Tag Archive | sound studies
November 19, 2015  

Sounding Out! Podcast #49: 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 reelREWIND! . . .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

October 29, 2015  

Sounding Out! Podcast #47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah

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In the early 1960s Native American women had few opportunities and rights as citizens. During this politically charged era, a young Navajo woman, Kay Bennett, or “Kaibah”, defied those restrictions by recording and releasing her own albums. Almost fifty years later, we present this conversation with Rachael Nez, a Navajo scholar and filmmaker, whose research explores “Songs from the Navajo Nation” through Kaibah’s records. Kaibah self-published her own albums until she was signed by Canyon records, wrote and published her own books, and traveled the world performing Navajo music everywhere from the Middle East to Europe. Rachael looks at how Kaibah’s music acts as a site for the circulation of Indigenous knowledge, oral history, and resistance.

In this podcast Marcella Ernest speaks with Rachael about the scarcity of materials relating to Kaibah’s history. Although there is no archive of her work, and no coherent trace of her story in one site, she explains how we can piece together a story of Kaibah based on her albums and songs. This dialogue considers the ways in which Indigenous erasure can be recuperated through sound. The project of finding the lost sounds of Kaibah is a fascinating story of how sound can be used to reconstitute indigeneous identity. What social and cultural norms conspire to obfuscate a Navajo woman of such prestige and talent? Finding the lost sounds of Kaibah is a conversation about (re)searching to find a lost sound.

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Marcella Ernest is a Native American (Ojibwe) interdisciplinary video artist and scholar. Her work combines electronic media with sound design with film and photography in a variety of formats; using multi-media installations incorporating large-scale projections and experimental film aesthetics. Currently living in California, Marcella is completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Drawing upon a Critical Indigenous Studies framework to explore how “Indianness” and Indigenity are represented in studies of American and Indigenous visual and popular culture, her primary research is an engagement with contemporary Native art to understand how members of colonized groups use a re-mix of experimental video and sound design as a means for cultural and political expressions of resistance.

www.marcellakwe.com

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Featured image is used with permission by the author.

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

Sounding Out! Podcast #24: The Raitt Street Chronicles: A Survivor’s History – Sharon Sekhon and Manuel “Manny” Escamilla

Sounding Out! Podcast #20: The Sound of Rio’s Favelas: Echoes of Social Inequality in an Olympic City— Andrea Medrado

The “Tribal Drum” of Radio: Gathering Together the Archive of American Indian Radio–Josh Garrett Davis

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