will x cheng

DESCRIPTION

Just Vibrations bends our collective ears toward the vitality and precarity of optimism, dependence, and reparative agendas in academia and in daily life. Cheng calls for a radical embrace of interpersonal care as a core—as opposed to extracurricular—component of intellectual labor. In the event we break, who will rush to criticize and who will stop to offer aid? Should our voices crack, who may take pains to listen all the more closely? Traversing the resonant archives of reindeer games, personal impairment, scholarly strife, queer hope, and accessible soundscapes, this book advocates for care work as a barometer of better worlds.

Foreword by Susan McClary

DESCRIPTION

Sound Play delves into the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our modern engagements with video games and their resonant worlds. What's playful about music? And what's musical about play? With case studies spanning Fallout 3, Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book explores how we imaginatively test and tinker with music, noise, speech, and silence across our real and virtual lives.

Foreword by Richard Leppert

Cover image courtesy of Tommy Tallarico and Video Games Live

CONTENTS

Prelude - Princes and Paupers

Chapter 1 - Blind Judgments

Interlude 1 - Nora

Chapter 2 - Staging Overcoming

Interlude 2 - Don

Chapter 3 - Alien Diva in Poison Paradise

Interlude 3 - Jordan

Chapter 4 - All the Feels

Interlude 4 - Yamaha

Chapter 5 - Out of Injury, Beauty

DESCRIPTION

This collection of original essays (co-edited with Gregory Barz) deals with queering musical fieldwork and new horizons of ethnomusicological scholarship. The volume raises two significant issues: first, ethnomusicology’s normalized approaches to musical ethnography (fieldwork, methodology, analysis, transcription); and second, the sexual identities and modes of identification at play in the ethnmusicological field. Authors expand the critical, social, and behavioral rubrics of musicality to include categories of play, performance, masquerade, expression, subjectivity, interiority. Concepts of normativity and deviance intersect with new perspectives on institutionalization, discipline, canon, and everyday habits. A complete list of contributors and essay titles can be found on our Queering the Field website.

DESCRIPTION

Touching Pitch: Dirt, Debt, Color is a resonant meditation on the embodied, emotional, and moral labors of connecting with other people in a globalized age of unprecedented network connectivities. Guided by the trifold rubrics of dirt (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger), debt (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: “We owe each other everything”—The Undercommons), and color (critical race theory, queer-of-color critique, crip-color critique), I explore practices of radical listening as potential modes of solidarity.

Touching Pitch, like Just Vibrations, will be available Open Access, pending funds. All royalties from Touching Pitch will officially go toward the American Musicological Society’s Eileen Southern Travel Fund.