Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. The virtual medium seemingly provides us with ample opportunities to behave and act out with relative safety and impunity. Or does it? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. Author William Cheng shows how the simulated environments of games empower designers, composers, players, and scholars to test and tinker with music, noise, speech, and silence in ways that might not be prudent or possible in the real world. In negotiating utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights from across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, and philosophy. With case studies that span 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.

This fun and engaging guide invites you to use sound-making as a collaborative, play-based practice in your early childhood classroom—first to transform tricky transition times and ultimately to support your children’s executive functioning development and social-emotional learning. The book offers techniques and ideas for every teacher to reach every child in their classroom including verbal, nonverbal, and special needs children. Easy to integrate into all standard early years curricula, it focuses on three basic elements of sound: pitch, volume, and duration. The book features an "overview of the school year" calendar and an implementation guide, in addition to a variety of suggested sound-making activities that start out simply and, through the course of the book, expand to engage children’s creativity in more dynamic ways. Creative Sound Play for Young Learners is key reading for any preschool teacher, leader, or parent.

This book is an interdisciplinary project that brings together ideas from aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, and music sociology as an expansion of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory on the aesthetics of play. This way of thinking focuses on an ontology of the process of musicking rather than an ontology of discovering fixed and static musical objects. In line with this idea, the author discusses the importance of participation and involvement in this process of musicking, whether as a listener or as a performer. Christensen then goes on to critique and update Gadamer's theory by presenting incompatibilities between it and recent theories of aesthetic emotions and embodiment. He proposes that emotions are ‘constructed’ rather than ‘caused’, that the mind uses a system of ‘filters’ to respond to sonic stimuli and thus constructs (via play) aesthetic feelings and experiences. In turn, this approach provides music with a route into the development of social capital and inter-subjective communication. This work builds on the hermeneutical steps already taken by Gadamer and those before him, continuing his line of thought beyond his work. It will be of great interest to scholars in music aesthetics as well as a variety of other music related fields, including music psychology, philosophy and science and technology studies.

Play provides young children with the opportunity to express their ideas, symbolize, and test their knowledge of the world. It provides the basis for inquiry in literacy, science, social studies, mathematics, art, music, and movement. Through play, young children become active learners engaged in explorations about themselves, their community, and their personal-social world. An Integrated Play-Based Curriculum for Young Children offers the theoretical framework for understanding the origins of an early childhood play-based curriculum and how young children learn and understand concepts in a social and physical environment. Distinguished author Olivia N. Saracho then explores how play fits into various curriculum areas in order to help teachers develop their early childhood curriculum using developmentally and culturally appropriate practice. Through this integrated approach, young children are able to actively engage in meaningful and functional experiences in their natural context. Special Features Include: Vignettes of children’s conversations and actions in the classroom Suggestions for activities and classroom materials Practical examples and guidelines End-of-chapter summaries to enhance and extend the reader’s understanding of young children By presenting appropriate theoretical practices for designing and implementing a play-based curriculum, An Integrated Play-Based Curriculum for Young Children offers pre-service teachers the foundational knowledge about the field, about the work that practitioners do with young children, and how to best assume a teacher’s role effectively.