Music, Sound and Identity in Video Games

Lidia López Gómez is a musicologist and violinist. She is Associate Lecturer at the Musicology Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Her main fields of research and teaching are audiovisual analysis, film music and music in video games. She has published in journals such as Games and Culture and Twentieth-Century Music, and edited the book Popular Music in Spanish Cinema (Routledge, 2023).

• 1. Introduction: Music, Sound and Identity in Video Games.- 2. “A Few Billion Timelines Might Take a While”: Temporality, Disruption, Folklore and Fantasy in Assassin’s Creed.- 3. Musical Representations of Tudor England in Video Games.- 4. Mixed identities: Picturing Spanish Music in World-travelling Games.- 5. Gaming the Lonely Road of Americana: Authenticity and Identity in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.- 6. (Re)Packaging Japanese Musical Identity in Ghost of Tsushima, Genshin Impact and Ōkami.- 7. Immersive Environments in Video Games as a New Stage for Popular Music Performance.- 8. Spatializing Music in VR Experiences.- 9. Uncanny Landscapes and Cosy Dungeons: from Sonic Spaces to the Musical Narratives of Elden Ring and Dark Souls.- 10. Dehumanization through Sound: Musical Representations of Fantastic Cultures in World of Warcraft.- 11. Queering Cloud: Music, Gender and Sexuality in Video Games.- 12. Music and Masculinities in Game Space.- 13. Voice of the Fembot: An Analysis of the Subservient and Sinister Vocal Depictions of the Gynoid in Sci-Fi Games.- 14. “I’ll Show You”: K/DA and the Role of the Virtual Popstar in the Games Industry.