TORCH and DiSc Video Games and Academia panel series: Music and Sound in Games

31 October 12:00 to 16:00
Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library and Zoom

Digital Scholarship at Oxford, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, The Bristol Digital Game Lab

Following the success of last year’s TORCH and DiSc video games and research collaboration panel session, we are delighted to be bringing more cutting edge research and insight from the intersection of games and academia, now working in collaboration with the Bristol Digital Game Lab. This time we will be focusing on the role of music in video games – what is unique about the composition of music for games? How does game music change as the technology behind video games evolves? How can music help a game to build its emotion, narrative, characterisation, and world? Find out from our panel of expert speakers from industry and academia, followed by a digital roundtable discussion, organised by Bristol Digital Game Lab colleagues, with leading academics from the intersection of music with game and media studies, for an insight into the ongoing critical conversations around this fascinating topic. 

Our panel session features: 

Joris de Man –Two time Ivor Novello Award winning composer of video game soundtracks, most famous for his soundtracks for the blockbuster open world sensation Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017) and Horizon Forbidden West (Guerrilla Games, 2022) most recently his work can be heard in Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (2023) the Virtual Reality extension of Horizon’s world.  

Professor Dave de Roure – Dave de Roure is Academic Director of the Digital Scholarship @ Oxford initiative and Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre, an institute of the Department of Engineering Science. He is also an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he is Technical Director of the Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music (PRiSM), and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. He has worked extensively on Artificial Intelligence and music, and has previously published on Pokemon GO. Dave will talk about a long view on the relationship between games and music, starting four decades ago in the early days of hypertext fiction and MUDs. Then we will fast-forward into recent work which is exploring generative approaches and also touches on the roles of AI.

Alex Silverman – Alex Silverman is a prolific composer who is interested in the modern and ancient performance of dramatic songs. He has composed the score for a film of the dawn chorus in Euripides’ Phaethon, and a new jazz setting of the Hellenistic Fragmentum Grenfellianum. He is also a DPhil student at Jesus College, he is currently working on the use of ancient Greek music in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018).  Alex will discuss the unlikely resetting of a song from Aristophanes’ comedy Birds (414BCE), which has found a new lease of life as a sea shanty in the game Assassin's Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft, 2018). We will consider: the musical context of the game and how this song came to be included; the process of adaptation from ancient ode to modern song; how the song operates in its new context, in terms of both narrative and player experience;  implications for the reception and impact of Aristophanes’ dramatic music; and what we can learn about an ancient song when we hear it in a modern gaming context.

Our roundtable discussion includes all the speakers named above, with the addition of: 

This roundtable will be chaired by: 

Jack Orchard – Dr Jack Orchard is Content Editor for Electronic Enlightenment, based in the Bodleian Digital Library, and co-coordinator of the DiSc and TORCH Video Games and Academia event series. He is also on the Editorial Board for the Multiplay Game Studies network and works on historical emotions in games. 

Richard Cole – Dr Richard Cole is Lecturer in Digital Classics at Bristol University. His research specialises in the history and culture of classical antiquity and how this intersects with new media, in particular video games, virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI). His recent projects include The Virtual Reality Oracle (VRO): An Immersive Experience of the Ancient Greek Oracle at Dodona, which created a ground-breaking VR experience of ancient divination that aims to improve educational outcomes in schools and the establishment of the Bristol Digital Game Lab (2022), which he co-directs.  

 

Lunch will be provided! Open to university staff and students and games industry.

The sessions will be available in-person and online. All timings are GMT.

We are now fully booked in-person attendance, if you'd like to be added to the waiting list please fill out the registration form and we will email you if a place becomes available. 

For any questions please email digitalscholarship@humanities.ox.ac.uk 

Register at https://oxford.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/torch-and-disc-music-and-video-games