Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford Music / Media)

Sound Play is an excellent academic book for both the experienced gamer who wants to learn more about reading video games as a social text and for scholars and students who want to learn more about the increasing social significance of video games. Rather than discussing music and sound on a more surface level (as one might find in a trade book), this book takes a deep look into implications of the use (and misuse) of video game sound and music. It's definitely not stogy and jargon-laden, but it's very smart, astute, and frankly, fun to read.As someone who rarely finds time to play video games, I found it particularly helpful that Cheng carefully and insightfully walks you, the reader, through the games he discusses as if he were sitting next to you as you played them, giving even the most unexperienced player/ludomusicologist a remarkably clear picture of how the music, ambient sound, voice acting (really any audio) in these games colors a critical reading of a video game. Not only are music and sound considered in terms of their impact on immersion and the player's experience, he digs into complex issues of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, identity performativity and role-playing, ethics, and the significance of video game music and sound in a critique of these issues. His examples are among the most astute hermeneutic readings of video games and their sonic elements that I've found (I'm particularly impressed with his discussion of online player discussions regarding gender and sexual politics in TF2 found in Chapter 5). It's clearly among the best books on video game music and sound.I would STRONGLY recommend this book for music courses in which video games are discussed and for media studies courses of all sorts. Although Cheng expertly discusses music and sound in games in great detail (and includes some great transcriptions of excerpts from a few game scores), it's not too technical for non-musicians. In fact, I've already recommended the book to several of my students by virtue of the writing alone. Cheng is a beautiful writer; his prose is clear and concise, yet he paints a vivid picture in the imagination of the reader (which is apropos considering the subtitle of the book).

This may very well be my favorite book about video game music and sound to date. Cheng's writing is clear, engaging, and sprinkled with game-inspired fun (my favorite bit of prose involves a description of Silent Hill's soundscape as an "acoustic katamari"). More than that, Cheng's ideas about particular video games, game sound, and players -- informed both by ethnographic research and deep probing of his own experiences -- are amazingly insightful and provocative. Over the course of reading this book, I encountered critical questions and issues I had never closely considered, and I gained new perspective on some familiar and unfamiliar games and situations. And while this book is highly valuable from an academic perspective, it is also approachable -- vastly more so than many other academic books I have read. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in video games, game music/sound, and the people who play games!

This book is a thought-provoking, well-written, and diverse look at the many roles music and sound play in video games. In Sound Play, Cheng (an award winning professor of music at Dartmouth College) focuses not on the technological aspects of game music, or even in its history, but rather on the effects of music and sound on players. The topics he addresses touch on many of the most pressing issues in gaming today, and how those topics intersect with the aural dimension of gaming: moral dilemmas reflected in the music of Fallout 3, gender issues in online play in Team Fortress 2, the nature of creative musical performance in The Lord of the Rings Online, and so on. The result is an always intriguing book that should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the serious study of game music, or of the role of games in modern culture.

As someone familiar with these games. It was hard to find any in game analysis that was worthwhile and convincing. I advice others to spend some time in these games, so you may detox yourself from this text mere fiction.Secondly.I often felt that Cheng’s described gaming communities were left in abstraction due to broad generalizations. He tried to redeem his mininal approach to properly representing such communities, by dedicating part of his last chapter too it.

I found this book to be a fascinating read. It is a thoughtful, articulate examination of music and sound in a range of video games, and makes you realize just how much the games we play extend to "real-world" political and social issues. You don't need to be a video game enthusiast to get something out of this book. It's a worthwhile read for anyone interested in music and contemporary society.

Wonderful selections by Cheng; very interesting read!

This book has become my first recommendation for anyone interested in studying game music in any context, whether as an academic or as a hobbyist. Will manages to tell engaging stories while sharing years of research -- the book is both entertaining and informative, a rarity in academic literature. Even if the reader isn't intimately familiar with each of the games that serve as case studies, Will's writing is so inviting previous experience with any one game under discussion (for instance, I am yet to play Lord o the Rings Online) is by no means required. Sound Play has set the new bar to which all of the research in this area should aspire, and I'm happy to recommend it.