Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination

by William Cheng

Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers, composers, players, critics, and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and discourses of music, noise, speech, and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, philosophy, and additional disciplines. With case studies spanning 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.


Foreword by Richard Leppert

Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico

Genres: Music, Video Games

264 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2014

Reviews

[Henna-Juulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very broad look into how music and sound in video games interact with players as well as how sound and music created by players affects the game world and other players. While Cheng's deep dive into his specifically chocen games are fascinating and thought provoking it doesn't really create any new theories to be applied outside the book. Yet I recommend it for anyone who is interested in video game studies and video game music.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book cover to cover right after it came out and I found it utterly engrossing. You don't have to be a video game enthusiast to appreciate Cheng's insightful analysis of the role of music and sound in our casual complicity with violence (through his example of Fallout 3 in Chapter 1) nor do you need to be an opera fan to appreciate his discussion of the opera scene in Final Fantasy VII (Chapter 2). Instead, what Cheng does is show how music criticism and games have much to teach each other about the ethical and psychological consequences of music, sound, play, and violence in our moment of the early 21st century. Every chapter has something valuable to say about how the immersive sonic environment of video games is changing our world. I was especially impressed by his discussion of perception of feminine voices in group play and their ramifications for closets of all kinds in Chapter 4. Taken with his discussion on musical trolling in Lord of the Rings Online (Chapter 5), and Cheng's book is especially timely as new revelations of harassment for women in video game industry emerge on a regular basis. This book should appeal to readers well beyond the musicology and video game studies.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're a fan of video games and video game design and theory, you'll definitely enjoy this book. Lots of great details about how music and sound relates to games, and issues that come up from using sound in different ways.

I admit, I was looking for something slightly different -- more of an analysis of the different original music specifically composed for video games, which is definitely not what is going on here. I also felt the author's writing style was stilted and filled with far too many big words ("sesquipedalian", which seemed too ironic to use here, but is actually the word for this case...) I don't normally have an issue with that, but everything just seemed far too academic -- he cited about 500 works for a 175-page book. That's insane. Also, the use of the phrase "ludic"! It was everywhere!

Anyway, those who are interested in video games more than music will find this a valuable read, as long as you're prepared for a pretty academic view and a lot of long-winded digressions.

[June Bash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book about video game music/audio aesthetics, how we interact with game sound, and their perhaps surprising repercussions in the real world. Cheng focuses on five case studies from Fallout 3, Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2.

Although the chapter on Team Fortress 2 was fascinating in its own way, I wasn't as interested in it since I'm more focused on music and sound design; that chapter offered a look more at the social aspects of voice chat in games.

I will say that the writing is very academic and at times seems just a little bit overly verbose, but for the most part he has a beautiful and clever writing voice that made it much more of a joy to read than most academic prose. I'll probably be using this as a supplementary text in the class I'm building on video game music.

[Melos Han-Tani · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun read looking at the role of sound and music in five games (and a few more) - Fallout 3, Final Fantasy 6, Silent Hill, Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2.

Some ideas I found interesting were the similarities between Silent Hill, horror games, and the horror genre of film - in terms of turning 'lo-fi' practices into positive and good design practices, and the ways in which the usages of sound in LOTR:O bring to light the quickness of players to want to incorporate real-life social hierarchies of musicianship into a fantasy simulation.

Other interesting ideas were the discussion on Fallout 3 and how its radio system initially simulates a fictional community, or how radio stations in games (and more generally, music in visual media) can juxtapose in ironic or violent ways (calm music scoring a murder scene or gunfight, etc.)