I’m very pleased to share that I’ll be giving the keynote address at the North American Conference on Video Game Music!  This conference brings together musicologists, music theorists and scholars to study a relatively-new genre in popular music during in an intensive two-day exploration of the art and science of video game scoring, the challenges facing the game composer, the unique characteristics as compared to scores for other entertainment media, and the relationship between the musical content and the mechanics of modern game design.

Last year’s conference sparked great interest and enthusiasm, including a feature article in Wired Magazine, widespread media coverage courtesy of The Associated Press, and a National Public Radio piece entitled “The Study of Video Game Music Gains Recognition.”

This year’s conference program includes many intriguing presentations. Some of the session titles include, “Immersion into what? The sound world of Sid Meier’s Civilization V,” “Navigating the Uncanny Musical Valley: Red Dead Redemption, Ni no Kuni, and the Dangers of Cinematic Game Scores,” “Music Appreciation and the Mario Bros.: The Pedagogy of Musical Hermeneutics,” and “Compositional Techniques of Chiptune Music,” among many others.  The entire conference program can be found here.

Moudy Hall, site of the North American Conference on Video Game Music

A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, winner of the Global Music Award Gold Medal for an exceptional book in the field of music.

The conference will take place on January 17th and 18th in Moudy Hall on the TCU University campus in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ll be delivering my keynote address, “The Role of Music in Video Game Immersion,” at the end of the first day of the conference, and I’m looking forward to it!

Right after my keynote I’ll be signing my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (The MIT Press), and it will be great to meet some more wonderful readers and hear about their experiences in the field of game music.  Should be tremendous fun!

On the second day of the conference, I’ll be participating in a TCU Society of Composers Seminar entitled “Composing for Games Q&A with Winifred Phillips.”  Really looking forward to meeting everyone and having a discussion about game music with such an impressive assembly of scholars and game music lovers!

The conference is organized this year by a committee of distinguished academics in the field of musicology:

• William Gibbons, co-editor of Music in Video Games: Studying Play (Routledge),
• Neil Lerner, editor of the book series Music and Screen Media (Routledge),
• Steven Reale, winner of the Dean’s Innovation Award for Scholarship and Creativity from Youngstown State University and presenter of the Tedx talk, “Playing Games and Playing Music,”
• Karen Collins, author of Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design (The MIT Press)
• James Buhler, co-author of Hearing the Movies (Oxford University Press),
• Daniel Goldmark, co-editor of The Cartoon Music Book (A Cappella).

Here’s a video that recaps last year’s highly successfully conference:

Thanks so much to the North American Conference on Video Game Music for creating such an outstanding event!