Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music

Video game music has been permeating popular culture for over forty years. Now, reaching billions of listeners, game music encompasses a diverse spectrum of musical materials and practices. This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of video game music by a diverse group of scholars and industry professionals. The chapters and summaries consolidate existing knowledge and present tools for readers to engage with the music in new ways. Many popular games are analysed, including Super Mario Galaxy, Bastion, The Last of Us, Kentucky Route Zero and the Katamari, Gran Turismo and Tales series. Topics include chiptunes, compositional processes, localization, history and game music concerts. The book also engages with other disciplines such as psychology, music analysis, business strategy and critical theory, and will prove an equally valuable resource for readers active in the industry, composers or designers, and music students and scholars.

'The work as a whole is useful for both game researchers and game designers; individual essays focus on such topics as intellectual property, music theory, the history of technology since the 1970s, identity and representation in video games, and the affective and physiological effects of music beyond this specific field … Recommended.' W. McNelis, Choice Connect

Melanie Fritsch is Junior Professor in Media and Cultural Studies with a focus on Game Studies and related fields at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. She is the author of Performing Bytes: Musikperformances der Computerspielkultur (2018). Tim Summers is Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Understanding Video Game Music (Cambridge, 2016) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – A Game Music Companion (forthcoming).