1st Edition
Music in the Role-Playing Game Heroes & Harmonies
List of Figures, Tables, and Musical Examples. Series Foreword.
Prologue: The Journey Begins. William Gibbons and Steven Reale
Part I: Magical Melodies
1. Song and the Transition to “Part-Talkie” Japanese Role-Playing Games. William Gibbons 2. “The Things I Do for Lust …”: Humor and Subversion in The Bard’s Tale. Karen M. Cook 3. Mother/EarthBound Zero and the Power of the Naïve Aesthetic: No Crying Until the Ending. Tim Summers
Part II: Mystical Metaphors
4. Alien Waves: Sonic Reverberations of the RPG Interface in Lagrange Point. Kevin R. Burke 5. The Penultimate Fantasy: Nobuo Uematsu’s Score for Cleopatra no Ma Takara. Dana Plank 6. Music in the Time of Video Games: Spelunking Final Fantasy IV. Julianne Grasso 7. Operatic Conventions and Expectations in Final Fantasy VI. Ryan Thompson
Part III: Meaningful Memories
8. Ludomusical Dissonance in Diablo III. Michiel Kamp 9. A Hidden Harmony: Music Theory Pedagogy and Role-Playing Games. Meghan Naxer 10. Soundwalking and the Aurality of Stardew Valley: An Ethnography of Listening to and Interacting with Environmental Game Audio. Kate Galloway 11. Musical Landscapes in Skyrim. Michiel Kamp and Mark Sweeney 12. Barriers to Listening in World of Warcraft. Steven Reale
Notes on Contributors. Index of Video Games. General Index.
Biography
William Gibbons is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University.
Steven Reale is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Youngstown State University.
"The volume breaks new ground as the first scholarly book focusing solely on RPG music and should be recommended to game theorists, music scholars, and fans of the genre. In my estimation, it also offers a significant and valuable contribution to the field of ludomusicology and will likely become an indispensable took kit in future studies of audiovisual narrativity."
—Barnabas G. Smith, Journal of Sound and Music in Games
