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On Listening to the Acoustic Ecologies of Games
Kate Galloway PhD

2023 Conference World Forum for Acoustic Ecology
Listening Pasts - Listening Futures
Friday, 24 March, 2023. Presented remotely from Ireland.
(c) 2023

Abstract: In this presentation I apply musicologist Tim Summers’ (2022) concept of playful listening to sonic situations of listening and musicking in games that remediate actual world ecological disasters, anthropogenic climate change, and biodiversity loss in the playable spaces of games. In these ludic contexts, playful listening is subversive, and even at times activist, requiring players to participate in “listening out” to the unexpected in the familiar, with renewed attention, understanding, and interest in both our immediate sonic environments (Lacey 2013: 17-20). Here, I am also drawing on media scholar Kate Lacey’s concept of “listening out,” a form of listening where the listener is “invited to listen out for the unexpected, to listen out for things that might challenge their preconceptions and widen their horizons” (Lacey 2013: 17). The concept of soundscape and its application has spread widely since R. Murray Schafer’s initial development of soundscape studies, and it continues to be a generative way to understand the complexity of sonic environments, whether that soundscape is a live concert, a scene in a film, an Internet meme, or an actual place (Sterne 2019; Kelman 2010; Schafer 1977). Grounded in gameplay autoethnography, I argue that in these case studies the function of in-game listening, sounding, and playing along “as” and “with” the acoustic ecologies in crisis articulates the complexity of human-environment relationships and ways of listening otherwise to actual and virtual at risk sonic environments. Ecologically oriented and informed games and their dynamic sonic environments provide a useful space for developing an acoustic ecology of video games, building on Grimshaw (2008), that listens for audiovisual ecologies and how they function in ludic and narrative situations.

Bio: Kate Galloway is Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she is cross-appointed to the Music, Electronic Arts, and Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences programs. Her research and teaching address sonic responses to environmentalism, sound studies, digital culture and interactive media, and Indigenous musical modernities and ecological knowledge. Her work is published in American Music, The Soundtrack, Ethnomusicology, MUSICultures, Tourist Studies, Sound Studies, Feminist Media Histories, and Popular Music. Galloway has co-edited with K.E. Goldschmitt and Paula Clare Harper two special journal issues on music, sound, and the internet, including “Platforms, Labor, and Community in Online Listening” in American Music (2020) and “Listening In: Musical Digital Communities in Public and Private” in Twentieth-Century Music (2022).