Here, you can find PPT slides for my talk “Between Art and Science: Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush Pieces and Early-Twentieth-Century Birdsong Transcription” at UT-Austin, March 28, 2025
If you’re here at the conference in Jacksonville — or even if you’re not — you can find my poster-slides here, with a bit more time to examine them on your own. Thanks for your interest in my work!
In the summer of 2019, I conducted a few days of archival research at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. I wasn’t really sure what I would find, but I was focused on their extensive archive of corporate documents from the Atari corporation: more than 80 boxes of technical documents, memos, agendas, sketches, advertisements, financial statements, and more!
I didn’t know what I was going to find, though I went in keeping my eyes out for interesting details about music and sound. It was a very happy coincidence that one of the best examples of sound and music in their process of game development centered on two Star Wars arcade games they made in the 1980s. I came home with hundreds of archival images, and I put together a talk for the 2020 North American Conference on Video Game Music. That conference was unfortunately forced online by Covid, but it resulted in a YouTube video presentation that I remain very proud of:
At some point after that, my colleague and friend Will Gibbons invited me to contribute a written version to the Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound that he was co-editing. I have very fond memories (fonder than with most projects) of going back through the Strong Museum archival finds, and supplementing them with more sources from around the internet, mostly hosted by enthusiast websites and digital archives. The final result is linked here!
Just in time for Halloween, I have a new article out on sound design in “embedded games” — little games you can play within other games — with a special focus on the framing story of the indie horror game Stories Untold (2017). It’s sort of a standalone article, not directly related to any of my current major projects. But it reflects my long-standing interest in how games use sound in ways that are — and aren’t — analogous to other media. And Stories Untold is really worth checking out, it’s an extraordinary little game!
The article appears in Music and the Moving Image 16/3 (2023): 5 - 23; and the full text is linked here. Special thanks to Kate Galloway for putting this great issue together! As she writes in her introduction, the three essays in the issue are all concerned with very different views of soundscape in games.
A few weeks ago my latest article came out in Music Theory Online. Going from conference talk to published, media-filled article has been a three-year, 20,000 word labor of love (editorial comment from late in the process: “Umm, so MTO has a word limit but apparently we just…missed that?”) that brings together a lot of my thinking on YouTube as a musical platform. It was a hard article to write, as I often felt like I was building a bridge for myself even as I was walking over it. I found in the revision process, though, that the more I addressed YouTube on its own terms, and the less I ‘apologized’ for the subject matter by trying to relate it to existing theories or downplay the fact that this is about a dynamic, sometimes rough, and still-developing new medium, the better the paper worked. I’ve certainly grown as a scholar in putting this together, and I’m excited to see how this project informs my other work on recomposition in music theory, and finding which aspect of music in social media grabs my attention next…