Playing With Sound - 9780262018678

In Playing with Sound, Karen Collins examines video game soundfrom the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonicaspects -- which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, andinterface sounds -- both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning isfound, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in thespace of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies andphilosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive soundexperience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening withoutinteracting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive andconsumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding ofthe world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodalexperience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating anemotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in whichsound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions withsound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices thatuse elements from games in sonic performances.