NACVGM 2025 Program

Abstracts available here

All times listed below are Eastern Time (UTC−05:00)

Saturday April 26th, 2025

8:45am–9:00am Welcome Remarks

9:00am–10:00am Panel 1: Adaptations & Reworkings 1

9:00am–9:30am Historical Trends of EDM in the Soundtracks of the Super Monkey Ball Series (Jeremy W. Smith)
9:30am–10:00am Prosumer Practices of Ludomusical Upgrade and Downgrade in Online Participative Cultures (Mattia Merlini)

10:00–10:30am Panel 2: Radio, Radio

10:00am–10:15am Radios, Alienation, and Imagined Communities: The Defamiliarizing Broadcasts of Paratopic (2018) (Logan Davis)
10:15am–10:30am Truck Game: Radio, Community and Transformation through Collaborative Storytelling (Odin Goldman)

10:30am–10:45am Break

10:45am–11:30am Panel 3: Ethnographies

10:45am–11:00am A Walkie-Talkie, A Telephone, A Field Recorder: Digital Placemaking and the Listening Affordances of In-Game Intelligent Environmental Sensing Sound Objects (Kate Galloway)
11:00am–11:30pm “We’re Going to Silver Scrapes!”: League of Legends Esports and the Sonic Construction of Liveness (Nic Vigilante)

11:30am–12:15pm Panel 4: Sound Design

11:30am–11:45pm Just One More Run: How Balatro Appropriates the Casino’s Sonic Aesthetics for Immersion (Nolan Miranda)
11:45pm–12:15pm Case Study: Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales and Imagined Deafness (Cecilia Hiros)

12:15pm–2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm–3:00pm Panel 5: Adaptations & Reworkings 2

2:00pm–2:30pm Transmedia Transylvania: Interactivity and Adaptation in Rocky Horror Video Games (Will Gibbons)
2:30pm–3:00pm One Score to Rule Them All: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Multi-platform Musical Adaptation from Film to Games (Justin Sextro)

3:00pm–3:45pm Panel 6: Literacies

3:00pm–3:30pm Lena Raine’s Soundtrack to Chicory: A Colorful Tale as a Critique of White Supremacy in Postsecondary Music Programs in North America (Nina Penner)
3:30pm–3:45pm Learning to Listen: Topical Literacy in 1990s ‘Edutainment’ Games (Pamela Mason-Nguyen)

3:45pm–4:00pm Break

4:00pm–5:00pm Keynote

5:00pm–7:30pm Dinner

8:00pm–9:30pm Concert

Featuring performances by Rob Kovacs, Miguel Sunico, Cole Burger, Benjamin Carlee, Sydney Kjerstad, Madison Drace, Dana Plank, Abigail McGreehan, Hannah Benjamin, Rich Anatone, Christopher Hatala, Molly Hennig, Adriana Ezekiel, Pamela Mason-Nguyen, James Haezlewood-Dale, Gregg Rossetti, and John MacDonald
Full program available here
Doors open at 7:30pm; performances begin at 8:00pm

9:00am–10:30am Panel 7: Outside Digital Games

9:00am–9:30am Bach at the Barcade: BWV 565 as the Most Used Classical Work in Early Game Music (Neil Lerner)
9:30am–10:00am These Bricks Sound Fun!: Paidia-Sonic Semiotics of Super Mario LEGO (Pete Smucker)
10:00am–10:30am Press Play and Lean Back: Passive Listening and Platform Power on Nintendo’s Music Streaming Service (Ryan Blakeley)

10:30am–10:45am Break

10:45am–11:45pm Panel 8: Identity

10:45am–11:15am (Re)Packaging Japanese Musical Identity in Ghost of Tsushima, Genshin Impact, and Ōkami (Thomas B. Yee)
11:15am–11:45am Sounding Spaces of Trans* Resistance in I Can’t Follow You Anymore (2023) (Aria Christopher Greene)

11:45am–12:00pm Panel 9: Video Game Orchestras

11:45am–12:00pm Between Theory and Practice: A Co-Op Presentation on Starting a University Video Game Orchestra (Adam Kasti & Stefan Greenfield-Casas)

12:00pm–1:45pm Lunch

1:45pm–2:45pm Panel 10: Time, Space, and Place

1:45pm–2:15pm The Map Becomes the Territory: Deriving meaning from musical metonymy in richly diegetic game worlds (Jordan Stokes)
2:15pm–2:45pm Music for the Final Voyage: Learning About Loss Through Spiritfarer’s (2020) Musical Chronotopes of Death and Grief (Chris Copley)

2:45pm–3:45pm Panel 11: New Modes of Analysis

2:45pm–3:15pm “Message from the Veins”: Analyzing Charts in the VR Rhythm Game Beat Saber (Drake Eshleman)
3:15pm–3:45pm Understanding the Sonic Frame in Game Function Transitions (Stephanie Lind)

3:45pm–4:00pm Break

4:00pm–5:00pm Panel 12: Diegetic Voices

4:00pm–4:30pm “Artless Singing,” Musicking, and Relationships in Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (2024) (Madison Drace)
4:30pm–5:00pm It takes a (virtual) Village: Identity and Vocal Persona in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Sean M Davis)