

eBook

Illustrated Edition

N/A

2014

264

 

TAGS


Publishers: #OxfordUniversityPress (Oxford University Press)

Languages: #English

Year: #Year2014


Companies:

N/A


Public Figures:

N/A


Games:

#Fallout (Fallout 3)

#FinalFantasy (#FinalFantasyVI [Final Fantasy 6, FF6, FFVI, Final Fantasy VI)

#LordOfTheRingsOnline (Lord of the Rings Online)

#SilentHill (Silent Hill)

#TeamFortress (Team Fortress 2)


Misc:

N/A

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