Sonic Identity at the Margins

Sonic Identity at the Margins
Author: Joanna Love
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2023-07-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1501368826

Papers from the conference "Contested Frequencies," held at the University of Richmond (Va.) in 2019.

Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games

Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games
Author: Kate Galloway
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2024-11-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1040135374

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.

Pixel Soundtracks

Pixel Soundtracks
Author: Tim Summers
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-07-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1538192772

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

The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction
Author: Mark Bould
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040042953

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

From Blues to Beyoncé
Author: Alexis McGee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2024-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438496516

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.

Sonic Bodies

Sonic Bodies
Author: Julian Henriques
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2011-09-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1441163468

The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, every night, sound systems stage dancehall sessions for the crowd to share the immediate, intensive and immersive visceral pleasures of sonic dominance. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature sound of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "sets" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks to play; and MCs(DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates - at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in a disembodied mind, that communication is an exchange of information, and that meaning is only ever representation.

Sonic Possible Worlds

Sonic Possible Worlds
Author: Salomé Voegelin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-06-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1623566959

Inspired by its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of game design, Salomé Voegelin adapts and develops “possible world theory” in relation to sound. David K Lewis' Possible World is juxtaposed with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's life-world, to produce a meeting of the semantic and the phenomenological at the place of listening. The central tenet of Sonic Possible Worlds is that at present traditional musical compositions and contemporary sonic outputs are approached and investigated through separate and distinct critical languages and histories. As a consequence, no continuous and comparative study of the field is possible. In Sonic Possible Worlds, Voegelin proposes a new analytical framework that can access and investigate works across genres and times, enabling a comparative engagement where composers such as Henry Purcell and Nadia Boulanger encounter sound art works by Shilpa Gupta and Christina Kubisch and where the soundscape compositions of Chris Watson and Francisco López resound in the visual worlds of Louise Bourgeois.

Magician of Sound

Magician of Sound
Author: Jessie Fillerup
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520379888

French composer Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a magician, conjurer, and illusionist. Scholars have been aware of this historical curiosity, but none so far have explained why Ravel attracted such critiques or what they might tell us about how to interpret his music. Magician of Sound examines Ravel's music through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre, orchestral effects, figure/ground relationships, and impressions of motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology, philosophy, and the history of magic, Jessie Fillerup develops an approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's fascination with machines and creates compelling links between his music and other forms of aesthetic illusion, from painting and poetry to fiction and phantasmagoria. Fillerup analyzes scenes of enchantment and illusory effects in Ravel's most popular works, including Boléro, La Valse, Daphnis et Chloé, and Rapsodie espagnole, relating his methods and musical effects to the practice of theatrical conjurers. Drawing on a rich well of primary sources, Magician of Sound provides a new interdisciplinary framework for interpreting this enigmatic composer, linking magic and music.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
Author: Michael Bull
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 896
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1501338773

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.

In the Blink of an Ear

In the Blink of an Ear
Author: Seth Kim-Cohen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1441183078

An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present Marcel Duchamp famously championed a "non-retinal" visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In the Blink of an Ear is the first book to ask why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp's conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself-or as the unwanted child of music-artist and theorist Seth Kim-Cohen relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts. Applying key ideas from poststructuralism, deconstruction, and art history, In the Blink of an Ear suggests that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation, and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed - or, in many cases, completely rejected - the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm. Starting in 1948, the simultaneous examples of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer initiated a sonic theory-in-practice, fusing clement Greenberg's media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception. Subsequently, the "sound-in-itself" tendency has become the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. Engaged with critical texts by Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Friedrich Kittler, Jean François Lyotard, and Jacques Attali, among others, Seth Kim-Cohen convincingly argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting sound-in-itself in favor of a reading of sound's expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality. At the same time, this important book establishes the principles for a nascent non-cochlear sonic practice, embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political, and the technological. Artists discussed include: George Brecht John Cage Janet Cardiff Marcel Duchamp Bob Dylan Valie Export Luc Ferrari Jarrod Fowler Jacob Kirkegaard Alvin Lucier Robert Morris Muddy Waters John Oswald Marina Rosenfeld Pierre Schaeffer Stephen Vitiello La Monte Young