The Oxford Handbook Of Video Game Music And Sound

"The music and sounds of video games have become an inescapable part of our world. Not only do these sonic elements profoundly shape the experiences of billions of players every day, but also the soundscapes of games have stretched out from our living rooms to encompass spaces as diverse as pinball arcades, concert halls, museums, and classrooms across the globe. Research on game music and sound is equally diverse-a vibrant, innovative, and multifaceted field that incorporates approaches from media studies, musicology, sound studies, music theory, psychology, and more. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars and practitioners from around the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound features nearly 50 chapters on topics ranging from the earliest pinball machines to the latest in virtual reality technology. The resulting volume provides both a comprehensive introduction to the study of game audio and an indispensable resource for experts"--

As audiences are increasingly no longer solely listeners but also active producer-consumers, and as video games and other interactive systems increasingly permeate our daily lives, understanding interactivity and its impact on the audience has never been more important. A collection of newly commissioned chapters on interactivity in music and sound edited by preeminent scholars in the field, this book marks the beginning of a journey into understanding the ways in which we interact with sound, and offers a new set of analytical tools for the growing field of interactive audio. What does it mean to interact with sound? How does interactivity alter our experience as creators and listeners? What makes interactive audio different from non-interactive audio? Where does interacting with audio fit into our understanding of sound and music? What does the future hold for interactive media when it comes to our musical and sonic experiences? And how do we begin to approach interactive audio from a theoretical perspective? The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio answers these questions by exploring the full range of interactive audio in video games, performance, education, environmental design, toys, and artistic practice. Examining these questions from a range of approaches -- technological, emotional, psychological, and physical -- the book provides a thorough overview of the fascinating experience of interactive sound.

Bringing together dozens of leading scholars from across the world to address topics from pinball to the latest in virtual reality, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound is the most comprehensive and multifaceted single-volume source in the rapidly expanding field of game audio research.

Music is a central component of video games. This book provides methods and concepts for understanding how game music works.

Do you want to learn everything you need to know to be a fantastic video game music composer? The Game Music Handbook is for you. This book takes readers on a journey through many of the greatest video game soundscapes to date, discussing key concepts and technical practices for how to create top-level game scores. It organizes game scoring techniques into an applicable methodology that gives readers a clear picture of how to design interactive elements, conceive and create a score, and implement it into the game. Readers will gain a solid understanding of the core techniques for composing video game music, the conceptual differences that separate it from other compositional fields, as well as many advanced techniques and topics essential to excellent game music scoring. These topics include using music to design emotional arc for nonlinear timelines, the relationship between music and sound design, music and immersion, discussion of the player's interaction with audio, and more. For beginning composers, this book makes the learning process as clear as possible. However, it also offers invaluable information for intermediate to advanced readers. It includes discussion of game state and its effect on player interaction, a composer-centric lesson on programming, as well as information on how to work with version control, visual programming languages, procedural audio, and more. It also offers indispensable knowledge about advanced reactive music concepts, scoring for emergent games, music for VR, and other important topics. Overall, this book explores the practical application of player and music interaction through the examination of various techniques employed in games throughout video game history to enhance immersion, emphasize emotion, and create compelling interactive experiences.

The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music offers a state-of-the-art cross-section of the most field-defining topics and debates in computer music today. A unique contribution to the field, it situates computer music in the broad context of its creation and performance across the range of issues - from music cognition to pedagogy to sociocultural topics - that shape contemporary discourse in the field. Fifty years after musical tones were produced on a computer for the first time, developments in laptop computing have brought computer music within reach of all listeners and composers. Production and distribution of computer music have grown tremendously as a result, and the time is right for this survey of computer music in its cultural contexts. An impressive and international array of music creators and academics discuss computer music's history, present, and future with a wide perspective, including composition, improvisation, interactive performance, spatialization, sound synthesis, sonification, and modeling. Throughout, they merge practice with theory to offer a fascinating look into computer music's possibilities and enduring appeal.

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an instigator of experimental aesthetics, "mobile music" opens up a space for studying the momentous transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, the two volumes cover a large swath of the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds suffusing the soundscapes of mobility. Volume 2 investigates the ramifications of mobile music technologies on musical/sonic performance and aesthetics. Two core arguments are that "mobility" is not the same thing as actual "movement" and that artistic production cannot be absolutely sundered from the performances of quotidian life. The volume's chapters investigate the mobilization of frequency range by sirens and miniature speakers; sound vehicles such as boom cars, ice cream trucks, and trains; the gestural choreographies of soundwalk pieces and mundane interactions with digital media; dance music practices in laptop and iPod DJing; the imagery of iPod commercials; production practices in Turkish political music and black popular music; the aesthetics of handheld video games and chiptune music; and the mobile device as a new musical instrument and resource for musical ensembles.

"Music has been a vital part of leisure activity across time and cultures. Contemporary commodification, commercialization, and consumerism, however, have created a chasm between conceptualizations of music making and numerous realities in our world. From a broad range of perspectives and approaches, this handbook explores avocational involvement with music as an integral part of the human condition. The chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure present myriad ways for reconsidering and refocusing attention back on the rich, exciting, and emotionally charged ways in which people of all ages make time for making music. The contexts discussed are broadly Western, including an eclectic variety of voices from scholars across fields and disciplines, framing complex and multifaceted phenomena that may be helpfully, enlighteningly, and perhaps provocatively framed as music making and leisure. This volume may be viewed as an attempt to reclaim music making and leisure as a serious concern for, amongst others, policy makers, scholars, and educators who perhaps risk eliding some or even most of the ways in which music - a vital part of human existence - is integrated into the everyday lives of people. As such, this handbook looks beyond the obvious, asking readers to consider anew, "What might we see when we think of music making as leisure?""--publisher's website