NACVGM 2025 Preliminary Program (subject to change)

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

7:30pm–9:30pm Concert

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–12:15pm Panel 9: Video Game Orchestras

11:45am–12:00pm Symphonic Fandom: The Rise of Fan-Created Video Game Orchestras (Michelle Eng)
12:00pm–12:15pm Between Theory and Practice: A Co-Op Presentation on Starting a University Video Game Orchestra (Adam Kasti & Stefan Greenfield-Casas)

12:15pm–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)