Presenters:
James Denis Mc Glynn is a scholar of music and sound in screen media, with specialist interests in rearrangement, adaptations, interactive media, and algorithmic culture. He is currently a Research Fellow in Screen Studies at Trinity College Dublin, where he is working as part of the Irish Research Council Laureate project “From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality,” led by Prof. Jennifer O’Meara. His forthcoming publications include chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Television and The Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies.
Jessica Getmanis an Associate Professor of Music (Musicology/Ethnomusicology) at California State University, San Bernardino, and a film musicologist focusing on music in television and science fiction media. Her research interests also include popular music, amateur music, critical editing, historically informed performance practice, and twentieth-century American music. Formerly the Managing Editor for The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition, she also co-edited the collection Music in Star Trek: Sound, Utopia, and the Future and is an editor for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Television.
Karen M. Cook is Associate Professor and Chair of Music History and Director of Graduate Studies at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. She specializes in the music, theory, and notation of the late medieval period and also in medievalism in contemporary music and media. Her book Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon: Magister Johannes Pipardi was published in 2021 (Routledge) and she is currently co-editing two volumes: Gender and Sexuality in Video Game Sound with Michael Austin and Dana Plank (Routledge) and Global Histories of Video Game Music Technology with William Gibbons and Fanny Rebillard (Brepols), forthcoming later this year. She is Associate Editor for the Journal of Sound and Music in Games and a member of the steering committee for the North American Conference on Video Game Music, among other professional engagements, and is also a freelance indexer.
Julianne Grasso is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Florida State University. She specializes in theoretical and analytical approaches to music in multimedia, especially video games. Her most recent published work has appeared in The Journal of Sound and Music in Games and The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory. She has presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and many other conferences and conventions regional to international. She has served on Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity, was chair of the Film and Multimedia Interest Group, and currently serves on the steering committee for the North American Conference on Video Game Music.
Dana Plank is an independent scholar and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, whose work focuses on intersections of music and representations of identity, particularly video game sound and gender, sexuality, and disability. She served as co-editor of The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing with Lisa Scoggin (2023, Routledge), and has a second project under contract with Routledge entitled Gender and Sexuality in Video Game Sound co-edited with Karen Cook and Michael Austin. She serves on the boards for Game Sound Con and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. In addition to her scholarship, she is active as a freelance violinist and violist, chamber musician, transcriptionist, arranger, and member of the “Stream Team” on twitch.tv/bardicknowledge.
Ryan Thompson is Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Media and Information, where he serves as the resident musicologist for the game development program, teaching and researching about a variety of issues related to sonic activity in video games. He has published on how gameplay is communicated to players via audio, on understanding Final Fantasy VI as opera, and currently researches how games are both scored and re-scored in order to channel a specific nostalgia for past generations of musical material and hardware as re-releases, remasters, and remakes continue to dominate discussion of popular culture. He has published and presented with the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, the Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, at GDC, GameSoundCon, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music, which he hosted in 2024.
Abstracts:
“Democratising Screen Music Studies through Videographic Criticism”
The video essay is by now a well-established facet of today’s digital mediascape. Having undergone extensive proliferation in popular contexts, the idiom has also enjoyed a notable presence in academia, especially in film and screen studies: the video essay has long been identified as this discipline’s “emergent scholarly form” (Keathley 2012), with its creative rhetoric long enabling screen scholars “to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds” (Grant, Keathley, and Morton 2014). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scholarly subdiscipline of screen music studies has likewise served as fertile ground for innovation in videographic presentation practices, with screen music scholars such as Miguel Mera, James Buhler, Sureshkumar P. Sekar, and Nicholas Kmet counting among the early adopters of the format (Kmet 2020; Buhler 2021; Sekar 2022; Mera 2023).
This paper explores the seemingly special conduciveness of the video essay in screen music studies, both in the context of scholarly presentation and as a pedagogical tool. Expanding on ideas presented as part of my earlier study “The Growing Potential of Videographic Criticism in Film Music Studies, Ludomusicology, and Beyond” (Oxford Brookes, 2023), I will especially focus on the video essay’s capacity to fruitfully assist in the teaching of screen music topics to interdepartmental, interdisciplinary cohorts, especially those comprising non-specialised students from outside of music studies. First, I will provide a conceptual exploration of the video essay as an increasingly prevalent, well-defined, and widely accepted model for analysis and expression in screen music studies, as well as framing the idiom as an inherently musicalized form (Grant 2024; see also Kulezic-Wilson 2015). Thereafter, I will offer some personal reflections on the video essay’s rich potential in teaching screen music topics to non-specialised cohorts, with reference to my recent experience of designing and delivering a module on video essays at the Film Department in Trinity College Dublin. Ultimately, this paper explores the extent to which the video essay’s unique affordances can assist screen music scholars in democratising their practice, both as educators and in the presentation of their research.
“Screen Media, Music, and Sound: Teaching Affordably with Technology”
Technology’s increasingly rapid evolution has greatly impacted the pedagogy of screen media and sound, creating new opportunities for learning while also constructing barriers. As IP security increases across media, and college media stipends shrink, managing courses in music and film, television, and video games has become increasingly difficult. This presentation will provide suggestions for free and affordable teaching technologies, with strategies for using them. In particular, it will address options for (and begin a conversation on) capturing video and audio clips for classroom use; screening full films, TV shows, and video game scenes for student viewing; coping with lack of in-classroom technology; creating digital assignments and projects that are accessible to students who cannot purchase technology; and teaching courses online in music and media without the benefit of extensive institutional app subscriptions.