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From the one-bit beeps of Pong to the 3D audio of PlayStation 5, this book examines historical trends in video game sound and music. A range of game systems sold in North America, Europe and Japan are evaluated by their audio capabilities and industry competition. Technical fine points are explored, including synthesized v. sampled sound, pre-recorded v. dynamic audio, backward compatibility, discrete and multifunctional soundchips, storage media, audio programming documentation, and analog v. digital outputs. A timeline chronicles significant developments in video game sound for PC, NES, Dreamcast, Xbox, Wii, Game Boy, PSP, iOS and Android devices and many others.
Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture. Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who emerged after 1960 - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and Kurt Cobain, to name just a few. This fascinating cultural history delves into a wide range of issues: Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hi...
How far would I go for love? This profound question drives the visceral storytelling of The Last of Us. Love is the central theme for people like us. We find it in literature, cinema, TV series, the most extravagant reality shows and, in this case, video games. After disrupting the adventure game formula with the acclaimed Uncharted series, Naughty Dog changed its recipe in 2013 with The Last of Us, embracing the post-apocalyptic genre. Seven years later, The Last of Us Part II offered a more radical and divisive experience, but still focused on people, their motivations and their flaws. With the book "Decoding The Last of Us: The Remnants of Humanity", author Nicolas Deneschau invites us to grasp all the complexity behind the design of these titles, as well as the meticulousness of their authors and development teams. He analyses the many ways The Last of Us can be read and considers the important role the diptych played in the transformation of the blockbuster video game.
Since 1992, the Directors Guild of America has hosted an annual symposium featuring its nominees for outstanding feature film directing. From the first, film and television director Jeremy Kagan has moderated these sessions in which the finest contemporary directors weigh in on every aspect of the filmmaking process. In Directors Close Up, Second Edition, Kagan culled the most insightful and entertaining responses from sessions conducted between 1992 and 2005. In Directors Close Up 2, an all-new sequel, Kagan shines his spotlight on nominees from the 2006-2012 seminars as they discuss their work on some of the most brilliant films of the last several years. From script development through pr...
The first monograph to examine Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, this book explains the significance of Salles’ film with respect to the specific category of ‘youth culture’ as a historically and culturally situated concept. The Motorcycle Diaries looks at the film’s engagement with ‘emerging adulthood’, the importance of travel as a source of self-discovery, and the film’s impact on the iconicity of Che Guevara, the international emblem of a restless, rebellious youth. Combining insights from transnational film studies, tourism studies and affect theory, as well as drawing on extensive historical materials, this book provides not only a necessary addition to existing sc...
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and becomes meaningful beyond Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. Challenging the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives, contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived or perceived as experimental. The conversation takes as starting point the 1960s, a decade that marks a crucial political and epistemological moment for Latin America; militant and committed aesthetic practices resonated with this moment, resulting in a multiplicity of artistic and musical experimental expressions. Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.
Widely regarded by critics and fans as one of the best games ever produced for the Sony Playstation, The Last of Us is remarkable for offering players a narratively rich experience within the parameters of cultural and gaming genres that often prioritize frenetic violence by straight white male heroes. The Last of Us is also a milestone among mainstream, big-budget (AAA) games because its development team self-consciously intervened in videogames’ historical exclusion of women and girls by creating complex and agentive female characters. The game’s co-protagonist, Ellie, is a teenage girl who is revealed to be queer in The Last of Us: Left Behind (DLC, 2014) and The Last of Us II (2020)....
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Mosaic Space and Mosaic Auteurs constructs a model of mosaic, which extends our focus beyond narrative strategy, to approach the trend of diverse multi-strand films across genres, nations and filmmaking contexts since the late 1980s. Different from investigation of this recurring global phenomenon from perspectives of spectator engagement, narratology, cognitive understanding and socio-political messages, proposed by film scholars, the model of mosaic helps establish the intertwining relationship between narrative, aesthetics, transnational production, and distribution modes – and in the framework of contextualised geopolitical spaces. As the transnational auteurs in question draw talents,...