Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games brings together a range of perspectives that explore how music and sound in video games interact with virtual and real environments, often in innovative and unexpected ways. Drawing on a range of game case studies and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors consider the sonic environment in games as its own storytelling medium. Highlighting how dynamic video game soundscapes respond to players’ movements, engage them in collaborative composition, and actively contribute to worldbuilding, the chapters discuss topics including genre conventions around soundscape design, how sonic environments shape players’ perceptions, how game sound and music model ecological processes and nonhuman relationships, and issues of cultural and geographic representation. Together, the essays in this volume bring game music and sound into the environmental humanities and transform our understanding of sonic environments as an essential part of storytelling in interactive media. Engaging a wide variety of game genres and communities of play, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, media studies, critical game studies, popular culture, and sound studies.

A wide-ranging survey of video game music creation, practice, perception and analysis - clear, authoritative and up-to-date.

Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games brings together a range of perspectives that explore how music and sound in video games interact with virtual and real environments, often in innovative and unexpected ways. Drawing on a range of game case studies and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors consider the sonic environment in games as its own storytelling medium. Highlighting how dynamic video game soundscapes respond to players' movements, engage them in collaborative composition, and actively contribute to worldbuilding, the chapters discuss topics including genre conventions around soundscape design, how sonic environments shape players' perceptions, how game sound and music model ecological processes and nonhuman relationships, and issues of cultural and geographic representation. Together, the essays in this volume bring game music and sound into the environmental humanities and transform our understanding of sonic environments as an essential part of storytelling in interactive media. Engaging a wide variety of game genres and communities of play, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, media studies, critical game studies, popular culture, and sound studies.

A distinguishing feature of video games is their interactivity, and sound plays an important role in this: a player's actions can trigger dialogue, sound effects, ambient sound, and music. This book introduces readers to the various aspects of game audio, from its development in early games to theoretical discussions of immersion and realism.

An examination of the player's experience of sound in video games and the many ways that players interact with the sonic elements in games. In Playing with Sound, Karen Collins examines video game sound from the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonic aspects—which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, and interface sounds—both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning is found, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in the space of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies and philosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive sound experience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening without interacting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive and consumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding of the world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodal experience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating an emotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in which sound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions with sound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices that use elements from games in sonic performances.

Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments researches both how game sound affects a player psychologically, emotionally, and physiologically, and how this relationship itself impacts the design of computer game sound and the development of technology. This compilation also applies beyond the realm of video games to other types of immersive sound, such as soundscape design, gambling machines, emotive and fantastical sound to name a few. The application for this research is wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and of primary importance for academics and practitioners searching for the right sounds.

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.