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November 19, 2015  

Sounding Out! Podcast #49: Sound and Sexuality in Video Games

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/nnrag-yeh75

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Sound and Sexuality in Video Games

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This week’s podcast questions how identity is coded into the battle cries shouted by characters in video games. By exploring the tools that sound studies provides to understand the various dynamics of identity, this podcast aims to provoke a conversation about how identity is encoded within the design of games. The all too invisible intersection between sound, identity, and code reveals the ways that sound can help explain the interior logic of the games and other digital systems. Here, Milena Droumeva and Aaron Trammell discuss how femininity and sexuality have been coded within game sounds and consider the degree to which these repetitive and objectifying tropes can be resisted by players and designers alike.

Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with a long-standing interest in game cultures. She has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments. Milena is a sound studies scholar, a multimodal ethnographer, and a soundwalking enthusiast, published widely in the areas of acoustic ecology, media and game studies, design and technology. You can find her musings on sound and other material goodies at http://natuaural.com.

Aaron Trammell is a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar for Faculty Diversity in Informatics and Digital Knowledge at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He earned his doctorate from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015. Aaron’s research is focused on revealing historical connections between games, play, and the United States military-industrial complex. He is interested in how military ideologies become integrated into game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out!

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Featured image borrowed from Geralt @Pixabay CC BY.

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tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Sounding Out! Podcast #29: Game Audio Notes I: Growing Sounds for Sim Cell – Leonard J. Paul

Sounding Out! Podcast #45: Immersion and Synesthesia in Role-Playing Games — Nick Mizer

Video Gaming and the Sonic Feedback of Surveillance – Aaron Trammell

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September 24, 2015  

Sounding Out! Podcast #46: Ruptures in the Soundscape of Disneyland

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/y5s62-20904

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Ruptures in the Soundscape of Disneyland

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In this podcast, Cynthia Wang shares examples taken from a soundwalk she performed at Disneyland. Disneyland has been an idealized space for the middle-class white American experience, and the aural signals and music used throughout the park encourage visitors to become cultural tourists and to share in this mindset. Here Cynthia considers the moments of rupture that disturb Disney’s controlled soundscape. Join us as we listen for a pathway out of the hyper-consumerist labyrinth of Disney. And, if you would like to learn more about this soundwalk, visit it’s website here.

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Cynthia Wang is currently a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, a USC Endowed Fellow, and a USC Diploma in Innovation grant recipient (for an LGBTQ stories mapping project called GlobaltraQs). Her work is framed in critical cultural perspectives. In the past she has done research on how Asian American musicians use digital media to build community and collaborate, and how crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo provide new avenues of creative production and distribution for independent artists. Her current research seeks to bring health care into this conversation of power, examining how health professionals manage and organize their time throughout the day, using practitioner-facing methods to identify where institutional systems and processes break down through a lens of time and temporality. In particular, she is interested in how communication technologies impact the organization of time and social relations within the health care system while enacting and/or reinforcing hegemonic power dynamics. In addition to research and academic stuffs, Cynthia is also a singer-songwriter, and just released her EP album (Find it on iTunes, Amazon, or wherever else you get your music).

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Featured image “Toontown Sound Makers” by Ryutaro Koma @Flickr CC BY-NC. 

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tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Park Sounds: A Kansas City Soundwalk for the Fall – Liana Silva

Sounding Out! Podcast #43: Retail Sounds and the Ambience of Commerce – James Hodges

Sound(Walking) Through Smithfield Square in Dublin – Linda O Keeffe

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Sounding Out! Podcast #46: Ruptures in the Soundscape of Disneyland_Wang_2015Download
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