This book offers a comprehensive overview of how video game sound and music represent cultures, spaces and personal identifications. Focusing on the concept of identity, the volume brings together issues as diverse as belonging to an ethnic or cultural group, identifying with certain sexualities or being able to deduce the historical or geographical context of a game. This volume explores whether the musical and sound identities linked to video games are based on clichés and stereotyped arrangements that span cultures and times. It includes case studies that analyse the mechanisms used by game producers, composers and sound designers to characterise and represent different identities to broad audiences of potential players, as well as how the players perceive these sonic inputs. The book is organized into three main sections, covering topics as the representation of historical periods, musical stereotypes of cultures from different geographic locations, representations of identity in fictional spaces and sonic depictions gender.
1. Introduction: Music, Sound and Identity in Video Games.- 2. A Few
Billion Timelines Might Take a While: Temporality, Disruption, Folklore and
Fantasy in Assassins Creed.-
3. Musical Representations of Tudor England in
Video Games.-
4. Mixed identities: Picturing Spanish Music in
World-travelling Games.-
5. Gaming the Lonely Road of Americana: Authenticity
and Identity in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.-
6. (Re)Packaging Japanese
Musical Identity in Ghost of Tsushima, Genshin Impact and kami.- 7.
Immersive Environments in Video Games as a New Stage for Popular Music
Performance.-
8. Spatializing Music in VR Experiences.-
9. Uncanny Landscapes
and Cosy Dungeons: from Sonic Spaces to the Musical Narratives of Elden Ring
and Dark Souls.-
10. Dehumanization through Sound: Musical Representations of
Fantastic Cultures in World of Warcraft.-
11. Queering Cloud: Music, Gender
and Sexuality in Video Games.-
12. Music and Masculinities in Game Space.-
13. Voice of the Fembot: An Analysis of the Subservient and Sinister Vocal
Depictions of the Gynoid in Sci-Fi Games.-
14. Ill Show You: K/DA and the
Role of the Virtual Popstar in the Games Industry.
Lidia López Gómez is a musicologist and violinist. She is Associate Lecturer at the Musicology Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Her main fields of research and teaching are audiovisual analysis, film music and music in video games. She has published in journals such as Games and Culture and Twentieth-Century Music, and edited the book Popular Music in Spanish Cinema (Routledge, 2023).
