• Foreword by Richard Leppert


• Introduction


• Chapter 1: A Tune at the End of the World


• Chapter 2: How Celes Sang


• Chapter 3: Dead Ringers


• Chapter 4: Role-Playing toward a Virtual Musical Democracy


• Chapter 5: The Wizard, the Troll, and the Fortress


• Epilogue


• End Notes


• Works Cited


• Index

William Cheng is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research on music, video games, opera, and other subjects have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Ethnomusicology, and 19th-Century Music. He is the recipient of the AMS Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, AMS Philip Brett Award, and SAM Mark Tucker Award.

Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's engagements with audio phenomena in video games-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic musical performances to verbal sexual harassment.