Music In Video Games: Studying Play (Routledge Music and Screen Media Series)

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

K.J. Donnelly is Reader in Film at the University of Southampton, where he convenes the Film Studies masters program.

William Gibbons is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Texas Christian University. His primary areas of research interest are opera studies and music in video games.

Neil Lerner is Professor of Music at Davidson College, where he is co-coordinator of the concentration in film and media studies. He serves as Editor of the journal American Music.