Sonic Identity At The Margins

Sonic Identity at the Margins convenes the interdisciplinary work of 17 academics, composers, and performers to examine sonic identity from the 19th century to the present. Recognizing the myriad aspects of identity formation, the authors in this volume adopt methodological approaches that range from personal accounts and embodied expression to archival research and hermeneutic interpretation. They examine real and imagined spaces-from video games and monument sites to films and depictions of outer space-by focusing on sonic creation, performance, and reception. Drawing broadly from artistic and performance disciplines, the authors reimagine the roles played by music and sound in constructing notions of identity in a broad array of musical experiences, from anti-slavery songsters to Indigenous tunes and soundscapes, noise and multimedia to popular music and symphonic works. Exploring relationships between sound and various markers of identity-including race, gender, ability, and nationality-the authors explore challenging, timely topics, including the legacies of slavery, indigeneity, immigration, and colonial expansion. In heeding recent calls to decolonize music studies and confront its hegemonic methods, the authors interrogate privileged perspectives embedded in creating, performing, and listening to sound, as well as the approaches used to analyze these experiences.

Tim Summers provides an engaging introduction to video game music aimed at gamers, music enthusiasts, budding composers, music professionals, and anyone with an interest in the topic. Pixel Soundtracks explore a wide variety of topics, including: the history of game music sound technology and chip music interactive and generative music composition how game music tells stories, creates worlds & characters, and evokes emotions classical and pop music in games battle and boss music nostalgia, remakes, and fandom game music concerts and albums Summers dives deeply into twenty beloved games across the decades to illustrate crucial concepts. These games include Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., BioShock Infinite, Dark Souls III, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, and more. The book is separated into five stages and a “final boss,” and sections build off each other into increasingly broader topics—starting with the specifics of computer chips and ending with questions of game music’s engagement with identity. The “final boss” brings together ideas presented throughout the book. Based on the latest research, this book will allow readers to better understand the fantastic experiences and meanings that arise when games and music fuse together.

The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction provides an overview of the study of science fiction across multiple academic fields. It offers a new conceptualisation of the field today, marking the significant changes that have taken place in sf studies over the past 15 years. Building on the pioneering research in the first edition, the collection reorganises historical coverage of the genre to emphasise new geographical areas of cultural production and the growing importance of media beyond print. It also updates and expands the range of frameworks that are relevant to the study of science fiction. The periodisation has been reframed to include new chapters focusing on science fiction produced outside the Anglophone context, including South Asian, Latin American, Chinese and African diasporic science fiction. The contributors use both well- established critical and theoretical approaches and embrace a range of new ones, including biopolitics, climate crisis, critical ethnic studies, disability studies, energy humanities, game studies, medical humanities, new materialisms and sonic studies. This book is an invaluable resource for students and established scholars seeking to understand the vast range of engagements with science fiction in scholarship today.

From Blues to Beyoncé amplifies Black women's ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women's sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.

The field of Sound Studies has changed and developed dramatically over the last two decades involving a vast and dizzying array of work produced by those working in the arts, social sciences and sciences. The study of sound is inherently interdisciplinary and is undertaken both by those who specialize in sound and by others who wish to include sound as an intrinsic and indispensable element in their research. This is the first resource to provide a wide ranging, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary investigation and analysis of the ways in which researchers use a broad range of methodologies in order to pursue their sonic investigations. It brings together 49 specially commissioned chapters that ask a wide range of questions including; how can sound be used in current academic disciplines? Is sound as a methodological tool indispensable for Sound Studies and what can sound artists contribute to the discourse on methodology in Sound Studies? The editors also present 3 original chapters that work as provocative 'sonic methodological interventions' prefacing the 3 sections of the book.

An inspired application of Possible World theory to approach and interpret the acoustic environment, music and sound art.

Cultural hybridity is a celebrated hallmark of U.S. American music and identity. Yet hybrid music is all too often marked -and marketed - under a single racial label. Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that counter this convention; these projects instead foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the very face of the ghettoizing culture industry. Giving voice to four contemporary projects, author Tamara Roberts traces black/Asian engagements that reach across the United States and beyond: Funkadesi, Yoko Noge, Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, and Red Baraat. From Indian funk & reggae, to Japanese folk & blues, to jazz in various Asian and African traditions, to Indian brass band and New Orleans second line, these artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit - and yet exceed - multicultural frameworks built on essentialism and segregation. When these musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their individual racial identities. The Afro Asian artists discussed in this book splinter the expectations of racial determinism, and through improvisation and composition, articulate new identities and subjectivities in conversation with each other. These dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Resounding Afro Asia joins a growing body of literature that is writing Asian American artists back into U.S. popular music history, while highlighting interracial engagements that have fueled U.S. music making. The book will appeal to scholars of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those interested in race and popular music.

The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts sound examples and links to further resources. The collection is organized around six main themes: Sounding Art: The notion of sounding art, its relation to sound studies, and its evolution and possibilities. Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing about sound. Listening and Memory: Listening from different perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and technologically mediated listening. Acoustic Spaces, Identities and Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound. Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute methodologically and epistemologically to historiography. Sound Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way we make and access music has changed. With contributions from leading scholars and cutting-edge researchers, The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art is an essential resource for anyone studying the intersection of sound and art.