TY - BOOK
T1 - The Queerness of Video Game Music
AU - Summers, Timothy
PY - 2023/7/6
Y1 - 2023/7/6
N2 - Video game music is a significant site of queerness, where normative demands are questioned, suspended or loosened. Games resist hegemonic musical logics, challenge musical value systems and use music to complicate essentialist notions of identity. I propose three areas of queerness, each representing different relationships between 'queer design' and 'queer engagement', ranging from the unintentionally resistive to explicit engagement with identity. First, this Element examines musical structures that provide queer temporal alternatives to normative linear development, and interactive systems that reframe the power relationship between musical material and listener. Second, it considers 'retro' or 'chiptune' timbres that queer notions of technological progress as improvement, rejecting chrononormativity. Finally, the Element discusses music that queers the self/other binary of identity. Games present ways of listening to, engaging with, and understanding music that provide opportunities to challenge inherited assumptions and reductive or monolithic values, practices and identities.
AB - Video game music is a significant site of queerness, where normative demands are questioned, suspended or loosened. Games resist hegemonic musical logics, challenge musical value systems and use music to complicate essentialist notions of identity. I propose three areas of queerness, each representing different relationships between 'queer design' and 'queer engagement', ranging from the unintentionally resistive to explicit engagement with identity. First, this Element examines musical structures that provide queer temporal alternatives to normative linear development, and interactive systems that reframe the power relationship between musical material and listener. Second, it considers 'retro' or 'chiptune' timbres that queer notions of technological progress as improvement, rejecting chrononormativity. Finally, the Element discusses music that queers the self/other binary of identity. Games present ways of listening to, engaging with, and understanding music that provide opportunities to challenge inherited assumptions and reductive or monolithic values, practices and identities.
UR - https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/queerness-of-video-game-music/3FE164AEDBCA00D611913C9CD293F6A7
U2 - 10.1017/9781009371421
DO - 10.1017/9781009371421
M3 - Book
BT - The Queerness of Video Game Music
PB - Cambridge University Press
ER -