Unless otherwise noted, all events take place within the Theater of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at RPI

Friday, May 1, 2026

8:45–9:00 a.m. • Opening Remarks

9:00–10:00 a.m. • Sense and Spectrability

• Luis Matos-Tovar, “‘Hey, Listen!’ Is That a Ghost? Musical Specters and Haunting in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom”
Abstract

Derrida’s concept of hauntology (1994) pertains to how the past influences and manifests itself in the present. Within video games, the past manifests as literal ghosts (Janik 2019), ludic elements (Asling 2020), lost memories and futures (Ford 2021), and psychological themes (Skott and Skott-Bengston 2022). References to the past in video games by these scholars are exclusively linked to visual components, yet the soundscapes that envelop the virtual world are rich in memories from the past. Bridging the gap between ludomusicology and hauntology studies, I argue that music is a sonic representation of ghosts that haunt narrative across a video game series.
This paper focuses on musical specters in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017; BotW) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023; TotK). BotW visually and aurally haunts the world of TotK, most notably with the champions Mipha and Daruk and their musical themes. During Mipha’s cutscene in BOTW, her little brother Sidon is present. “Mipha’s Theme” (example 1) shares similar musical characteristics to Sidon’s, and when “Prince Sidon’s Theme” (example 2) is heard during his cutscene in TOTK, fragments of her are also heard. The half step motion between 5 and 6 is heard in both themes with a descending bassline. Mipha’s melody is shorter and has a descending chromatic bassline, while Sidon’s melody preserves the half step motion but is rhythmically elongated and has a descending diatonic bassline. Mipha, despite being physically absent in TotK, is aurally present in “Prince Sidon’s Theme,” and it is her death that haunts and connects the tracks together.

• Jordan Stokes, “Sense and Nonsense in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33”
Abstract

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive, 2025), has been justly lauded for its meticulous aesthetics, with critics heaping praise on the script, voice acting, art direction, and music. However, this carefully constructed order is leavened by calculated doses of nonsense, including babbling, surrealism, and AI-inflected machinic postmodernism. Song lyrics prattle meaninglessly (“kasoi dale ú” etc.), important items receive portmanteau names à la Jabberwocky (trebuchim, brulerum), a serpent made of flowers rears its head, which turns out to be a lighthouse.

Perhaps the only aspect of Clair Obscur which never lapses into nonsense is its music. But what would musical nonsense even be?

This paper answers that question by exploring the forms of nonsense listed above, and the ways in which they interact with various forms of art (i.e. text, images, and music). By cataloguing the nonsensical episodes in Clair Obscur, we can identify corresponding categories of nonsensical music – a set of musical paths-not-taken that throw interesting light on the sensical music that actually appears. Drawing on Richard Elliot’s account of musical nonsense and Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s account of literary nonsense, I argue that our ability to aestheticize nonsense depends on a rationalizing frame or ground through which we can force meaningless terms to participate in meaning-making. And this perhaps explains why the music of Clair Obscur never becomes nonsensical. Trying to tell a story about real emotions set in a defiantly unreal world, the developers use music as the rationalizing frame – the ultimate ground of the story’s underlying emotional truth.

10:00–10:45 a.m. • Play Outside Video Games

• Will Ayers, “Microtonal Board Games: Isomorphic Keyboards and Fretboards as Musical Play Spaces”
Abstract

In his original 2015 treatment of the keyboard as a “field of musical play,” Roger Moseley expresses a “ludomusical interest” in “enharmonic keyboard designs that invoke… isomorphic properties.” As Moseley (2016) notes, “At isomorphic keyboards, the spatial relationship between any two pitches is topologically equivalent regardless of transposition.” This means that chord shapes (along with other musical constructions) are easily transposable in these spaces, allowing a transference of performer abilities across various play contexts. Ecological approaches (largely inspired by Gibson) have appeared in the ludomusicological literature applied to the study of video games (Grimshaw, Kamp, and Grasso), expressing that virtual/sonic environments afford particular (and varied) player responses.
Applying De Souza’s theories of musical embodiment and gesture (2017) and his approach to mapping transformations on musical instruments (2017, 2018), this presentation offers an analysis of two microtonal pieces that afford divergent interpretations of isomorphic keyboard spaces in performance, “Preludio” from Henk Badings’s Suite van Kleine Stukken voor 31-Toons-Orgel and “Sundog” by Benton Roark for the Lumatone. Including preliminary allegories to board games and their musical antecedents and descendants, this presentation seeks to demonstrate that expressions of musical performance can ultimately influence our interpretation of traditional video game play, tracing the relationship between how we interact with virtual and physical environments. The examination of this allegory will continue by reintroducing this relationship into the realm of video game musical experiences.

• Lidia López Gómez, “Google Doodles as Ludic Interfaces for Musical Creation”
Abstract

Since 1998, Google Doodles have evolved from static illustrations into interactive experiences, ranging from playful visual animations to mini-games. In this presentation I will focus on their musical Doodles—those that allow users to create music “in the style of” Bach, Fischinger, or theremin virtuosa Clara Rockmore. Musical Doodles function as tools that transform the leading search engine into a playful interface for sonic experimentation, accessible even to users with minimal musical or game literacy (Van Elferen 2016). Their design—based on presets, simplified interaction models and algorithmic processes—ensures that any input yields a musically coherent result.
Drawing on comparative analysis and observational data from multiple musical Doodles, I will argue that these interfaces reconfigure practices of musical creation by merging play with sonic exploration. They also situate these activities within broader models of aesthetic and ludic listening (Kamp 2024), and within forms of transmusicking (Borgo 2013) that blur conventional distinctions between composing, performing, and listening. Nevertheless, although musical Doodles invite open-ended experimentation, the user’s freedom is subtly limited. To account for the particular kind of constrained agency these interfaces produce, I propose the concept of guided randomness: a form of system-driven variability that grants users the perception of open-ended musical choice while directing outcomes through predetermined rhythmic, timbral and visual frameworks. This concept captures the paradox at the core of these Doodles—simultaneously enabling creativity while delimiting it.

10:45–11:00 a.m. • Break

11:00–12:30 a.m. • Performance and Copyright

• Laura Intravia, “NEW GAME +: Orchestrating Video Game Music for Common Ensembles”
Abstract

Video game music in concert has existed since the 1980’s, and has exploded in popularity during the last several years. Not only are game studios themselves beginning to produce their own touring concerts, but community-led “gamer symphony” ensembles composed of dedicated amateur musicians who are passionate about gaming have begun popping up worldwide as well.
Arrangers and orchestrators for these concerts are presented with a unique challenge when writing for these common instrumentations: video game soundtracks are anything but common. With the availability of realistic VSTs, highly specialized remote recording musicians from all over the world and purely synthetic/electronic components, video game soundtracks are often full of unusual timbres and textures that make their soundscapes iconic and instantly recognizable.
In this presentation, I will:
1. explore practical and artistic considerations that arrangers must confront when transcribing VGM for new instrumentations
2. examine real-world examples and lessons learned in my own work as an arranger
3. examine the true role of the arranger as it relates to community volunteer groups.
While it is tempting to think that the arranger’s goal is merely to “simplify” the music for these players, I argue it is far more vital to expand upon the music, to make it interesting and fun to play. Performers of all skill levels give a more engaged performance when they know that their part is important, and interacts with the other players in a meaningful way–rather than simply being a boring afterthought to fill in the blanks.

• Femke Vandenberg, “The Practice of Gamified Concerts: Exploring the Experience of Live Music in Fortnite”
Abstract

As game worlds evolve into multifunctional social platforms, live music has increasingly migrated into their spaces (Arditi, 2024; Moritzen, 2022). From Fortnite’s Travis Scott and Marshmello events to more intimate performances in Roblox, games are becoming infrastructures for shared, synchronous musical experience. Within these ludic environments, the meaning of “live” performance shifts, which audiences participating as avatars and engaging through gamified elements.
This paper examines how the integration of live music into game environments reconfigures the practice of concert-going. This paper adopts a sociological theory-of-practice framework (Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012; Magaudda, 2011) to analyze how objects (digital platforms and instruments), representations (meanings of liveness and community), and doings (player competences and digital performance) co-constitute the experience of live music in game environments. Drawing on video-elicited interviews with Fortnite concert-goers, participants revisited self-recorded gameplay footage to narrate how their engagement unfolds, revealing the interplay between materiality, meaning, and social interaction.
By connecting insights from gaming scholarship (Steinkuehler, 2006; Chess & Consalvo, 2022; Taylor, 2002) with sociological theory on live music consumption (Roose & Vander Stichele, 2010; Benzecry & Collins, 2014; Vandenberg, 2022), this study situates concerts in games as emergent sociotechnical practices, emphasizing the social dynamics of gaming and the hybrid cultural spaces where play, music, and interaction converge.

• Molly Hennig, “Copyright on Twitch and Collapsing Ontologies of Music in the Streaming Age”
Abstract

For the past ten years, the video game livestreaming platform Twitch.tv has held a fraught and shifting relationship with commercial copyrighted music due to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Record labels have repeatedly confronted Twitch on allowing unpermitted streaming of copyrighted music on the platform, all while users engage with copyrighted music both as part of the games they stream and the “personas” they perform for their viewers (Jackson 2023). Twitch, playing mediator between users and labels, enforces complaints from rights holders while offering alternative music for users’ streaming soundscapes. Meanwhile, ongoing copyright disputes still arise, resulting in deleted content, sporadically muted audio, banned users, and attempts at evading Twitch’s copyright detection.
I argue the precarity of using copyrighted music on Twitch results from a collapse of ontologies of music as activated by each ontology’s campaigner. Such ontologies include 1) music as resource to the streaming economy (Drott 2024), 2) music as asset to intellectual property law (Pistor 2019), 3) music as ludo-narrative device for video game media (Ivănescu 2024), and 4) music as performance to the Twitch streamer (Woodcock and Johnson 2019). Pre-existing ontologies of music clash on Twitch due to the platform’s hypermediality (Bolter and Grusin 2000), yielding two phenomena within Twitch’s soundscapes: streamer ambivalence and lingering silences. Twitch can therefore serve as example of the contingent positions and identities of music in today’s gaming and entertainment industry, as well as how individuals in platform societies work around contingency to create new forms of performance.

12:30–2:00 p.m. • Lunch

2:00–3:00 p.m. • Sports and Esports

• Jordan Zalis, “Intermediality, Lifestyle Branding, and Marketing in the NBA 2K Series”
Abstract

This paper examines how basketball video games have become important sites for lifestyle branding, marketing, and community building through music, sound, and musicianship. Focusing on the NBA 2K series, I examine three key moments where the involvement of an icon of popular music—in this case, Drake—blurred the boundaries between music, sports, and digital media: the 2015 unveiling of the Toronto Raptors’ redesigned uniforms at Drake’s OVO Fest (conducted in partnership with NBA 2K16); Noah “40” Shebib, Drake’s long-time producer, as co-curator of the NBA 2K17 soundtrack; and Drake’s appearance as a playable character in NBA 2K22. Drawing on theories of intermediality, which examines how different media forms interact and influence each other—a co-ordinated flow of expression and exchange—I demonstrate how these collaborations represent sophisticated cross-platform lifestyle marketing and branding strategies that unite record labels, sports franchises, and gaming companies. Crucially, music, in this context, is represented not merely through the aural dimension (soundtracks and songs) but through the musician’s body. More than simply providing background music, the soundscape of the NBA 2K series actively shapes how individuals experience basketball culture, often reproducing nationalist narratives alongside capitalist values—that is reinforcing a nationalist-capitalist hegemony. Thus, sport simulation games like NBA 2K are not merely a reflection of basketball culture but an active agent in the dynamic calculus of its visual, sonic, and cultural meanings, serving as a crucial node in its contemporary transnational community.

• Nic Vigilante, “STAR WALKIN’: Lil Nas X, Queerness, and the Contested Sound of Esports”
Abstract

In 2022, Lil Nas X declared: “I left my stamp on pop music, I left my stamp on culture… so now, I’ve decided to be the new president of League of Legends!” As the artist tapped to create the musical anthem for the 2022 League of Legends (LoL) World Championship, Lil Nas X ignited a firestorm over what esports should “sound like.” This paper examines Lil Nas X’s “STAR WALKIN’” and its contested place in the history of LoL Worlds anthems, demonstrating how this annual musical tradition operates as a definitional exercise for esports writ large. Drawing on ethnographic research in esports fan communities both on- and offline, I argue that the musical aesthetics of LoL Worlds anthems can help us better understand the racialized and gendered foundations of professional esports. Despite attempts by some LoL fans to position Lil Nas X as a community outsider (based largely, if implicitly, on his identity as a queer Black man) and his music as thus inappropriate for the Worlds anthem, his entire career has in fact been entangled with video games – from the intertwined origins of “Old Town Road” and Red Dead Redemption 2, to his 2020 concert within Roblox. By reading “STAR WALKIN’”’s composition and reception alongside Lil Nas X’s queerness and history of involvement with video games, we can better understand the contested place of esports as a cultural phenomenon.

3:00–3:45 p.m. • Temporality

• Mike D’Errico, “Suspended Worlds: Sound, Power, and Temporality in Elden Ring“””
Abstract

Elden Ring is a game defined by illusions of juxtaposition. Implied forces of “good” are pitted against forces of “evil”; light seems to compete with dark in both narrative storytelling and game design; and the assumed forward march of time contrasts with the stillness of ancient relics, artifacts, and the distant past. The music and soundscapes of the game epitomize this juxtaposition of movement and stasis. While a large portion of the exploration gameplay state includes ambient drones performed by delicate strings and pads, the title theme and boss battles present epic orchestral arrangements emblematic of the high fantasy genre of RPGs.
Crucially, however, the game persistently destabilizes these oppositions. As players assemble the game’s fragmented lore through artifact descriptions and environmental storytelling, clear-cut distinctions between past and present become increasingly uncertain. In this paper, I analyze contrasts between movement and stasis in the exploration sounds and boss battle music of Elden Ring to show how sound and music align with the game’s core messages and themes about time, history, and power. I consider the music and sound design in Elden Ring as a curated illusion, like many elements of the game’s lore and narrative design. Incorporating Deleuze’s concepts on the “movement-image” and the “time-image” with Virilio’s philosophy of “dromology”—in which the movement of time causes stillness itself to become an artifact—I argue that the perceived contrasts in musical temporality reinforce the game’s core concept of time as an element of power that is manipulated, suspended, or distorted in such a way that the dominant ideology can present its narrative and eternal and natural.

• Tiffany Eady, “Temporal Perception in Gaming System Startups”
Abstract

The Nintendo GameCube startup sound, only a few seconds long, transforms a technological delay into an aesthetic event. The startup sound’s descent from G to C, paired with other musical aspects, turns the act of waiting for a system to load into an experience of expectation. This paper begins with an overlooked question: why does waiting feel musical in games? While scholars such as Karen Collins and William Gibbons analyze how sound structures interactive time, and Jonathan Sterne examines the cultural sonification of technology, the temporal design of startup sounds remains largely unexamined. In the GameCube, the sequence not only signals machine readiness but also mediates between stillness and action, anticipation and immersion. This gap between sonic function and temporal aesthetic offers a way to understand how interactive media transforms delay into part of the ludic experience.
This paper argues that startup sounds operate as rituals of temporal transformation, converting technological latency into a meaningful threshold of play. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis, Héctor Zagal’s concept of ludic temporality, and Mark Grimshaw’s work on auditory immersion, I examine how musical elements encode readiness and transition. Using spectrographic visualization and frame-synchronized audiovisual mapping, I show how the perfect fourth descent (G–C) acts as a temporal cadence that resolves tension into activation. Comparative examples from PlayStation and Xbox systems demonstrate how each company cultivates a distinctive temporal feel through sonic branding. The startup sequence emerges as a form of musical world-building, in which time becomes a playable element.

3:45–4:00 p.m. • Break

4:00–5:00 p.m. • Keynote

5:00–7:30 p.m. • Dinner

8:00–9:30 p.m. • Concert

Saturday, May 2, 2026

9:00–10:30 a.m. • Posters and Game Demos

Posters

• Drake Eshleman, “Geometric Representation of Rhythm in A Dance of Fire and Ice”
• Thomas Wilson, “It’s Time to D-D-D-Dual! Mirroring forces in Live Yu-Gi-Oh! and Card Video Games”
• Karen M. Cook, “Whither Ludomusicology? An Ethics of Inclusion and Acknowledgment”
• Kenneth Froelich, “Play Making: Connecting Mechanisms of Music Composition and Analog Games”
• Marcos Acevedo-Arús, “Listening to Rhythm Game Charts”
• Ryan Thompson, “Koichi Sugiyama’s Nine Topics across Nine Albums: The Scene-Separated Symphonic Suites”
• Tyler Widener, “Rising from the Ashes: The Sublime Experience of Video Game Music”
• Jordan Johnson, “Why Does Water Music in Video Games Sound Like Water?”
• Cameron Gwynn, “Musical Agency and Embodiment in Super Mario Maker 2”
• Joseph Crisler, “‘Wait…You’re a Girl?!’: The Sound of Non-Hegemonic Masculinity in Video Game Music”
• Pamela Mason-Nguyen, “Gotta Learn ‘Em All!: Intertextual Learning in Pokémon Edutainment Games”

10:30–10:45 a.m. • Break

10:45–12:15 p.m. • Childhood

• Daniel Sozdashov, “Childness, Innocence, and Corruption: Topic and Trope Families in Video Game Music”
Abstract

This paper introduces two concepts—the topic family and the trope family—to examine relationships between topics in video game music. Building on Danuta Mirka’s definition of topic (Mirka 2014) and Robert Hatten’s definition of trope (Hatten 1994), each family is a set of stylistic references that 1) are organized on the grounds of a shared social signification (such as “military” or “dance”), and 2) have some overlap in the characteristics that define their appearance. Topic and trope families address the problems of integrating many closely-related topics in an analysis of musical meaning, each of which we might want to hear alone or contributing to a composite meaning (or both), depending on the circumstance. As our scholarly repertoire of topics grows, it becomes increasingly important to navigate their combination with methodological clarity.
By way of example, I describe “childness” in video game music, not as a single topic, but as a family that contains “lullaby,” “pedagogical music,” and “nursery rhyme” topics. Keeping these sources of meaning separate, while recognizing their similarities, allows us to appreciate the distinctions that arise in musical portrayals of childness when specific soundtracks emphasize lullaby characteristics versus nursery rhyme characteristics, for example. After “childness,” I describe “innocence” and “corruption” as families of tropes that mix “childness” with other topic families. In particular, I examine childness’s interaction with “ecclesiasticism” and “glitch” families to demonstrate how trope families provide a framework to handle large amounts of topics that variously reinforce and contradict each other.

• Logan Davis, “Playful Gear: Playdate, Teenage Engineering, and Fetishistic Cultures in Gaming”
Abstract

In 2022, the game publisher and software developer Panic Inc. released a retro-inspired handheld console named Playdate. This paper uses the Playdate to investigate the broader rise in popularity in nostalgic hardware as well as the politics and rhetoric around “gear” that has created a fetishistic social scene akin to those that form around particular synthesizers (Bates and Bennett 2025). Given the Playdate was designed in conjunction with Teenage Engineering – notable for creating the OP-1 synthesizer – I highlight how these kinds of consoles respond to broader trends in nostalgic gaming where companies attempt to elevate their remediation of older play by recreating physical, performative interfaces in what Mike D’errico calls “controllerism” (D’Errico 2022). Simultaneously subverting and complicating the culture of “bigger, better, faster” that often accompanies masculinized conversations about computing hardware, niche consoles are practiced ambivalently by reifying traditional, low-level programming practices as well as promoting accessible, open platforms for aspiring game developers and players. Companies like Teenage Engineering have managed to turn technical deficits into social desire. Demonstrating the shared cultural dynamics of synthesizers and consoles, I show how gaming gear is instantiated as a social process in which players form haptic and material intimacies with consoles by interfacing with a host of experiential and rhetorical positions utilized by hardware designers. As the release dates of major console generations grow further apart, unpacking the “incoherent aesthetics” of the Playdate illustrates a shift from hegemonic parties and highlights the fractional communities that exist in gaming culture (Galloway 2012).

• Marina Gallagher, “The Quest to Become a Real Boy: Music and Humanity in Lies of P”
Abstract

Korean soulslike Lies of P (Neowiz, 2023) is a bold reinterpretation of Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio that asks players to consider what separates humans from machines and whether a machine can be(come) human. The player controls P (Pinocchio) as he works to save the city of Krat from a deadly Petrification Disease and a horde of mechanical puppets that have been driven mad by a Puppet Frenzy. The game’s unspoken goal, however, is to become human: the player’s Humanity level increases as they interact with non-player characters (NPCs), complete Lying Quests, and listen to records they collect during their travels on a gramophone in Hotel Krat.
This paper examines Lies of P’s music in light of extant research on automata and mimesis (Anger and Vranken 2024; Reilly 2011) as well as music, gesture, and identity in video games (Ellis 2025). It asserts that the gramophone records are not merely a reward for helping the game’s NPCs, but rather play an important role in P’s journey to become human. Like the in-game gestures the player can perform and the compassion they show NPCs by telling what psychologists term “prosocial” lies (Lupoli et al. 2017), listening to the records is a mimetic act that allows P to forge an identity as a human. This is because the records produce what Tanberg et al. (2025) term “music-evoked autobiographical memories” of NPCs that the player has assisted throughout the game, eliciting strong emotional responses from the player and, by extension, P.

12:15–1:45 p.m. • Lunch

1:45–3:15 p.m. • Culture and Authenticity

• Marcis Bravo, “The Illusion of Paradise: Playing a Tourist in Pokémon’s Alola Region”
Abstract

Positioned almost equidistant between Japan and the United States, Hawaiʻi has linked economic and cultural exchange for hundreds of years. During the 19th century, as global powerhouses exerted imperial pressure on their neighbors and sea travel hastened, Hawaiʻi became a hub for ships crossing the Pacific. This created a crossroad between the East and the West that was paradoxically oppressed by both yet existed as neither. From the whaling and ranching industries to blackface minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley tunes, global influences overtook the islands’ existing culture much like the mongoose and myna overcame the native fauna. This in mind, I explore the impact of these extranational relations on not only the music of Hawaiʻi, but also the Japanese corporate perception of “authentic” Hawaiian music and the “glocalization” of what Japanese companies like Nintendo and GameFreak market as “authentic” to global consumers.
Building off of Gunn’s recent scholarship on the music of the Generation VII Pokémon games, I aim to dig deeper into the sociopolitical and economic processes from both Japan and the United States that contributed to the eventual creation of these games. I put myself in dialogue with scholars like Consalvo, Kahaleole Hall, Dirlik, Raes, and Iwabuchi in order to utilize these games as a window into such policies and ideologies. From Japanese emigration companies to transpacific tourism marketing, and from pre-WWII tension between the US and Japan to the concept of mukokuseki, I aim to examine the confluence of factors that made the “Alola” region (in)authentically Hawaiian.

• Lorena Alessandrini, “‘Tavern Music’: Medievalism, Celticism, and Liminality in Soundscapes of Fantasy RPGs”
Abstract

Taverns are the meeting places par excellence in medieval-inspired RPGs: frozen in an undetermined space and time, inns are liminal spaces in digital other-worlds where virtual communities gather, socialize, and rest in-between quests. In this paper, I will explore how taverns’ spatial-temporal liminality, rooted in an imaginary medium aevum, is aurally evoked in video game music. More specifically, building on recent works by James Cook, Karen Cook, Stephanie Lind, and Mariana López, I will investigate the intersection of medievalism and Celticism in “tavern music,” arguing that the pervasiveness of “Celtic folk” music in medievalist media facilitates the players’ transition between virtual – and sonic – worlds: in-game and out-of-game, past and present, folk and medieval. Focusing on a selection of case studies, my paper will compare the soundscapes of three medieval-fantasy RPG franchises (“The Witcher,” “World of Warcraft,” and “Dragon Age”), examining how the conflation of “early,” “folk,” and “Celtic” music in video games molds our (aural) imagination of the European Middle Ages. The ubiquity of Celtic-inspired “tavern music,” I suggest, has created a recognizable, culturally encoded soundworld – a “musical home” (White 2024) which players long to return to at the end of their quests. By integrating “Celtic folk” sonic signifiers into their soundscapes, medieval-inspired RPGs – microcosms of an idealized “Old Europe” – evoke an idyllic aural homeland, which, in turn, reflects a broader trend in historical films (Nugent 2018) and neo-medieval popular music (Saunders 2020): a nostalgic yearning for a lost sense of community, and, ultimately, for a premodern, pre-industrialized past.

• Iván García Jimeno, “Between Memory and Guilt: On Conventions, Authenticity, and the Resignification of Spanish Traditional Music in Two Case Studies”
Abstract

The current heyday of Spanish independent developers seems to echo the explosion of creativity that defined the so-called “golden age of Spanish software” during the 1980s. That period preceded the gradual consolidation of axioms and conventions within the global video game domain, ranging from the adoption of design frameworks tied to ludic genres, including music, to the establishment of habits and practices of play. As Jesper Juul argues, at a time when ideas of locality and small-scale production are being reinforced, the indie sector has emerged as a vehicle for articulating discourses of “antimodernism” and “authenticity”. In Spain, the creative freedom that characterizes independent development has displaced traditional music from its original performative spaces, giving rise to notable works whose examination prompts compelling questions about the representation of identity, the polysemic nature of authenticity, and the processes through which local and global languages intertwine to generate new “ludonarrative” potentials. Drawing on an autoethnographic perspective, this proposal offers an analysis of the musical materials in two indie titles. First, Blasphemous II (The Game Kitchen, 2023) incorporates Andalusian Folklore elements as a self-exoticizing, sometimes even parodic, mechanism. While reproducing some andalucismos that permeated numerous cultural institutions back in the nineteenth century, it nevertheless avoids the stereotypical portrayals of “Spanishness” commonly found in videogames, as well as the musical aesthetics typically associated with the metroidvania genre. Secondly, Tape: Unveil the Memories (BlackChiliGoat Studio, 2022) illustrates how intertextual references to specific pieces of the Galician musical tradition function as storytelling devices, shaping embedded narratives.

• Joseph Stuter, “Sounds of the Salt: Cultural Ambiguity in the Music of Dandera”
Abstract

Dandara, by the Brazilian game studio Long Hat House (2018), is an indie Metroidvania game that has gained popularity for its non-traditional platforming mechanics and loving homages to Brazil present in the game’s narrative and visual design. The music of Dandara, however, does not share this focus on an overtly Brazilian identity. In a growing sea of games made by independent Brazilian studios featuring music inspired by Brazilian musical styles, why would Dandara not utilize its soundscape to strengthen the game’s national ties?
This paper examines the cultural ambiguity in Dandara’s score, exploring its complex role of supporting the identity of a gameworld while also existing as both the artistic product of its composer, Thommaz Kauffmann, and a commercial product of the global video game industry. Through a series of interviews with Kauffmann, I situate Dandara’s score within the context of the academic background and cultural experiences of its composer. Drawing on scholarship surrounding Brazilian participation in the global video game industry (Farias 2023), as well as the history of Brazilian music and its practices of cultural syncretism (Vianna 1999; Avelar & Dunn, 2011), I propose an analytical framework by which to analyze the music of Dandara and its function(s) in the gameworld. I argue that Kauffmann chooses to eschew a local Brazilian identity in his compositions in favor of cementing the fictional local identity of Dandara’s world through a mixing of diegetic and nondiegetic compositional devices pulled from a global culture of video game scoring.

3:15–4:15 p.m. • Marketing

• Sophia Wetzel & Jacob P. Cupps, “‘Down with Zelda’: Hip-Hop Advertising Aesthetics and Nineties Neoliberal Coolness”
Abstract

In 1987, Nintendo released a commercial for The Legend of Zelda (1986) that featured two white teenage boys rapping about the “radness” of the game. This now-famous commercial is one of several that Nintendo released in the late 1980s and early 1990s that capitalized on what Amy Coddington (2023) has described as hip-hop’s mainstreaming in popular culture. Previous work by Gibbons (2021) and Deaville (2024) has focused on early methods of video game advertising.
In this paper, we explore how Nintendo’s advertisements between 1987 and 1993 co-opted hip-hop aesthetics to signify their games’ “coolness” to their targeted audience and helped to shape the “gamer” marketing identity. Drawing on work from scholars such as Tricia Rose, Bakari Kitwana, and Patrick Jagoda, we trace the paths hip-hop and video games each took to independently become major commodities by the 1990s and how their paths converged towards what we term “neoliberal coolness.” We use neoliberal coolness to refer to the indexing of consumption as not simply market participation, but as an act of self-definition and individuation. To examine how these marketing techniques were deployed, we evaluate Nintendo’s “Down with Zelda” commercial for The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993). Our analysis illustrates how Nintendo appealed to white, teenage boys who wished to individuate themselves from others—at first, socially and, later on, in the labor market. Drawing on hip-hop’s association with a culturally legible Black coolness, Nintendo was able to sell their audience games and by extension neoliberalism.

• Adriana Ezekiel, “Vertical Montage Theory and the Paratext: Analyzing Audiovisual Counterpoint in Video Game Trailers”
Abstract

The analysis of video game music has primarily focused on the in-game experience, but not enough analysis examines the paratexts surrounding games. Minimal musicological research has been published on trailers (Deaville and Malkinson 2014; Deaville 2017) and game trailers have only been examined outside of music scholarship (Villegas et al. 2023; Vollans 2023). Trailers are the industry’s primary tool for shaping player expectations and generating excitement for a game’s release. They combine filmic shots, gameplay footage, and music that guides the viewer’s attention to exciting new game features. This is especially important for long-awaited sequels within franchises. I examine how designers and composers direct the viewers’ attention to these new elements. In recognition of trailers’ similarity to film, I apply Eisenstein’s (1968) vertical montage theory (Figure 1) to describe the parallel relationship between musical structures and the viewer’s eye-movement in “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Trailer #3.”
Figure 2 shows my vertical montage graph that aligns each shot with musical events and eye-movement, which is guided by principles of visual design. The diagram shows still shots with annotations of camera movement, a melodic transcription, a reduction of the image (showing the prominent features the eye is drawn to), and a diagram of eye-movement with the line representing vertical motion and annotations representing horizontal motion. By vertically aligning each of these features, this diagram visualizes how the designers are guiding the viewer to the new landscape, characters, and gameplay mechanics that will influence them to purchase the game.

4:15–4:30 p.m. • Break

4:30–5:30 p.m. • It’s Not A Map Conference!

• Bridget Foley, “‘You’re the Mourning’: Affectively Mapping the Musical Melancholia of Disco Elysium”
Abstract

Scholars have investigated melancholia in music through a pathological lens but have not addressed its political dimensions. Robert Kurvitz and ZA/UM’s 2019 role-playing video game Disco Elysium plunges players into a realm of individual and collective loss. They assume the role of amnesiac police detective Harry Du Bois, who contends with a murder investigation, the haunting figure of a lost love, and the vestiges of a failed communist revolution. When exploring the dilapidated borough of Martinaise, the player is aided by facets of the character’s psyche that obscure the hidden past of the protagonist. This gameplay is complimented by a score from the British band Sea Power. Through close listening, I deduced that they culled their extant discography for motivic fragments that puncture the ambient underscore. I interpret this scoring strategy as an instance of what Jonathan Flatley called “affective mapping.” Both Harry and Martinaise are melancholic subjects who live in ruins, and this manifests musically through an absence of discernible melodic/rhythmic structures in areas associated with perpetual stasis. Animated by Sea Power’s fragments, however, Harry remediates his melancholia into resistance. Through this score, the player confronts the tension between the broken promises of progress and the desire for recovery of memory and agency. I suggest this musical juxtaposition is situated in Walter Benjamin’s concept of “left-wing melancholy”: a perpetual yearning toward a past ideal. Remapping melancholic attachments, therefore, not only leads to productive mourning but reignites a capacity for political change.

• Cameron Cummins, “From Lap to Map: How Music Drives the Interconnected Mario Kart World”
Abstract

Deserts, castles, and ghost houses— Super Mario’s environments are whimsical and charming, but why are they so compelling, and what happens when our analysis extends beyond individual levels to worlds or even entire games?
Drawing on Cresswell’s theory of place (2014) and recent work on musical place-building in Mario Kart 8 (Heazlewood-Dale, 2024), I propose a spectrum between localized and globalized scale in games. As game environments become increasingly globalized, the music may similarly be affected. Consequently, players encounter a broader, less musically congruent sense of place. This leads to different “affective energies” and potential interactions compared to those in localized environments (Grasso, 2024).
Using Mario Kart World as a case study, I apply a mix of qualitative and quantitative musical analysis to demonstrate that the game’s Free Roam mode produces a uniquely globalized sense of place through its trans-environmental musical “radio.” Employing statistical modeling, musical congruency, and transformational media analysis (Grasso, 2024; Summers and Farmer, 2023), I argue that the affective potential (“sense of play”) in Free Roam becomes more exploratory than that of other modes because of its more globalized sense of place. In doing so, I adopt the developers’ term “interconnected world” to describe games with this globalized structure.
By plotting interconnected worlds, open worlds, and level-based video games along a continuous spectrum from localized to globalized senses of place and play, this paper offers a new framework to demonstrate that games produce differing musical-spatial coherence across environments of various scales.