Interactive Sound and Music: Beyond Pressing Play

Interactive Sound and Music: Beyond Pressing Play provides an accessible exploration into the aesthetics of interactive audio, using examples from video games, experimental music, and participatory theatre and sound installations. Offering a practitioner’s perspective, the book places interactive sound and music within a broader aesthetic context relating to key texts and discussion within musicology and wider art practices. Each chapter takes the reader through a key debate surrounding interactive sound and music, such as:

• Is it actually interactive and does it actually matter?
• How do audience expectations change in an interactive space?
• How do you compose for multiple possibilities?
• Is interactive sound and music ever finished?
• Where now for interactive sound and music?

Supported by a series of questions at the end of each chapter that can be used as a focus for seminar or reading group activities, this is an ideal textbook for students on audio engineering, music technology, and game audio courses, as well as an essential guide for anyone interested in interactive sound and music.

Lucy Ann Harrison is a composer, sound designer and academic based at the University of Westminster, UK. Works include a library themed puzzle game, an interactive blanket fort complete with a musical hopscotch, motion sensitive sound created using gaming controllers and critically acclaimed music for immersive theatre.