Music, Sound and Identity in Video Games

This book offers a comprehensive overview of how video game sound and music represent cultures, spaces and personal identifications. Focusing on the concept of identity, the volume brings together issues as diverse as belonging to an ethnic or cultural group, identifying with certain sexualities or being able to deduce the historical or geographical context of a game. This volume explores whether the musical and sound identities linked to video games are based on clichés and stereotyped arrangements that span cultures and times. It includes case studies that analyse the mechanisms used by game producers, composers and sound designers to “characterise” and represent different identities to broad audiences of potential players, as well as how the players perceive these sonic inputs. The book is organized into three main sections, covering topics as the representation of historical periods, musical stereotypes of cultures from different geographic locations, representations of identity in fictional spaces and sonic depictions gender.

Lidia López Gómez is a musicologist and violinist. She is Associate Lecturer at the Musicology Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Her main fields of research and teaching are audiovisual analysis, film music and music in video games. She has published in journals such as Games and Culture and Twentieth-Century Music, and edited the book Popular Music in Spanish Cinema (Routledge, 2023).