This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Music Research Seminars”
Abstract
This presentation puts the music of two media forms in dialogue – video games and theme parks. Both media forms have found huge popularity in the Twenty-First Century, attracting mass audiences and substantial corporate investment.
While video game music has received concentrated academic attention for over twenty years, in that time, theme park music has only attracted minimal academic attention. Nevertheless, video games and theme parks share many similar concerns. Crucial aspects of motion and movement, space and reality, control and modularity, nostalgia and memory, cultural representation, roleplay, modes of listening, and so on, are all thematized in both. And, of course, games and theme parks exist as part of the ‘franchise’ era where stories, characters and worlds spread across many media forms.
This presentation, drawing on work of ludomusicologists including James Ellis, Elizabeth Medina-Gray, Stephanie Lind and Michiel Kamp; theme park music scholars like Dan White and Gregory Camp; and franchise music thinkers like Will Farmer, aims to evolve the discussion of music in these media formats. It considers what theme parks can learn from listening to video games, and vice versa.
About the speaker
Tim Summers is Associate Professor of Music at Royal Holloway University of London.
He teaches and researches music in modern popular culture, with particular interests in music and video games, multimedia franchises and theme parks.
His work seeks to understand the musical experiences that mass media provide for the huge audiences they address.
His publications include Understanding Video Game Music, Pixel Soundtracks: Exploring Video Game Music Through Twenty Games, and The Queerness of Video Game Music.
Tim’s current projects include a theory of music in the pop-culture franchise, and a book on music in Disneyland.
He continues to organize conferences on game music and sound as part of the Ludomusicology Research Group.
Performing Arts Research Seminars are hosted by SPARC (Sound Practice and Research at City St George’s) in the Department of Performing Arts at City St George’s, University of London. They bring together world-leading artists, practitioners, and scholars in the broad fields of performing arts.
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