Tutor: Tim Summers tim.summers@rhul.ac.uk

Wednesdays, 9-11, Wetton's Annexe A
Aim

This course examines aspects of music in video games, not only in order to understand music within games, but also to use games as a site for critically exploring wider musical practice.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify and describe facets of music in video games by using an array of critical-theoretical ideas and technical terminology
• Explain technical and aesthetic approaches to game music employed by designers and composers
• Demonstrate understanding of the history of game music, especially showing an awareness of changing production processes and technologies
• Analyze game texts with a focus on musical content, using a variety of different approaches
• Explain how video games act as a site of musical culture, both with, and beyond, the game texts
• Use video game music as a way of exploring broader aspects of engaging with music (especially, but certainly not limited to, modern mass media culture).

Students will also have engaged in new aesthetic experiences and improved their skills in critical thinking, analyzing multimedia texts, reading and appraising scholarly work, researching in an academic context, and writing essays.

Course Content

Each week focuses on a different aspect of music and video games. After explaining and interrogating this topic within the fame of games (by engaging with histories, theories and case studies), the musical issues raised are partnered with broader, cultural, analytical, historical issues of music. In this sense, the course looks both ‘inwards’ to dealing with game music in depth, but also ‘outwards’ to other musical practices.