Sound Play - Cheng, William; - Prospero Internet Bookshop

Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
 
Product details:

ISBN13:9780199969968
ISBN10:0199969965
Binding:Hardback
No. of pages:262 pages
Size:163x239x20 mm
Weight:578 g
Language:English
Illustrations: 12 music examples, 46 figures, and 9 tables
0
Category:

Sound Play

Video Games and the Musical Imagination
 
Publisher: OUP USA
Date of Publication:
 
Normal price:

Publisher's listprice:
GBP 140.00
Estimated price in HUF:
73 500 HUF (70 000 HUF + 5% VAT)
Why estimated?
 
Your price:

66 150 (63 000 HUF + 5% VAT )
discount is: 10% (approx 7 350 HUF off)
The discount is only available for 'Alert of Favourite Topics' newsletter recipients.
Click here to subscribe.
 
Availability:

 
  Piece(s)

 
Short description:

Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's engagements with audio phenomena in video games-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic musical performances to verbal sexual harassment.

Long description:
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.

As addictive and energetically conceived as its subject matter, Sound Play enables even non-gamers to navigate the sonic waves and kinetic pleasures of story worlds that challenge us to rethink the complexities of human agency, identity politics, and embodied performance.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by Richard Leppert
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Tune at the End of the World
Chapter 2: How Celes Sang
Chapter 3: Dead Ringers
Chapter 4: Role-Playing toward a Virtual Musical Democracy
Chapter 5: The Wizard, the Troll, and the Fortress
Epilogue
End Notes
Works Cited
Index